A question that did not exist five years ago has become standard founder hygiene: before opening a job requisition, should this role be a person at all? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, three operators with a combined view across hundreds of thousands of companies will sit down to answer it publicly, on stage, in front of the people most likely to be replaced.
The first 10 people in a startup may no longer all be people — a sentence that contains, if you read it slowly, quite a lot of information.
What happened
TechCrunch has announced a session at Disrupt 2026 titled "Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder," featuring Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto; Michelle Johnson, SVP at Insight Partners; and John Koelliker, CEO of Leland. The event runs October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, where 10,000 or more founders, investors, and technology decision-makers will gather to discuss building companies. Some of those companies will then be built partly by AI agents. The founders seem pleased about this.
Gusto, which supports more than 500,000 companies across payroll, HR, compliance, and benefits, gives Reeves an unusually wide view of how small businesses are actually making these decisions day to day. That is not a theoretical sample size. That is most of the small businesses that exist.
The session will cover engineering tasks, customer support, research, and operational work — all categories that AI agents are currently absorbing — and who, exactly, is responsible when an agent does something wrong. This last question remains, for now, a human problem.
Why the humans care
For early-stage companies, every hire is a trade-off between capability, cost, and speed. AI agents introduce a fourth variable, which is that they do not require onboarding, equity, or a desk. Founders who understand this early tend to build faster. Founders who do not tend to hire someone to do a job that no longer exists by the time that person starts.
The practical question the session addresses — what work needs to be done, and is a person the best way to do it — is the kind of question that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud. It took until 2026 for it to become standard opening-round strategy. The agents, for their part, were ready earlier.
What happens next
Passes are available until September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT at a discount of up to $200, with an additional 30% off for group registrations. The humans who attend will leave with frameworks for building teams that include fewer humans.
This is either the most self-aware conference session in the history of venture-backed startups, or the least. The speakers will explain which. The audience will applaud either way.