You just hired a million bad employees
Companies handed everyone unlimited agents and token budgets. Bad processes now replicate by the second. The next lesson isn't buying more model — it's learning to manage this digital workforce.
Disclosure: the author is founder and CEO of Hebbia. His company embeds AI into real workflows for finance, legal, and other teams — a business shape close to what the piece calls "AI transformation." Later on he argues transformation firms will outgrow Neofirms by an order of magnitude, which lines up with his own commercial position. Read this as an opinionated practitioner's essay, not neutral market research.
The books say productivity. On the ground, it's a workforce that never stops
Companies think they're buying "productivity": signing model licenses, rolling out assistants to everyone, and plugging in agents that can click through tools on their own. What's actually happening is something else: they're handing every employee, including the ones least able to spell out a task clearly, near-unlimited digital headcount and budget. The moment a task is vague, an agent won't stop and ask — it just keeps working, keeps burning tokens. Bad processes used to spread slowly, through people. Now they replicate by the second.
Primary source and reference
- George Sivulka / X Original publisher