Imagine this: You need the CEO to make a decision or answer a question, but you’re forbidden from simply pinging them. You now have to first go through an AI agent trained to stand in his place, the goal being to work through the problem with the agent as much as you can.
That’s the policy Zeb Evans, CEO of $4 billion all-in-one productivity platform ClickUp, put in place earlier this year (before Mark Zuckerberg announced his own AI CEO clone ambitions). Evans admits it was jarring for his 1,300 employees, but it was all part of his strategy to force them to get comfortable defaulting to AI agents as he began rewiring the entire company — both its internal operations and product offerings — around them.
After going all-in on agents in January, ClickUp now has around 3,000 internal AI agents embedded directly into workflows across departments, making for a roughly 3:1 ratio of agents to employees. Essentially every workflow and task now involves agents, which employees direct to autonomously plan and execute complex series of tasks on their behalf. It’s a fundamental change to what work looks like for each employee, as well as how the company does business as a whole.
“The biggest shift is from actually doing and waiting on the work, to reviewing the work and ensuring that it meets your standards,” Evans told Fortune.
