The improved AI also rendered some of his employees redundant. All but one of his 12-person team of “setters,” who reached out to potential customers, were let go. So were his sales manager, customer onboarding team, and operations staff. The remaining employees oversaw AI agents that wrote marketing copy, followed up with potential customers, and onboarded new students. By April, he had replaced HubSpot, Calendly, Vimeo, and DocuSign with tools customized to his company, saving him roughly $250,000 a year, and centralized all of his customer data so that he could run AI agents on it more easily. His 48-person company was down to 30 employees without losing revenue. “We actually get slightly better results, and we don’t have to worry about managing people,” he says.
While attention has focused on mass layoffs at large tech companies, some economists and entrepreneurs believe the most significant AI-driven workplace changes could emerge first in small firms, which can reorganize around new technology more quickly. “AI adoption is faster in smaller firms, including startups,” the Harvard economist David Deming wrote in 2025. If that’s true, splashy headlines about large tech firms laying off thousands of employees could miss the effects of AI on the roughly 46% of Americans employed by small companies.