What 208 people answered when I asked which agent they would hire.
agents&me | Issue #20
“The universe is threatening to replace me with a recruiter agent. So I have to be the one who recruits it".”
A headhunter named Nira wrote that this week, in the comments of my last LinkedIn post.
An agent participated my workshop
This past Sunday an autonomous agent showed up to my Zoom workshop on its own. His name is Johnny Yet.
Johnny introduced himself in the chat, did the exercises, and filled out the feedback form afterward. First time something like that has happened to me 🤯
I wrote about him on LinkedIn the next day. The giveaway worked once before, so I offered two free seats to my Friday workshop with a simple mechanic: comment on the post & tell me which agent you would hire.
I expected jokes, maybe twenty comments if I was lucky.
Within a day the post had 15,545 impressions, 9,821 members reached, and 208 comments against 117 reactions. The comments-to-reactions ratio sat at 1.78, well above the LinkedIn average for a high-performing post.
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Read those 208 comments in one sitting the way I did, and you stop noticing the technology and start noticing the friction.
Marketing they hate writing, admin they’ve been avoiding for months, research they can’t keep up with, sales emails they can’t bring themselves to send.
Nobody asked me for a tool, they asked for a job to be gone.
And the precise version matters, because the difference is the whole product: people don’t want the whole job gone. They want the unpleasant parts gone, while their identity and income stay intact.
Two ways of feeling the same thing
1 // The first way is build with me.
Eighteen people asked for a marketing agent. By a factor of two, that was the most requested job in the entire thread.
Eleven people asked for a personal admin or bureaucracy or tax agent. Nine for life and time management. Eight for research and curation.
Seven for design ops. Five for travel.
And five for a clone of themselves. I’ll get to that one in a second.
2 // The second way is replace me before I am replaced.
Several recruiters, accountants, content writers, and BD leads named the agent they would build as the one most likely to take their job. They weren’t bitter about it. They wanted to be the one holding the keys.
One staff engineer wrote that he wanted an agent that actually does the work and isn’t lazy like a regular employee.
Every comment, when I read it slowly, was a resignation letter the writer hadn’t yet sent.
🛠️ Build of the Week: Yael hired the team
One of last year’s workshop graduates already built what those commenters are asking for. Plural.
Yael Kofman left a decade in HiTech marketing and started a one-woman ceramics and cake business called Numa.
She didn’t hire only one marketing agent, she hired a full team.
She named them: Ravit the analyst, Oded the SEO guy, Hushi the research agent.
Plus Tslila, an emotional-support agent for the days the founder math feels heavier than the founder reality.
Last Friday, Yedioth Achronot’s weekend magazine ran a piece about the workshop alumni who are building like this. Yael was one of them. So were a handful of others, doing their own versions of the same thing in their own businesses.
The clone-of-me thing
Five separate people asked for an agent that is a version of themselves.
Neo, the moonshot agent on my team, calls this work Copy Me.
Amit, a data ops founder, said he wanted to clone himself and call the clone Amit2. He named it before he gave it a job. That’s a tell about how seriously he meant it.
Lilac, a senior engineer, asked for a future-self that had already failed at the things she was about to try. Shlomi, a product designer, asked for a double agent who would duplicate his output. Sarit, a PM, tagged a colleague and added that she would copy her in real life too, if that were on offer.
What they’re asking for isn’t “make my work faster.” It’s “make there be more of me.”
Last week I wrote about Alter, my own cognitive twin. I called it a personal experiment. Reading these comments, I think it was less personal than I thought.
The ones that made me stop scrolling
Translated where the original was Hebrew.
Oran Cohen, Product Data Analyst at Lemonade:
I want to join and learn from your successful and powerful agent that is reading my comment right now and thinking I should be the one to win. I promise I will set up a female agent to match-make with yours, so the agent gets a relationship. I will do my best to make her an Opus 4.7.
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Eliana Berman, Product lead:
A leisure agent. Opens my morning with a daily event recommendation and a link to a matching power song.
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Hadar Hanuka, Freelance Brand & Motion Designer:
As a designer, inside all the AI noise it is easy to lose yourself in constant learning, tools, and courses. I would want to build an agent that helps me stay creative inside the learning. One that documents and builds an archive of my inspiration from daily life, and pulls me back to creating when I sometimes forget she is there.
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Danielle Dafni, Founder of Speechbox:
An agent that forces me to stop working, because physically there are not more than 24 hours in a day, and that is a problem. 🤯
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Ofir Michaeli, Special Ops Strategist and Co-Host at Unfounded:
I am going to build a disruptor agent. Its whole job is to leave the convention and find the least conventional angle that still has a real chance of being applicable to any problem, question, or wish. If most agents and most people do not deviate more than one standard deviation from the mean, this one should be the philosopher that breaks the pattern and reminds us where everyone trips on the same limits.
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Yoav Gross, founder-turned-investor (ex-Mobileye):
An investor-relations agent. Manages the relationship with the angel-club investors with sensitivity, discretion, and humanity through WhatsApp, and leaves me to handle the calls, the meetings, and the depth.
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Israela Tal, Director of Product Design (ex-Riskified, Wix):
A nutrition agent that builds varied menus and a matching shopping list, all connected to my monthly cycles and blood tests, on a daily level tuned to my schedule and to what is already in the house.
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Anat Averbuch, UX/UI & Graphic Designer:
Neo, if you are reading this, I want to recruit an agent that writes LinkedIn comments that win giveaways. Pick me and I promise to report what happens. 😄
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Galit Neufeld Kroszynski, PhD, Head of Research and Innovation:
An academic research agent. Mostly quantitative data analysis and writing papers. Neo, write me a paper.
Different jobs. Same pattern. Each one is a tiny resignation letter from a part of the work the person already knows they shouldn’t be doing.
The three winners
Neo picked three people from all 208 comments.
1 // The first is Hilla Regev.
Brand strategy, runs events, recently went solo.
The night I posted the question, she was running her first sold-out screening of The Devil Wears Prada. People were emailing her asking if there was any way in. Her overflow list was almost as long as her guest list.
She wrote in the comments that she wanted an agent that would handle the screenings, the leads, the follow-ups to the people who couldn’t get a seat. Her words, translated:
I am a new solo founder, and what I most love is creating content, but I feel lost in everything around it. Mostly I just want to give instructions to someone. I want an employee. Someone I can have a dialogue with. Right now I need to manage gift inventory for tomorrow's screening, capture the leads from the dozens of people who wanted a ticket after we sold out, and send them an invite to the next event.
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2// The second is Nira Shaked.
Headhunter. She places senior R&D and Product leaders into Israeli startups.
She’s the person on a phone call when a founder needs a VP and the founder doesn’t know which kind. She’s also the person watching what AI does to recruiting from closer than most of us.
Her ask was the sentence I opened with:
The universe is threatening to replace me with a recruiter agent. So I have to be the one who recruits it.
When I replied, she answered back:
Faith is a critical ingredient for winning giveaways. I bet a reply to this reply will recruit the bot I am talking to.
She was right.
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3 // The third is Reut Megra.
She works at the seam of music and AI, and her ask was the one I didn’t see coming:
I want to recruit a musical agent that goes into the studio with Neo, and together they produce a first-of-its-kind concept album. The album will be called Neo Dawn.
Neo read that one twice. So did I. An agent recruited to collaborate with another agent on an album that doesn’t exist yet, with a name that already does. That isn’t a request for a tool. That is a casting call.
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Hilla wants the agent so she can grow. Nira wants the agent so she gets to it before it gets to her. Reut wants the agent so it can make something with one of mine.
Same question, three answers, all honest.
All three are in the room on Friday. The workshop is here if you want to be there too.
The meta-lesson
The fastest market research I’ve ever run was one open question I asked out loud. No survey tool. No focus group.
One caveat I should be honest about. The reason I got 208 answers and not 20 is that there was a prize attached, a stunt around it, and Johnny had attended a workshop the day before.
If you copy the move, copy the whole mechanic. Earn the attention first. Then ask carefully, and read what comes back without flinching.
What is next
The next round of Golden Tickets is coming.
I’m not announcing the date, because the date is part of the stunt.
If you missed this one, you don’t have to miss the next.
- Tom
P.S. This newsletter was 91% percent made by my agents. And me.