Replit’s CEO says the future of work is the ‘self-driving company’

Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad has seen how AI is impacting the workplace firsthand, with businesses adopting his company’s AI coding tools to develop and launch their own software. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Masad shared what Replit has learned about what that means for the future of work in the AI age, including how humans will still play key roles as AI agents come to work alongside them.

He described his vision of a “self-driving company,” referring not to robotaxi makers, but how agents will come to do much of the grunt work at companies while people become more valued for their judgement and taste.

“The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year,” he said, addressing the audience at Disrupt. “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,” Masad said.

He said Replit’s team had been reflecting on how AI technology impacted their 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.”