Replit CEO Amjad Masad outlines 'self-driving company' vision at TechCrunch Disrupt

Masad said Replit has seen businesses adopt its AI coding tools to develop and launch their own software, and he shared what the company has learned about what that means for work in the AI age, including how humans will still play key roles as AI agents come to work alongside them. Addressing the Disrupt audience, he said jobs had already changed over the past year. “The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year,” he said. “But a big part of America and the world, they still don’t know that that change is coming, and it’s going to be surprising to a lot of people.”

He said Replit’s team had been reflecting on how AI technology affected its own workplace over the past year, particularly after AI agents became more reliable sometime earlier this year. “Our company entirely changed how we operate, and I would say the closest analogy is a ‘self-driving company’,” Masad said. “The company is sort of self-improving, so a lot of the work that’s going on is driven by agents.”

Masad offered Replit’s support tickets as an example. When tickets come in, they are first examined by an agent, which performs the initial triaging by looking at GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets. By the time the support request reaches a person, that person has all the additional information that helps them decide how best to proceed. When the support person decides to submit a patch to apply a fix, it is just a click to deploy another agent.

“You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but crucially, there’s human judgment in the middle, and we don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. You need human judgment; you need taste,” Masad explained.

He said the result is that agents are changing what people work on rather than taking jobs from people. “We’re spending a lot more time figuring out what to work on,” Masad continued. “I go around the company, I see a lot more discussions, a lot more whiteboarding. We spend a lot more time on architecture, how to build things. And so I think the future of work — the self-driving company idea — is really trying to discover what AI transformation means.”

Masad also said that when Replit talks with other businesses, the conversations are more about how AI can help people become more productive and happier at work. He said the latter is because AI agents make work less boring and more creative. “There’s a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we’re hoping to do that,” Masad added.