Your startup’s next teammate might be an AI agent: Gusto, Insight Partners, and Leland explain what that changes at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Your startup’s next teammate might be an AI agent: Gusto, Insight Partners, and Leland explain what that changes at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. 25% off tickets now Back by popular demand: Save up to $300 on Disrupt Close Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography / Flickr (opens in a new window) AI Your startup’s next teammate might be an AI agent: Gusto, Insight Partners, and Leland explain what that changes at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 TechCrunch Events 8:30 PM PDT · September 16, 2026 The first few hires at a startup can define the company.

What happened

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Josh Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto; Michelle Johnson, senior vice president at Insight Partners; and John Koelliker, CEO and co-founder of Leland, come together on the Builders Stage for an insightful session called “Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder. ” This session will explore how early-stage companies are building teams where humans and AI agents work alongside each other — and how founders can do that without sacrificing speed, accountability, or culture. This session will explore how early-stage companies are building teams where humans and AI agents work alongside each other — and how founders can do that without sacrificing speed, accountability, or culture. Learn more at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register before September 25 to save up to $200.

Learn to build yours for what comes next, only at Disrupt 2026. Image Credits:TechCrunch Topics AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Disrupt 2026: OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, and more take over 6 industry stages. Join them at Moscone West in San Francisco, October 13–15, alongside 10,000+ startups, investors, and tech decision-makers exploring what it takes to build and scale the next generation of companies. Image Credits:TechCrunch The first 10 people in a startup may no longer all be people For an early-stage company, every hire is a trade-off between capability, cost, and speed.

The wider picture

At Insight Partners, she works with CEOs and CROs across North America and Europe on go-to-market strategy, revenue organizations, and AI implementation. Together, they bring three different views of the same challenge: How do you design a startup team when some of the work can be done by agents from day one? The challenge is deciding where those people create the greatest value — and where an agent might do the job instead. BOOK NOW Most Popular Clean tech startup Fluxnium found a way to tap 50,000 years’ worth of nuclear fuel Tim De Chant Jensen Huang took a call from Trump, and showed off something else, too Connie Loizos The 9 buzziest startups from Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day, according to VCs Marina Temkin Dominic-Madori Davis Tesla says it will finally unveil the second-generation Roadster on October 1 Anthony Ha Revolut confirms customer data breach through fake government requests Jagmeet Singh Matt Mullenweg tells (trolls? ) Automattic staff, saying he’s back in control after CEO ouster Sarah Perez OpenAI puts Pro subscriptions on hold due to Astra demand Sarah Perez Loading the next article Error loading the next article

AI agents are beginning to take on engineering, customer support, research, and operational work that would previously have been assigned to early team members. Register now and save up to $200 on your Disrupt pass before rates increase on September 25 at 11:59 p. m. Instead of automatically asking, “Who do we hire next? ,” the starting question can become: “What work needs to be done — and is a person the best way to do it? ” That distinction matters.

Giving work to an AI agent can help a small team move faster, but it also introduces new questions around ownership.

What has been reported

What happens when an agent gets something wrong? Those are no longer theoretical questions for companies building AI-native startups. All these questions, and more, will be answered on the Builders Stage at Disrupt. Three perspectives on the AI-native team shared at Disrupt Josh Reeves sees the shift across a particularly broad customer base. Gusto supports more than 500,000 companies across payroll, benefits, compliance, onboarding, HR, and retirement, while combining AI with more than a decade of experience serving small businesses.

That puts Gusto close to the day-to-day realities of companies deciding how — and when — to grow their teams. Image Credits:Chloe Ellingson/Bloomberg / Getty Images Michelle Johnson brings the startup scaling perspective. Before joining Insight, she helped scale Flock Safety from less than $1 million to $90 million in ARR as an early sales and revenue operations leader.

What happens next

If AI agents can research prospects, prepare outreach, analyze customer data, or manage parts of the sales process, what should the human members of a revenue team concentrate on? And how does that change the skills a startup should prioritize when hiring? As CEO and co-founder of Leland, a career and talent platform for the AI era, he brings experience across product and growth roles at LinkedIn, Curated, and Uber, alongside building a company focused on how people develop and apply skills in a changing labor market.

Some of the most important decisions inside a startup are difficult to reduce to a workflow. As AI agents become more capable, those questions could become more important, not less. That has implications across the startup ecosystem. Learn how to build the company, not just the technology, on the Builders Stage at Disrupt Early-stage companies have always competed on their ability to do more with less.