What Happens When Your Coworkers Are AI Agents
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year, AI agents have been at the forefront of tech companies' ambitions. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has often talked about a possible billion-dollar company being spun up with just one human and an army of AI agents. And so last summer, journalist Evan Ratliff decided to try to become that unicorn himself — by creating HarumoAI, a small startup that’s made up of AI employees and executives. Mike and Lauren sit down with Evan to discuss how it’s going, and the current promises and realities of AI agents.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives | WIRED
- AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers | WIRED
- Who’s to Blame When AI Agents Screw Up? | WIRED
Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from Alexis Ohanian's newest tech venture to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Lauren. How you doing? How was your vacation? It was great. Did you miss me? I did, of course. Yeah. It was so fantastic that I had a hard time coming back, honestly. And I saw a lot of really beautiful art. I was in Italy. Not a bad place to go for vacation, I have to say. I've heard this before. I confirmed it. |
| 0:23.1 | And after seeing so much incredible art and just like people doing stuff with their hands and |
| 0:29.2 | tangible goods and I was like, I don't want to go back to the world of AI. I didn't want to go |
| 0:36.6 | back to like sitting in a coffee shop and hearing everyone pitching their AI startups and driving on the 101 and seeing the billboards. |
| 0:44.6 | The inscrutable billboards. |
| 0:45.3 | I was just like, no, keep me in the land of Barada and Caravaggio. |
| 0:51.2 | Well, Lauren, I'm sorry to tell you that you came back on the show just in time to talk about AI agents. |
| 0:56.8 | Oh, I know. Great. It's something that we've talked about a lot this year. And our listeners have heard about it a lot. And we're not sick of talking about it. In fact, we have a very fun conversation about AI agents happening today. |
| 1:09.6 | Well, if you can promise me fun, amen. |
| 1:12.5 | I can. |
| 1:13.2 | All right, let's do it. |
| 1:14.1 | I'm excited. |
| 1:14.7 | We're moving beyond the hype and putting AI agents to work in real time for us, or more |
| 1:19.7 | specifically. |
| 1:20.6 | We're bringing on journalists and podcast host Evan Ratliff because he created a company composed |
| 1:25.9 | of AI employees and executives, and he is here to tell us all about it. |
| 1:30.8 | Welcome to the show, Evan. |
| 1:32.5 | It is fantastic to be here. |
| 1:34.1 | Evan, you're also an original wired one. |
| 1:37.3 | You weren't wired for a long time, right? |
| 1:39.0 | I'm an old school wired person. |
| 1:41.0 | I was only at Wired very briefly for a couple years a long time ago, but I have |
... |
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