Amjad Masad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday that artificial intelligence is reshaping workplaces. Drawing on his company’s experience selling AI coding tools, Masad described how AI agents are increasingly handling routine tasks while human employees shift toward roles that demand judgment and taste.
Masad said Replit’s team has watched the technology change their own operations over the past year, and that a notable inflection point came when AI agents became more reliable sometime earlier this year.
“The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year,” Masad told the Disrupt crowd. He added, “But a big part of America and the world, they still don’t know that that change is coming, and it’s going to be surprising to a lot of people.”
The “self-driving company” concept
Masad used the phrase “self-driving company” not to describe autonomous vehicles, but to convey a business that increasingly self-improves through agents doing much of the grunt work. He gave concrete details of how this works at Replit: incoming support tickets are first examined by an agent that triages them by checking GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets. By the time a human sees the request, they already have the additional context needed to decide how to proceed. If the support person decides to submit a patch, deploying another agent to apply the fix is just a click away.
“You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but crucially, there’s human judgment in the middle, and we don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. You need human judgment; you need taste,” Masad explained.
Work changes, people’s focus shifts
According to Masad, agents are not simply taking jobs away from people; they are changing what people spend their time on. Employees are spending more time deciding what to work on, engaging in discussions and whiteboarding, and focusing on architecture and how to build things.
“We’re spending a lot more time figuring out what to work on,” he said. “I go around the company, I see a lot more discussions, a lot more whiteboarding. We spend a lot more time on architecture, how to build things.”
A positive narrative about AI at work
Masad also noted that Replit’s conversations with other businesses tend to focus on how AI can make people more productive and happier at work, partly because agents remove boring tasks and enable more creative work.
“There’s a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we’re hoping to do that,” he added.
Replit’s example shows one path for integrating AI agents into company workflows: reallocating human effort toward judgment, design and strategy rather than routine execution.
