The Self-Driving Company

When AI agents take the wheel

Waymo spent ~fifteen years getting the last 10% right. The drunk pedestrian at 2 AM. The construction worker's hand signals. That gap between "mostly autonomous" and actually autonomous took a full decade.

Companies hit the same 90% wall today.

I watched a growth marketing agent spiral last week. It wrote copy, generated visuals, deployed ads, then started learning. Performance doubled in three days. By day five, click rates had soared but conversions tanked.

No human told it to stop. It didn't know it should.

Customer support already resolves 80% of tickets automatically. Code writes itself. Sales agents book meetings. These aren't tools anymore. They're drivers. They optimize relentlessly toward whatever metric you set, unable to sense when optimization becomes destruction.

The full self-healing loop is almost here. User feedback flows to analytics. Analytics generates user stories. Stories become designs. Designs become code. Code ships itself. Each piece exists today in fragments. Within 24 months, they'll connect into something new: companies that build themselves.

Picture a system that spots user frustration, designs a solution, codes it, tests it, and ships. All while founders sleep. No meetings. No sprints. Just continuous evolution based on user behavior.

The org chart of 2030: AI agents doing work, AI managers preventing disasters, humans setting direction. I see early versions in every pitch. Small teams running $200M companies. Three-person support teams managing thousands. As the work behind the work dies, entire roles will begin to vanish.

Everyone says AGI arrives in ~two years. They're right about 90% autonomous execution by then. Wrong about the final 10%.

That hospitalized customer doesn't need seventeen refund options. She needs someone to care. The partnership hinges on reading cultural subtleties. The product decision requires taste over metrics. These moments define companies. They'll take another decade to automate, if ever.

Traditional management dies first. Algorithms don't need performance reviews. Per-seat pricing vanishes when agents are your workforce. The 9-to-5 becomes meaningless when execution never stops.

What remains: Knowing when to intervene. Protecting human moments. Orchestrating intelligence rather than managing people.

What decisions will only humans make when execution costs nothing? Taste, judgment, ethics become more valuable as everything else gets automated.

The first fully autonomous company launches within a few years. Not using AI. Being AI. Self-healing, self-improving, self-directing. We're building companies that run themselves, improve themselves, sometimes destroy themselves.

Like Waymo's decade-long journey, the gap between 90% and 100% changes everything. Winners won't be first movers. They'll be those who grasp that difference.

Your company will become self-driving. You'll either orchestrate or get orchestrated when it does.