Airtable CEO: AI Will Make You Almost Superhuman | Howie Liu

Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012, the no-code app builder used by over 80% of Fortune 100 companies. After scaling Airtable into one of the biggest software businesses on the planet, he's now building HyperAgent: a platform where anyone can deploy AI agents into their team chats, email, and calendar without writing code. In this conversation, Howie asked me a question I couldn't answer: if you could hire as many people as you wanted for almost zero cost, what roles would you fill first? That's the question agents force you to answer in 2026. We covered: The two skills that separate the people who become almost superhuman from everyone elseHow to build a virtual twin of yourself so you stop being the bottleneck in your own companyWhy builders win the next few years and what the "tinker mindset" actually meansHow to choose between Claude, ChatGPT, and HyperAgent (Howie maps the full landscape)A live demo of his real productivity setup, including an agent that watches X 24/7 and only pings him when something actually mattersHe also walked me through a billboard campaign his agents ran end-to-end (sourcing locations, cross-referencing Google Street View, generating mockups with NanoBanana), and shared his three steps for anyone who's been reading about agents but hasn't deployed one yet. If you've ever felt like the bottleneck in your own work, this one's for you. Links: Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=HowieLiu ⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=⁠HowieLiu Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ X: https://x.com/siliconvalleymm LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko My Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Marinamogilko.cohttps://partnerships.marinamogilko.co ⁠ https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:55Marina Mogilko?

  I'm the bottleneck because all the content goes through me. What if I have an agent that already knows my taste? And I say like, you just let it give the feedback.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  If you could hire as many people as you wanted for almost zero cost, like what other roles would you hire people into?

• 1:10Marina Mogilko?

  Pali Lu built one of the biggest software companies on the planet. Airtable is used by more than 80% of the Fortune 100.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  The people who are able to do that most effectively will become like almost superhuman, right? You're able to give good judgment and feedback to just like a really effective CEO of humans. You could imagine building a company that you never would have dreamed of without any employees or with minimal employees. So the tinker mindset is most important for most. And I think the second is really.

• 1:39Marina Mogilko?

  My goal is that anyone who has been consuming con about AI, but was not like scared to try it, but thought it was too complicated.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48Marina Mogilko?

  I want them to actually deploy a few agents after watching this video.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:52Marina Mogilko?

  To realize how powerful the technology has become compared to like two years ago when they maybe tried one prompt in chat GPT. And they're like, oh, this is just nothing. All the hype, I don't understand it.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05Marina Mogilko?

  When you work with this technology correctly, it's actually really transformative. Can you talk to me about the current state of AI?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:13Marina Mogilko?

  We've been in an era of chatbots. You had to initiate the process, correct them, and then the output, you wouldn't really trust an agent to post for you on LinkedIn. I feel like right now we're trying to close the loop with these agents. Like, teach them our taste, teach them how we give feedback, and make them more autonomous.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31Marina Mogilko?

  Is that what you're saying too?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  I do think like there's been this, you know, kind of step function change in the experience that you can create with AI from pre chat GPTs. But then I think we entered like a mature era of even AI chatbots where the models got smarter. So even thinking about like, you know, the, the year after GPT four came out, you know, we could actually do really interesting things with chatbots. So chatbot mat- maturation. And then I think we started to hype agents a little too early. So there was a year, like last year, people were, you know, they were saying this is the year of the agents. And I think that was when Salesforce Mark Benioff went up and was talking about like, you know, in the future, every CEO is going to have thousands of agents, like, you know, agent employees and human employees. And I think it was correct, but just early.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  And so what we finally hit now, I think, and some would say like, really, it was like around the end of last year with like the anthropic like Opus four point five and beyond generation of models. But now, you know, you have GPT five point five and Kimi two point six, like these open source and, you know, alternative models that I think have all reached this level of intelligence that actually enable agents to be like almost human like, right? And autonomous.

• 3:40Marina Mogilko?

  Do you, when you see a post on X where somebody says, I sleep at night and my company is being run by fifty agents. Do you believe that? Cause I, I don't know, like I've deployed a lot of agents, but I can't sleep. It's still in my head.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53Marina Mogilko?

  Like I'm responsible for that agent.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:55Marina Mogilko?

  I'd rather have more humans to just control those agents. But do you think we're moving towards that reality?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  You know, I think I think that as the models get better and better, we do need to rethink the entire paradigm and like the the product form factor to reflect it. So I'll use a parallel here, which is in the development agents world. You know, you had Copilot, GitHub Copilot, that was kind of the first, you know, kind of chatbot for developers. Right. And it really was that like you couldn't have it go and develop like really complex programs. It was more like you could autocomplete a few lines of code at a time. And so it was a convenience. Then you had Cursor, which introduced its own AI agent called Composer, which is different from like the now what they're using that name for is the the model they've fine tuned. But at the time, it was a much more autonomous agent.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  You could tell it, go and like, build me this file, write me this this simple, like, you know, kind of script or or function. And it would do something a lot more autonomously than, you know, the original Copilot experience. I think now, yet, we've entered into a new era where the agents do enable, you know, kind of you to go and execute on parallel in parallel with multiple agents. And so in the development world, the best developers are already, you know, they're not using necessarily Cursor. They're actually now using many different agents. Maybe it's Claude Code, for instance, running in parallel. And it almost does feel like they have their own company or team running, including overnight. Right. I actually, when I'm developing, I use agents that, you know, I try to have them do something substantial before I go to sleep.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  So that, you know, for hours at least, like, I'm not wasting bandwidth cycles. And they're they're doing something useful. And so when I wake up, they've already completed, right? So I, you know, I think we are moving to a world where the form factor will start to look more like managing a fleet of agents or almost managing like, you know, people. You know, like, everybody, when they transition from being an individual contributor to becoming a team manager, it's kind of a different role, right? You still need some of the same techniques, but also it's quite different. So I think we are moving in that direction. But to your point, I think it's it's also not yet a, you know, at a point where you literally just have the agents do everything, right? Like, I don't think agents can effectively run an entire company or any substantial company autonomously.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 7:05Marina Mogilko?

  When do you think this flip is going to happen? Do you think by the end of this year, we're going to see more output? That's actually deployed right away by agents?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I think that to your point, like on analytics, you know, the, the fact that agents can help close the loop with, you know, maybe drafting some content. There's still a human review step. You're posting it and then maybe the agents are helping to analyze what's working, what's not working and seeing what's, you know, kind of catching fire out there from other people on, in the content world. You know, I think it does create this like really high leverage circuit for people who know how to effectively deploy agents. So even if humans are still in the loop at points, I think that the amount of the loop or the, the percentage of the loop that is more agent driven is going to increase and increase and increase until at some point, it's almost like, yeah, there's a human, but like that human is extremely leveraged. And you could imagine building a company that you never would have dreamed of

• 7:56Speaker 03

  without any employees or with minimal employees. Now you can do that with agents.

• 8:01Marina Mogilko?

  Absolutely. And I see it with my content. We haven't really expanded the team. We're still hiring, but. We are producing, I think, three times more content just because it's so much easier to generate.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:11Marina Mogilko?

  That content, of course, we have to check in everything, but one person can now handle like G E O.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:17Marina Mogilko?

  And newsletter.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:18Marina Mogilko?

  And also threads.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:20Marina Mogilko?

  And another person can do three other outlets.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  And maybe even like researching ideas. So like, you know, all the substantive work that goes into like going deep on a topic.

• 8:29Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  A lot of that can be enabled by agents.

• 8:31Marina Mogilko?

  So for someone who's excited about all of this, but also they don't know, like, I am also confused. Every week there is something new. There is Claude with coworker, Codex. Oh, my God. Perplexity Computer. Amazing. Hyperagent. How do you choose? And I saw you use Claude as well. It's not like you're just choosing one tool. What's the best setup?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think maybe going back to our generational metaphor, you know, there was like the chatbot era. And there were a lot of products that were built as chatbots. And, you know, now we have agents that are much more fully autonomous. So I first, you know, would separate products that kind of fall into the chatbot era from the agent era. Even within the same company like Anthropic, they have Claude, like the vanilla version, which is much more close to a chatbot. I mean, it is actually a weekly agentic product, so it can do a few turns at once. But you're not using Claude to go and, you know, work on something for five hours without human intervention, right? And this is Claude, like the end user product. Confusingly, they also use that name for their models. And as a prefix to their other products like Claude Code and Claude Co-Work.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  But the plain, you kind of end user Claude experience, I think of as more of a chatbot. Likewise with ChatGPT. And that can still be very valuable. But, you know, when you think about like frontier agents that are actually able to perform, you know, maybe hours of human equivalent work autonomously. You know, you put into that category, OpenClaw, you know, everybody kind of got excited about OpenClaw on Twitter because of what it could do. I would put into that category Claude Co-Work. And then, you know, products like Perplexity Computer and of course, Hyperagent. And then within that bucket, there's kind of, um, there's, you know, I think different, uh, options for, you know, depending on what you want. So what Hyperagent gives you and what we focused on is both.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  The fact that you can do this in a much more team-enabled setting as you kind of refine their skills and memories. So we put a lot of emphasis into this like closing of the loop for self-improvement, which I think is key because even though agents are out of the box very smart and they're only getting smarter as the models underneath them get better and better.

• 10:35Marina Mogilko?

  This is what I'm very excited to try when you mentioned the team collaboration. We don't use Slack, we use Telegram. But I saw you have this Telegram integration. And the thing is, and it's so funny, like, I feel like the industry is moving at the same phase and thinking about the same problems. Because last week I was talking to my COO and I'm like, I'm giving so much feedback to my team in Telegram, which is inaccessible to like anybody really. So I have to download the conversations, like, how do we close this? How does the agent learn my taste? So what we're gonna do, we're gonna download the conversation, train the agent, but then we're gonna add the bot to all the team chats that I have. So it learns my feedback and can give feedback to me instead of me to my team.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think, I mean, one, by the way, as an aside, I think Telegram has a really interesting opportunity to become maybe the dominant platform in messaging for agents. Because they just have the best ergonomics of all these messaging platforms to be able to deploy bots, right? You know, Hyperagent has a really first-class Telegram integration, right? And even if you're not a current Telegram user, I might recommend for people to go and like, set up a Telegram account because it's such an easy and free way to create both individual and group chats with your agents. And it's very cool actually to see in a group chat setting, you can add even multiple agents that you've created through Hyperagent and have them jump into the conversation as relevant and even start to talk to each other, which is very cool.

• 12:00Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, like even like give feedback, because I realize in my company, I'm the bottleneck. Because all the content goes through me and sometimes I'm doing this, right? I can't get back to my team. What if I have an agent that already knows my taste? And I say like, on busy days, you just let it give the feedback.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that is one of the interesting emergent phenomena here, which is, you know, as people have gotten really into their agent building, like OpenClaw, you know, you see all these open Fans who have created like a virtual twin of themselves in their open claw instance. Right. This is my like virtual Howie agent that has really learned so much about me and actually does have real time access to the same context that I do. So it knows.

• 12:39Marina Mogilko?

  This is crazy.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:41Marina Mogilko?

  It's crazy, right?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  You know, they talked about the singularity and like how we're gonna put ourselves into like a a computer and like, I mean, it's kind of actually happening.

• 12:48Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  With agents.

• 12:49Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. What's the most unique use case with hyper agent that you've experienced?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  I personally like, um, you know, kind of these multimedia related use cases. So what I mean by that is, you know, sometimes for fun and sometimes for like actual kind of, you know, functional marketing purposes. I like to have a hyper agent go and create like marketing ideas. So, uh, at one point, uh, we actually did do a billboard, a small billboard campaign for hyper agent announcing the launch of it. And I had it go end to end sourcing the actual billboard location. So we worked with a, um, a vendor that had like, uh, basically a list of all the billboards that were available.

• 13:25Marina Mogilko?

  One on one or are you doing it here?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 13:28Marina Mogilko?

  Are you doing it on one on one?

• 13:29Speaker 03

  It was in New York, LA and SF. And, uh, and so we grabbed all the inventory. And then it had all the specific locations, like what street it was on. And then hyper agent was able to process all of those locations, cross-reference them with Google street view and Google Maps. So it can literally put them on a map. And then even show like the street view, point of view of like, here's what that billboard looks like, um, on the street. And then best yet, because it's very versatile in terms of being able to chain together different tools. It was able to take those street view images and then pass that in to leading image models like Nano Banana. And then use that to generate a really high fidelity mock-up of what our billboards would actually look like. Um, you know, so it took real world location shots,

• 14:12Speaker 03

  mashed that up with like our actual kind of campaign, uh, imagery, which it created based on the concept. And then could help us visualize like, here's literally what that, um, that billboard on Sunset will look like. Uh, I thought that was very cool. And then, you know, I think like, uh, we ended up not, you know, like we weren't around, uh, long enough to do a Super Bowl ad. We just started hyper agent basically around the, uh, the holidays. But, you know, had we done a Super Bowl ad? Or maybe for next year, you know, I use Hyperagent to go and generate some like actual video concepts. Right? So again, it's able to like come up with concepts, combining, you know, real product marketing, understanding of like, what does this product do?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  We fed it or gave it access to our documentation for Hyperagent. So very meta, but like Hyperagent was then able to learn about all of the capabilities and differentiation of Hyperagent. And then to be able to go and come up with really good marketing concepts that it could cut up into different scenes, like a screenwriter or like a director of in, you know, a Super Bowl ad script. And then actually generate really high quality, production grade videos using V O in this case from, from Google. So that it actually looked like a real Super Bowl ad. So I think, you know, I like the creative, creative use cases because they're just so immediate and visceral.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  But of course, I also have like many functional use cases, chief of staff use case where it's reading my emails and Slack all the time and pushing me anything that needs my attention. So saying, hey, you just got this really important email from somebody, a customer or a partner or an investor, you should probably respond to this. And here's even a drafted reply.

• 15:44Marina Mogilko?

  Can you show me some of your productivity use cases? Cause this is where I see a lot of my time being saved.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:52Marina Mogilko?

  When I optimize stuff with ages.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Okay. So this is a, this is actually a demo account of mine that's realistically recreated based on my actual usage. My actual usage has everything of mine, like all of my, you know, like calendar, my emails, everything. So it's a little sensitive. Either you can have it go on a recurring schedule or like similar to open clock and have a heartbeat mode where it's always, you know, waking up and checking new stuff. And then pushing you messages either via Telegram, it could be via Slack, it could be via email, but you can kind of set up how you want. I like Telegram because then it just feels like it's almost like a personal assistant, like messaging you all the time. You can respond to it. I'm going to especially Telegram if you have the bot living in your group channels already with your team, then you could just mention the bot and say, hey, you know, go research this thing on behalf of the team.

• 16:41Marina Mogilko?

  Go create caption for this post.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Exactly. Okay. So here's one that is one of my. So favorite. So obviously you have to be on top of Twitter or X like 24/7 now to like keep up with all the latest news. It's all happening so fast. It's kind of overwhelming. And sometimes I feel like I just like I forget to check X and I miss some really important stuff. So I have one agent whose entire job is just to constantly watch X. And literally it's like doing this like all the time 24/7. And then it's making a judgment call. It knows enough about me and what I care about and airtable and hyper agent. That it can push to me messages alerting me, you know, when there's something interesting, only when it's actually relevant to me, right? And it can even like frame this around like, why is this relevant to you, to Howie?

• 17:24Marina Mogilko?

  Interesting how social media is transforming because I see a lot of people doing this. Once you enter X, you forget your life.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 17:32Marina Mogilko?

  Now it's your agent consuming content for you.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:35Marina Mogilko?

  It's an interesting shift for social media in general.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, it's like agents consuming the content, but then, you know, also probably agents helping to create the content. And so, you know, there's a, it's, it's this funny loop of like, what happens when it's really just like our agents posting and consuming all the content on our behalf.

• 17:50Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Because this is a favorite one of mine. And one thing you can do here is like, if you want to set up a live mode agent, you can actually click that dialogue button. Or just ask it in the feed or in the, in the thread, turn this into in, in always on agent. And push me messages via Telegram when you see something interesting for me, right? And then it will set it up. It will walk you through the flow. You can set up like a Telegram bot.

• 18:21Marina Mogilko?

  You're doing this now and I'm realizing a few months ago, we built this system that does as notifications about videos that are underperforming.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:29Marina Mogilko?

  Took us a few days.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And by the way, even a few days is far better than a few months or a few years, right?

• 18:37Marina Mogilko?

  But it's, this is such a like how technology progresses these days. You have to be always on, always testing.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:43Marina Mogilko?

  Because there's new, this new product's coming.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, one of the cool things, if I take a step back and think about the state of tech right now. Like I've always believed that you can choose to make tech like a. Enabling tool, right? Like, in fact, like, when we founded Airtable, we spent a lot of time studying the history of like personal computing, the Macintosh, Microsoft. And it's quite interesting because like at one point, you know, all of the major like previous era computing companies scoffed at the idea of a personal computer, right? Like, they literally laughed at it. They were like, oh, nobody would need a personal computer on their own desk, let alone like they didn't even think about smartphones. Um, and you know, the idea that obviously Apple and Microsoft had was like, wow, like these processors are getting cheaper and faster.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  And in fact, like, instead of using that to do even more arcane and like specialized work, what if we made this even more accessible? What if we chewed up all of that computing power to make computers something that anyone can use and get value out of them? And I think there's a very strong parallel to models and like as the models get smarter. Yeah, you could apply them towards very, you know, kind of complicated use cases, like higher palantir for like $300 million to do like a very complex, like, you know, government deployment of AI. But also the alternate point of view is you can use it to enable people to do even more broad and interesting and ubiquitous things, right?

• 20:02Marina Mogilko?

  Absolutely.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  So I'm personally a fan of like the, you know, kind of democratization angle. That's the entire founding premise of Airtable was democratizing app creation. And I think now we have a very similar opportunity to do that for agents and like, you know, I really think like there's going to be two paths of agents that are more and more powerful but inaccessible. And then agents that are actually more and more friendly and accessible and useful to as many people as possible.

• 20:26Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, I just saw your speech on stage and you said builders are gonna win in the next few years. How do you adopt the builder mindset?

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think what really being a builder comes down to is one, like having the appetite to tinker. Like, that's the most important thing, right? Because I think it's a humility to say like, nobody knows all the answers. Like, if somebody tells you like, here's exactly how to build the perfect agent for every single use case and every single company out there. Like, they're full of it because there's no way to prescribe that so perfectly. Like, it's constantly changing and what's really cool about the builder community out there already on X, for instance, or like on Reddit, etc. Finding that people are like almost accidentally discovering the best ways to use agents, right? Like, you know, they're learning, hey, you know, it turns out like one way to make the agents very, very good at content production is to

• 21:19Speaker 03

  give it this kind of a skill with this kind of guidance, right? Or maybe create a skill from, you know, the Mr. Beast leaked handbook on like how to create content like, you know, it turns out when you feed that into the agent, have it develop its own skill informed by that, it does really well, right? Um, and so, you know, there's all of these emergent practices that actually make these agents work better and better. And the only way to go and kind of like really, you know, get good at it is to try it out, right? And the great thing is like, you know, there's no, you know, kind of master class, there's no PhD that you need for it. I mean, I'm sure you could take some great classes out there, but you don't really have to, right? And like, you know, if you have nights and weekend time even to go and just play around with the agents and it's quite fun to use. I think that's the best way to actually get into it. So the tinker mindset is most important first and foremost.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  And I think the second is really just a willingness to really distill down like what is the work? In order to generate the output you want, right? I think some people, um, you know, have an easier time imagining, you know, what is the ultimate purpose of let's say software engineering or sales or marketing or, you know, content creation? And if you are stuck in, in, in terms of thinking about it as like the activities that you currently do. So software engineering, the activity of writing code by hand, line by line is now going to be obsolete, right?

• 22:38Marina Mogilko?

  Same as script writing.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. But if you can rethink the, the work as being, how do I generate great software? How do I output great code and great applications and get to go up in the abstraction? To like have a team of agents that actually do that work for me, or, you know, same for script writing or content. Like, I think then you're able to really effectively leverage agents because you're thinking about the outcome first. And then how do you use these awesome, you know, capabilities to generate that output? Versus being stuck in the activities of before. You know, I think like a lot of it is just like getting that starting point, right? Like, you know, it feels sometimes very daunting to get started. Like I personally, every time I try a new generation of AI or products, you know, it always feels like, you know, a little intimidating. Like, how do I get started?

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Like, you know, over the holidays, I personally got back into software development in a really big way. Like, I had done some tinkering before, but with the latest family of models, like, I actually started building, like, with code again, right? And using development agents. And at first, it was like, you know, like, I just picked some low stakes projects to do, like, for fun and got so immersed into it that by the time I personally started working on Hyper Agent in code, like, you know, it was already very, like, exciting and, you know, I had built up some confidence around, like, what I could do with the agent. So I think, you know, the, the, um, the really empowering thing is like, you can start with anything, like, low stakes, personal use cases, but that helps you develop the confidence and the fluency to then go and bite off something even bigger.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could have a whole agent just dedicated to helping you prepare for that. And you could even have a meta-agent that itself is running 24/7 to discover new opportunities for additional agents, right?

• 24:18Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, that's amazing. This is, do you have that agent? No, I think it's genius.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  I, I don't have one right now, other than my Chief of Staff, which is constantly, like, looking through all my stuff and suggesting, like, follow-ups. And sometimes it will suggest additional agent use cases, but I should. You know, I want to have, like, a weekly, yeah, weekly review, look at everything I did, and then come up with additional agents that you should hire, basically, onto your team to automate even more of what happened over the week. So this one, I'm just setting up, like, the final parts of the, um, the Telegram flow. But, you know, in short, like, it will help me walk through the configuration to actually turn this agent into an always-on Telegram agent that will then push me messages in Telegram.

• 24:58Marina Mogilko?

  When something's happening on X, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  So I gave it some, some feedback on, um, on what I wanted to do.

• 25:03Marina Mogilko?

  I should set up an agent for kids' school emails.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 25:05Marina Mogilko?

  Now that I'm thinking.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, now that we're talking about personal use cases, like, I have some fun ones, which are, um, you know, I'm in the market for a used car right now. And so it actually, uh, I have an agent that's monitoring all of the used car listing sites and then finding cars of my spec. I want a convertible, uh, here, you know, we're here in LA. It's a good place to have a convertible. And it will go and do extensive research on the price point I want and, like, do the cars have the specs that I want? And even, like, you know, what, um, what are the, uh, you know, locations? Like, let me click through and, like, see where it is and more details. But. You know, just like fun personal use cases that I wouldn't have otherwise hired like a person to go and monitor.

• 25:46Marina Mogilko?

  Now I'm thinking I need to book my flights to Cannes. I could basically build an agent that goes through all my points that I have on different credit cards and find the right.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. For a points optimizer, like use the points effectively, even help you like plan out like with a map, like all the different places you want to go. So yeah, it's a very fun time.

• 26:04Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  You know, I saw this term referenced in a like one of the AI forums I'm in. But you know, one way to think about agents is like, I mean, obviously you can use it in your core job, but it also enables you to go and make all these luxury hires that you otherwise wouldn't go like, maybe you wouldn't hire a full time travel concierge for your team, right? Like it just, that would be like too, it wouldn't be worth like a full time hire. But now with an agent, you can literally have an agent whose full time job, even running 24 seven, is to find ways to optimize your points, find like new, you know, itineraries that are surfacing from your email, like it knows, oh, maybe you need to go out and do this kind of a, you know, this kind of a promotion or this kind of like an interview. And it will, you know, automatically go and propose, here's the flight itinerary, here's

• 26:50Speaker 03

  even like the way that you can optimize your points for this trip.

• 26:53Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  So, you know, it kind of allows you to just imagine all these, like, if you could hire as many people as you wanted for almost zero cost, right? Like what other roles would you hire people into? I think that's a very cool thing, too, is, you know, a lot of people are worried rightfully about, you know, what jobs will look like in the coming years. But I think that actually like some of the most interesting use cases of agents are going to be not necessarily replacing existing human jobs outright, but actually enabling completely new jobs that weren't being done because, you know, it just wasn't worth it to have like a full time hire to do something. So, you know, you're able to like go and do incrementally so much more that puts you ahead, right, personally and as a business.

• 28:01Speaker 01

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• 28:30Marina Mogilko?

  If I'm running all these agents and getting all that information, like learning how to live in that environment where yes, they source a lot of stuff for you, but then you're still the end decision maker. So it's a lot of decisions now, which actually is founder's job, right? You're not, you don't have to be building. You have to be making those big decisions.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  It's like the judgment, right? Like, that's the thing I think like a common thread is like, you know, the thing that scales the most and gives you the most leverage in the agent world. And, you know, it was true in the human world as well as good judgment, right? And how do you apply good judgment as efficiently and to as many different threads as possible? And I think the people who are able to do that most effectively will become like almost superhuman, right? Like, you know, you will have this team of agents that you're able to give good judgment and feedback to, just like a really effective CEO of humans, right? Like, that's what discerns a good CEO of humans versus not is ability to scale good judgment.

• 29:24Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, yeah. And you scale it by making more decisions, I guess, seeing how they work.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And maybe like iterating, experimenting more, having agents try things that you otherwise wouldn't have tried. Like, maybe you can do new content experiments, right? Or new business model experiments like, hey, what if we built our own, you know, kind of brand? And or micro sites around these different kind of opportunities for Airtable or for Hyperagent, you know, like, we can actually go and execute on way more like marketing programs or even like product, you know, features than we would before. And not all of them will work, but like, we just get way more app bats.

• 29:59Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, my last question for anyone who wants to start with agents today. First three steps.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Um, one is obviously sign up for Hyperagent and um, you know, we uh, you know, we try to make Hyperagent really, really in non-intimidating, right? So it's got a very great GUI experience. You don't have to go in and like do technical setup. It's kind of like using the Mac, right? As opposed to like setting up Linux. And the second is like, just come up with like a few personal use cases or low stakes work use cases. I think um, problem hunting, like figuring out like what are the problems you want to solve is like 80% of the battle, right? Because it turns out the actual building of the solution is no longer so hard. Like compare this to the prior era where like, let's say you wanted to build custom software even before no code and you wanted to solve a problem with like a custom app.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Okay, well, you could pick the right problem. You need to track, let's say, all your brand deals, but then actually writing the code to build the app is like all of the effort.

• 30:58Marina Mogilko?

  It's not worth it. Easier to hire someone, yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And so now I think really it's kind of inverted where the, the most interesting part and actually the part that you should spend the most time on upfront is just coming up with a list of like, what are all the problems that I want to solve? And then third is like, have fun with it. I think that's the most important part too, or that's a really important part too, is you know, this has to become like a passion. I think like the best agent users and builders I see really kind of enjoy it, right? Just like, you know, if you were an early internet user, you had to kind of enjoy it, right? Like there's a functional purpose to it, but also like, you know, it's just fun to go online and like, you know, see what else was out there, shopping sites and like news sites and games and so on. And so there is this like interactive and like just kind of very dynamic nature to

• 31:43Speaker 03

  agents that I think to become truly fluent, you have to have passion, you know, technology fit, right? So like try to enjoy it. And that's why I think like also picking the lower stakes, you know, kind of fun use cases where you get to really experiment rather than putting all this pressure on yourself up, upfront to like deliver some kind of ROI. Like it's just like any other new and disruptive tech, computers, the internet, the iPhone, like to really understand how to apply it in a very efficient and effective business way, you have to first really kind of, I think, immerse as a consumer of it.

• 32:15Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. And two skills everyone should be working on for what you're saying. The skill to figure out the problem to solve.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:23Marina Mogilko?

  And the skill to make the right call or judgment.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think those will be the two most important things. And effectively mastering them, I think, makes you into superhuman.

• 32:35Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly, exactly. And we're living in an age where everyone has a potential to become a superhuman in less than, I think, a couple of weeks.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, seriously.

• 32:44Marina Mogilko?

  It's a very, very speedy path.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  I think we'll, we'll see a lot more entrepreneurship, too. I think like, you know, the, the era of like one person building a great company, you know, whether it's like the literal billion dollar revenue company that was forecasted with, with AI. Or, you know, it could just be, it doesn't have to be a billion in revenue to still be successful. But I think a lot more people are going to be able to get off the ground with their own ideas and build a business, whether it's an online retail business that, you know, before they couldn't have afforded to hire the team, to market it, to source the inventory, to build a site. Now you can do that all with agents, right? Or it could be a content, you know, kind of business, or it could be like a software business. Like, all of these businesses, I think, are now much more possible for anyone out there who just has the idea and sees an opportunity.

• 33:26Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, it's amazing time to be alive. Thank you so much, Howie, and thank you so much for the product.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Of course, yeah, thank you.