In February 2024, Sam Altman said AI will soon allow a founder to surpass a billion-dollar valuation without having to hire a single employee. In that interview with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Altman even said he had a betting pool among his CEO friends as to what year this might happen.
This single-person unicorn he imagines could very likely be led by a creator. One of the main barriers to entry into the creator economy is that there are so many administrative tasks for an individual to do; from video editing to managing enquiries, coordinating sponsorship invoices to researching your next video. There are unseen, and often underestimated, hours of work, both pre and post-production behind any influencer’s snippet of content.
Yet, the way we engage with AI is changing, shifting away from large language models or image-generation software that just produces an output, and towards AI agents that can complete complex, time-consuming tasks autonomously. Leveraging this rapidly developing technology means that creators can build one-person companies, with agents performing those same administrative tasks on their behalf.
Relevance AI builds teams of AI agents that can autonomously process and complete complex tasks for clients including Roku and Activision. A no-code platform, Relevance AI’s agents are trained by companies and freelancers to help handle sales, marketing, and operations activities. As the barrier to building AI agents lowers thanks to platforms like Relevance AI, creators can build customised AI teams or agents for business or personal use. “The best agents won’t be made by career engineers in hackathons, they will be made by experts in that specific field,” says Daniel Vassilev, the company’s CEO and co-founder.
Automation makes it easier for creators to expand their pastime into a career, building well-oiled revenue and freeing up their time for the important bit: being creative. As Vassilev describes, “Agentic AI seamlessly connects with other tools, to equip agents with skills such as internet search and transcription, plugged-in emails, calendars, and pretty much anything else you can think of.”
Through platforms like Relevance AI, creators can use pre-existing template agents to quickly get started on tedious tasks, from sales agents who will book new business meetings on your behalf, to life cycle marketing agents who will message every customer like they are your only customer, individually drafting and tailoring every message based on research from across the internet.
Creators have even asked Relevance AI to help build tools like this specifically to expand their one-person careers. “At the moment, careers in the creator economy are resource-constrained, so at a certain level, creators will need someone to run their finances or handle any potential partnerships. With AI agents doing some of the more labour-intensive back-end work, we want creators only to be limited by the wildness of their ideas”, Vassilev explains.
Relevance AI’s founders know a thing or two about viral wildness: with little programming training Vassilev and fellow co-founder Jacky Koh created the smash hit app PokeWhere, a real-time Pokemon tracking app, at “the height of the Pokemon Go craze” Vassilev explains that “soon enough it had millions of downloads and was top of the app store charts.”
“With the success of PokeWhere, I saw first-hand that you could create value from the stroke of a keyboard, and that there was a real career and pathway in creating these things which people use.”, Vassilev says.
This is also true for creators embedded in the AI space, who have found lucrative business models by offering to build these AI agents for their audiences, with Vassilev noting “We have seen multiple cases where a creator started doing tutorials on YouTube and then over time has expanded this into a thriving AI automation agency. This has created a symbiotic ecosystem where free educational content drives awareness and basic understanding, and then the creators themselves capture the market for implementation and customisation.”
As the adoption of AI agents increases further, Vassilev believes this will increase the time to attempt different things, “automating the, quite frankly, dull boring tasks leaves more space to try new things. AI agents will help turbocharge the creator economy, because ultimately what we are building provides a level of freedom for us to think creatively.”
So what of Sam Altman’s prediction that we could soon see a “one-person unicorn”? “We’re technologically approaching the possibility of a single-person unicorn”. Yet, Vassilev also stresses the human penchant for creativity stemming from interpersonal collaboration, “So while we could potentially build a billion-dollar business alone, why wouldn’t we build a ten-billion-dollar business with ten people?”.