May 6, 2026

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What happens when you let AI agents run an entire start-up

Journalist Evan Ratliff explores what happens when AI agents are given real autonomy to build and run a start‑up from scratch

By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Alex Sugiura, Kylie Murphy & Sushmita Pathak

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Have you ever been chatting with a customer service rep and just felt like they’re a little off? Well, customer service is a tough job, so, you know, maybe you’re the problem. But it’s also possible you were communicating with an AI agent.

These are computer programs designed to autonomously execute tasks. So while you might use a chatbot powered by a large language model to answer a specific question using data scraped from the Internet, you could give an agentic AI system a task like “Design a website for my new bakery” and expect it to at least try to accomplish the whole project out in the real world. Depending on how you design your agent and how much freedom you give it, one of these computer programs could create its own login on a web-hosting service, scour the Internet for examples of good marketing copy about croissants, generate a few fake photos of kids with too many fingers enjoying cupcakes…you get the idea. Before you know it you’ve got a bakery website though, maybe not a very good one.

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When global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company surveyed nearly 2,000 people about AI usage last year, 62 percent of respondents said their companies were “at least experimenting with AI agents.” Now many of those prospective agents are likely doomed to be faceless customer service reps or code monkeys. But to hear the AI industry hype machine tell it, agentic AI could replace just about any human you might want to fire.

Journalist Evan Ratliff recently decided to put that idea to the test by launching a start-up staffed entirely by AI agents. The latest season of his podcast, Shell Game, shares how the nonhuman members of his team built an app, got, like, really good at LinkedIn posts—which isn’t necessarily a compliment—and started having conversations behind his back.

Evan sat down to chat about his experience with journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis, who until recently was serving as Science Quickly’s interim host. Here’s their conversation.

Kendra Pierre-Louis: So my understanding is, you know, in the interest of journalism, you created a company called—I don’t know if I can say this correctly—HurumoAI.

Evan Ratliff: That’s how I pronounce it, and that’s how my colleagues pronounce it. I’m not sure there’s a correct pronunciation, per se. But yes, HurumoAI is how we say it. [Laughs.]

Pierre-Louis: And you chronicled your experiences with this company on a podcast called Shell Game. What made &hairsp;HurumoAI unique? Like, why is it different from, say, a lemonade stand? [Laughs.]

Ratliff: [Laughs.] I mean, certainly, the most unique thing about HurumoAI is that, except for me, all of the co-founders and employees are AI agents. So I created the AI agents, and then I created the company with the AI agents. So there’s two co-founders, and then there are three other employees of the company, and they’re really responsible for building and running the company day to day.

Pierre-Louis: So for people who maybe deliberately have been ignoring everything related to the AI revolution, so to speak, what is an AI agent?

Ratliff: First, I don’t blame anyone who’s deliberately ignoring it.

Pierre-Louis: [Laughs.]

Ratliff: It’s in your face every day, and that’s a natural reaction, I feel.

An AI agent—so most people, I think, will be familiar with an AI chatbot now: you know, a ChatGPT or a Claude that you go to ask questions, get answers, engage in conversation with, if you desire. An AI agent is really a version of one of those chatbots that is given some kind of autonomy and release to go accomplish a goal.

So a simple example would be an AI agent that you want to book a plane ticket for you. So you give it the goal: “I want you to book a plane ticket.” You give it the information: “Where do I wanna go and when?,” the credit card number. And then you just say, “Go do it.” And it go does it.

Now, people have varying levels of comfort about whether or not they wanna do something like that, but AI agents are now deployed for