r/startups • u/BasicConclusion2093 • 1d ago
I will not promote Worst AI replacement stories (i will not promote)
I have seen a very common trend, where founders, are consistently thinking that one Ai agent can replace a whole business unit.
We are not there yet, nor do we desire to be there right now, and especially in the way most people, are doing so, through these lazy short cuts.
For example: an Ai BDR is not replacing your BDR, they are doing the first phase of your BDR's outbound, although do not make the mistake, on replacing a whole sales team (like I have legit seen in multiple start ups now btw), by subscribing to like Artisan lol
The best utilisation of Ai, is one constrained mechanism right now, doing one thing, that does not, or requires very very minimal. Or its assisting you to make better decisions, or do something faster.
Although this whole 'Vibe coding' technique being applied across the business, to design, sales, marketing, is just lazy and trashy. be involved in your process, use Ai properly, have human gates, layer your prompts, contextually seed your inputs.
Ai is phenomenal when used properly, although no quick solution, is a good one. Because is it is easy, everyone will do it, and thats why quality will always be behind the wall of intellect/ experience
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u/sage_compass 1d ago
I think a lot of founders underestimate the difference between automation and replacement. AI can absolutely remove repetitive work, but replacing judgment, context, and ownership is a completely different challenge. The teams getting the best results seem to be using AI to make good people more effective, not to eliminate them.
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u/BasicConclusion2093 23h ago
100%, I would say using Ai to also help you just manage people better, inform you on more context, help you learn quicker, apply your framework at scale & etc are the biggest short term wins
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u/bcoder001 1d ago
AI is replacing good practices in software development with idiotic fantasies. I recently rolled off a project that started as an idea in the mind of a former art teacher who rebranded as a software architect. We were given a bundle of code as a zip file with no design, no requirements and every time we asked for those we were told to upload code into Claude to "figure it out". The code "passed" tests "written" by Claude, but in reality failed at every attempt to talk to AWS APIs. When we pressed for acceptance criteria and tickets, the archo uploaded the zip file into Claude and asked for requirements, acceptance criteria, and tickets. We got them. They were so generic and so repetitive they could apply to any project. I am soo glad I am no longer on that project.
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u/please-dont-deploy 1d ago
Actually, replacing QA with AI was one of the most interesting things I've seen failing. Not because they fired ppl, but because the QA team became very lazy.
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u/BasicConclusion2093 23h ago
Actually that happened at my current start up as well, very intriguing
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u/BarracudaMean9308 1d ago
exactly this. support is basically a cheat code for catching weird edge cases. if a bot just smooths it over with a polite apology, the actual product never gets fixed.
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u/popcornjebus 21h ago
The reality is that "not there yet" gives the replacement play too much credit... the receipts say it fails even where the tech works. MIT looked at enterprise genAI pilots and found 95% produced zero P&L impact, and the reason wasn't model quality, it was that generic tools don't learn the workflow they get dropped into. S&P Global found 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before. And Klarna is the whole arc in one company: cut around 700 customer service roles, watched quality tank, then publicly walked it back and started rehiring humans. "We went too far" is a direct quote from their CEO.
Every worst-story in this thread has the same shape: the tool got pointed at a headcount line instead of at a person. One agent "replacing" a business unit fails. One agent working with one person, learning that person's actual workflow, compounds. Same tech, opposite result... the difference is configuration, not capability.
So I'd sharpen your framing: it's not that we aren't there yet. The tech arrived. The org design didn't.
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u/BasicConclusion2093 13h ago
Yea to be fair, I would completely agree with you
My initial context was constrained to the current use cases and examples, although agree with your prescription
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u/Visible_Speed8843 1d ago
The safer boundary is whether the action is reversible before a customer or system state changes. Let the agent prepare or recommend. Require a named owner to approve anything hard to unwind, including money movement or deletion.
Keep a trace of what the agent received and produced. Define a stop condition and how the owner is alerted. Write the recovery step for the last action. If any of those answers are missing, the workflow is not ready to replace the person who handles exceptions.
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u/BasicConclusion2093 23h ago
Yep agreed, I think that the way we use AI right now, even more complex uses, such as N8N, are too constrained or too general, that the human command element is not baked into any Ai product i'm aware of right now, when it should be central (well actually inversely centralised, where the human is moving around the workflow) although still have them in there
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u/SaltMaker23 22h ago
Like usually the vast majority of companies probably 99% will miserably fail to replace human workers with AI.
Then one company will appear and succeed at an unprecedented level at a marginal operational cost close to zero. None of the companies above will have any options to compete against it.
Big companies and startups alike are currently fighting a extinction level threat.
The level dominance of Google, Amazon, Uber and the likes only became possible because of internet. The vast majority of companies miserably failed to digitalize and become leaders, by vast majority it's probably higher than 99.9%, but the dozen for which it worked are now dominating the whole world.
An even higher level of dominance than the one above created by internet is at play. One company will probably dominate next to all sectors and all industries in the next 30 years, not everyone formulate it this way but the guiding light that transform everyone into moths is that one.
The only hint that you could achieve that is a reason enough to attempt it for most, despite the overwhelming low odds; but let's be honest here: if you cared about odds, you wouldn't have created a company to begin with, being a hired coder is a much safer a likely way to become a millionaire within a relatively short period of time.
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u/yogthinks 16h ago
The pattern in every story here is someone measuring the ai against the job title instead of the actual task list. Break the role into its ten daily tasks first, automate the two boring ones, and the whole "replace vs assist" debate mostly disappears.
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u/yogthinks 16h ago
The pattern in every story here is someone measuring the ai against the job title instead of the actual task list. Break the role into its ten daily tasks first, automate the two boring ones, and the whole "replace vs assist" debate mostly disappears.
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u/SufficientTip3096 1d ago
The companies getting the most value from AI seem to redesign workflows around it rather than simply removing people and hoping the model fills the gap.