Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Your Next Cofounder Is an AI | Edward Kim, Co-Founder & CTO of Gusto ($10B)

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of Gusto — the $10B payroll and HR platform that millions of small businesses run on.Gusto just launched Gusto Cofounder — an AI teammate for small businesses: payroll, compliance, and daily ops handled before they become problems.Learn more about cofounder here -> https://gusto.com/cofounder?idgm=2mm6b6i2  We covered:The two levels of using AI in a business, and why almost everyone is still stuck on the first oneHow Gusto's AI found $70M in tax credits owners had no idea they qualified for, including one pool company now collecting $50K a yearHow to hand off the "work before the work" so payroll runs itself two days early and all you do is tap approveHow to run your whole back office from a text message, with your Notion and spreadsheets plugged straight inHow to stay ahead of tens of thousands of changing tax rules without reading a single oneLinks: Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=Edward KimInstagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠My Companies & Products: ⁠https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co #GustoPartner

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In 2030, every small business will have a co-founder-type agent that is running their business for them. And they're really just focusing on why they started that business in the first place. This is Eddie Kim, co-founder and CTO of Gusto. A $10 billion company, millions of businesses run their payroll benefits and hiring on. They just launched Gusto co-founder, an AI that runs your back office. You just approve the important stuff. And it might just change the way we run business itself. Just imagine like the amount of time savings that a business gets when they no longer have to like

do the manual stuff. Yeah. AI has accelerated so many things. Actually these like 10 things that you have, these are the bottle of X. Yeah. If you have this very powerful AI that knows everything. What does it change in the way you run your business like two or three years? Will it be able to help you make strategic decisions?

Yeah. I mean, we live in this interesting time when everything's changing. and I'm sure a lot of small business owners are using gusto and they're also listening to this podcast. Can you talk about what AI is changing for small business owners? Because a lot of people are not using it yet. And they're like, oh, I used it a little bit. I haven't seen any impact. Yeah.

Well, we're seeing in our data, a lot of small businesses start starting to use AI to help run their business. And I think maybe even a little bit more so than your average tech startup or enterprise business. And I think the reason why is because just out of necessity, right? Small businesses have so much less resources. They have to be a lot more creative. So we see a lot of small businesses actually use chat chitp-t and Anthropic and Claude and things like that to help run their business. I'd say a lot of them are still using it a little bit more as like a chat bot or like a question and answer, maybe more of like a search type functionality and occasionally content creation.

But I think there was a huge next level of unlock that we're starting to see. Some of the even more on the edge, small businesses use AI forward to help automate and actually run large parts of their business. So you would say level one is this chatbot. Level two, what you say is like is. Yeah, I mean, you can call it agents, but really it's moving one step up from the like question and answer like search type functionality and the and the content creation functionality. And more into like, here's my business that operates.

It has a set of processes that are usually recurring like running. payroll, approving time sheets, approving time off, things like that, that I have to do week in, week in and week out. And now I can have AI through agents, through a product like Gusto, actually run all this for them. And they can be involved as much as or as little as they want. But we're seeing some of the more cutting edge small businesses be more comfortable with being less involved and maybe just kind of like saying responding yes on their phone. Like I approve this. But really, Gusto is doing everything else for them. That's, you know, when it comes to things like payroll and taxes, there are so many things that you just don't know about. Like, if you don't know, you don't know.

Right. And things just go on by themselves. And I've read that you actually saved small businesses $17 million. Yeah. And tax credits. Can you talk to me about this? Like, as a small business owner, right? If my CPA doesn't tell me anything, I don't know it exists and I'm losing those dollars. Does Gusto do that for you? Yeah. And that's one of the ways that we're leveraging AI. We're using AI to analyze all the things that we know about a small business and proactively letting them know of things that they should be doing or things that they should know about to help improve their business. And what you just referred to is called the R&D tax credit.

When you're like developing something? You're developing something? It's a tax credit that's given to any business in the U.S. That's doing some sort of qualified research. Now here's the thing. many people, including myself when I first learned about this, think that it's only applicable if you're doing some sort of like hard science type research, like you're trying to build like a nuclear fusion reactor or find the cure to cancer.

But actually, it's available to a lot more businesses than you may think. And we have this one company called Cabana Pools, where we use AI to let them know that they are actually potentially eligible for this R&D tax credit. And not only did we do that, we actually help them fill out the forms, also very much assisted through AI, that they then submitted to the government agency and ultimately got, like, I think it was like $50,000 in R&D tax credits, not just one time, but year after year. And they're actually been increasing the amount that they're getting. So literally, the tax credit, if you're not familiar, you know, there's a difference between like deductions and credits, right? credits is literally the same as like the government just mailed you a check so i remember doing this for my business for a language trip and i think it was dependent on how much we're paying our ctio is that

does there have to be specific person who's like responsible for so yeah that's one of the so basically like the way it works is like you have like a set of like expenses things that you spend money on that like fall in this bucket of of research right and some of that is like oh i bought this like fancy equipment right but some of it is also like i spent a percentage of my time researching this new way to do something, right? And so that is also an expense, right? Because that's part of your salary, right? So if your role is primarily in doing some sort of research or development or really just innovating in some way, you can claim the R&D tax credit, the part of your time, aka your salary, that is being spent towards that. And again, like,

it applies, of course, to like hard sciences. It applies to software development. So if your title is like primarily a software engineer and you're building something that doesn't exist today, but also applies to a lot of small businesses are innovating on different ways to do whatever that they do, right? Absolutely. Especially with AI. I feel like everyone is trying to build something for their company in a new way. Yeah. They're trying to run their business a little bit more efficiently through AI, right?

And they don't have, they're experimenting. they're researching how to do that, I think that would qualify as potential free credits that they would get. One of the ways that we can help small businesses, we do help small businesses, is AI can like analyze all this data that we have about every single individual customer that's using gusto and tell them, hey, you're eligible for this tax credit. We think it's going to be about X amount, right? And by the way, we've also done most of the work for you, filled out most the forum, all we need you to do is review it and sign it, and there's a good chance that you will get this tax credit. Right. And it's like, as a small business owner, you're like, whoa,

that's just like free money that I didn't, I just like kind of found like some money in my, my jeans that I didn't know about, right? Like, you should be absolutely getting that. And I think that's one of the ways that AI can really help small businesses. Is that what co-founder does? Or what what is this new gusto co-founder thing? So that is a, that is like kind of in the same vein of what Gusto co-founder does. Co-founder takes the way that we've kind of like thought about how are most people using AI in a small business and how do we like level it up to do a lot more for the small business, right?

And essentially what co-founder is, it is a tool that allows you to automate anything and everything about your small business. That could be things that we already do for you, like running payroll or proving time off. But it could also be things like emailing your customers, right? Or texting you. the weather today. And, you know, one example is like a tour guide company, right, where they have a list of guests that are coming in to get a tour and it's going to rain today. And so the small business owner uses Gusto co-founder to set up an automation that says, send me a text message every

time it's forecasted to rain today. And if it is, if I reply with yes, go ahead and email all of my guests that are coming in today to let them know that it's forecasted to rain and that they should, you know, wear something warm or bring an umbrella. Does that mean you're connecting your CRM to Gusto or how does it get all the information about customers? Yeah, so you can think of Gusto co-founder as a mashup between all the best parts of, for the tech folks out there, OpenClaw, Claude Co-work, and Gusto. So what about it is kind of like OpenClaught?

Like one of the primary features of Gusto Co-Founder is that you don't actually really interact with it through our website. you kind of, the first thing you do is you set up text messaging connection. So you communicate through text. You can communicate through Slack if you prefer. So basically, you can communicate with it and work with Gus or Co Founder anywhere that you're at. You don't have to be in front of a computer. Then we add in a bunch of connectors.

Those are MCP connectors. You can connect Gus or Co Founder to things like your Notion, your spreadsheets, things like that. And thirdly and finally, it comes out of the box with everything that Gusto already does for you, right? So it has knowledge of all of your people, what jobs they hold, how to contact them. It has knowledge of your payrolls, and it can take action on all of those things as well. And when you combine those three ingredients together, you get something really, really powerful for small business. If I'm a small business, and I just started talking to Gusto co-founder, what is it going to look like? Is it going to ask me,

like do you want to run payroll or suggest stuff? Yeah. So the first thing it does is you go through like a really short onboarding. And the first thing it actually does it asks you for your phone number. And then it kind of establishes a connection. You verify the code and everything. And now like you can like now it has a second second way to communicate with you, not just through the web app. But typically through the web app, when you log in there's like a, you know, you'll see a big chat input. You'll see a bunch of ideas. These ideas are like things that we think that Gus are co-founder can help you automate large parts of your business.

For your business? They're not personalized yet, but we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, definitely the idea is to like, like, where is your 401k or exactly? Right. So if you have like a lot of hourly employees, right, you have a different set of things like time sheet approvals and, and, and things like that, um, that probably wouldn't make as much sense if you're a tech startup where all of your employees are a salary, right?

So we obviously have all that data and we can kind of like customize the the out-of-the-box automations that come with Gus and co-founder. We could even do it, by the way, by like verticals, right? So, like, the processes that a dental practice has might be a little bit different than the process that a doctor's off, a medical doctor. Yeah, a content creator, right? And so you can get really hyper-personalized. And, like, the cool thing is that Gusto has a lot of this data to sort of, like, curate.

Like, here are the problems that either, we're already solving for you, that we can solve even more for you. Or here's some new things that, like, you might want to think about. How does it know my process? How does it learn about it? So you have to, you basically, you tell it, right? You say, like, here's how I run payroll every single week. I talked to this one business on gusto that is like a spa slash massage, right?

And a lot of times, this is actually very common. they track the work of their therapists, for example, in one system. Like, let's say, for example, mind-body. Whatever you use for booking, right? Yeah, for booking. That information is in one system. Then they actually export data from there. They put it into Google Sheets.

And then they have all these calculations, right? So in this case, they say, oh, if the massage therapist performed this many 60-minute massages and this many 90 minute massages, then we'll pay them this much for each amount, right? And if they upsell like hot stones or like CBD oil, they get $15 each time that they do that, right? So then they have to like calculate all that, right? And then also tips, right? Here's how we manage our tips.

We pull it and here's how it gets split up based on seniority and things like that. It's pretty complicated. And so they actually spend a lot of time in that step to figure out what to put into gusto, right? What's the bonus? what's the tips, what's the commission. And then when they do that, when they hit their run payroll in GUSA, as you probably know, it's very, very fast and very easy, right? But it's kind of what I call the work before the work that actually takes a lot of time.

And that sits in their processes and in their other systems. So, yeah, the business has to like kind of, kind of, a lot of times they actually have this documented in a Google doc somewhere, right? Because they give it to some employee. They say, like, just run this payroll for me. Here's the process that we run. All they do is copy paste that into Guster co-founder and just say, just do this for me every week, two days before my payroll is due.

And let me know, like, if before I, so I can have a chance to approve it. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, Not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment.

Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. Can you talk about other use cases? So running payroll, I feel like it already saves a lot of time. Can you give me more like intermediate to advanced use cases? I know every business is different. Yeah. What those small businesses can do in the first week to start actually saving hours. Yeah.

So hourly employees, like there's this kind of like wild goose chase that happens to a lot of our customers. And if you're a small business on Gusta, you have hourly employees and you have like, let's say in 20 employees, you actually have managers that are managing those hourly employees. Every single week, you go on this wild goose chase of like getting people to submit their timesheets. Right. So everyone's supposed to submit their timesheets by a certain time, you know, on Friday or whatever. And many people just don't do it. They don't clock out. And so you start slacking everybody. Hey, can you submit your time sheets? How much, how much? How much? much hours did this person work because they forgot the clock out and it says they work 24 hours,

which obviously not possible. There was a mistake there. And so that's one of the things that Gusto co-founder can actually do for you, right? Text on your behalf. On your behalf, because it connects to like text and Slack, right? So if your company is using Slack, Guso co-founder, not you as the human CEO, is now going on this wild goose chase for you. So you don't have to worry about it.

It's going to slack your manager and say, hey, employee A and C didn't submit their time sheets. Can you have them go submitted? And then once they've submitted, can you actually approve those timesheets? And then I'll check back with you in a day to see if it's all taken care of. Right. And at the end of the day, like, the CEO just gets a, you know, a status report from Gusto co-founder saying, hey, I'm tracking these three people to submit their timesheets.

If I don't hear back for them by Friday, I'll let you know. And that way you can kind of go ping them yourself. What about taxes, health insurance? Is that part of what Gusto co-founder does? Yeah, so a big part of it is also just kind of not just like helping them automate the business processes that a small business has, but also just being very proactive about things that the small business may not know that they should be doing or things that they should know about, right? So compliance is a huge aspect of what we do at gusto and there's a heavy compliance tax that businesses have to face, right? every month or a quarter, there's new tax laws that come up. And many of them actually apply to small businesses.

Like, you see them in your city, local, like, propositions that you have to vote on. And those kind of, like, translate to, like, new rules or laws that a business has to know about, right? And they're like tens of thousands of these. How can you expect a small business? To just catch up with everything. Yeah, to just know everything. And so the thing that, and like 90% of those probably don't even apply. apply to your business because a lot of them are like, if you're in this industry or if you,

if you have people who are above the salary or you have more than five employees. And so what Gusto can do is take everything that we know about that business and take all the compliance knowledge that we have. And then we proactively let the customer know, hey, this is something that is a new thing that you need to be thinking about. Right. And for many of those things, we also just have a button that's just like take care of it for me. Right.

You just click that button and Gus, the co-founder. if it's able to can just take care of it for the small business. So there is this proactive, like, here's things that you may want to know about that you haven't asked me about, right? And that's a big part of what Gus and a co-founder does as well. Does it suggest, because this is a big problem for me. I actually built an agent that runs through my QuickBooks and like analyzes everything that's going on in my revenue and then tells me like, hey, you could have been, you can be

optimizing your taxes with these tax strategies. Totally. And then I bring them to my CPA. Yeah. And she tells me whether it's good for you or not. Right. Is there something that Gusto Co-Farner can do? Like, as you said, identify some expenses that could be eligible for R&D.

Or say like, hey, I don't see your 401K. You could be saving a lot of money. Or you're overpaying for health insurance. Shall we move you on a different plan? Because they raised your prices by 20% again. Exactly. Yeah. That's what they do.

Yeah. I mean, you could even take it a step further. Like you can basically, you just have a chat with Guso co-founder, like, either through a web interface or maybe you just like have some free time. You just have that idea, right? And you just send Gusa co-founder a text message saying exactly what you did, right? And it'll like connect. You have to authorize it, of course, but it'll connect into QuickBooks or there's actually

a lot of expenses that businesses have on Gusto as well, right? Because like there's an expense reporting expense reimbursement feature that we have. and you tell Casa Co-Founder exactly what you just said. And then you could also just say, hey, write this report for me. And this is an email address of my CPA and email that report to the CPA so that they can kind of like get back to you. And when they reply, send me a text message that they replied and give me a summary of it. That's all possible with Gusa co-founder today.

If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl. podcast on your favorite platform, new episode every week on AI, careers, and how to not get left behind. So once it has access to all of this, and it already has access, what does it change in the way you run your business in like two or three years if you have this very powerful AI that knows everything? Will it be able to help you make strategic decisions and what type of decisions? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, just imagine like the amount of time savings that a business gets when they no longer have to like manually do the manual stuff. Yeah.

These like processes, right? They actually take a surprising amount of time. So I think first of all, like that frees up the small business owner to like think about things that are more important to their business, frankly, right? How do I grow this business? What are some new products? What are some new things I should be researching, right? And then also by the way, get more orange tax credit for it.

And so I think it just step one is just like it just gives. a little bit more breathing room to small businesses, a little bit more headspace to think about the things that they should be thinking a little bit more longer term about. But then also like with all the, you know, compliance knowledge, all the data that we have about the business, again, we can kind of like proactively let them know what things that they should maybe start to think about, right, based on an analysis of the business. Yeah, of like that industry, like what's going on in that industry and you're part of that industry. Right. might apply.

Yeah, yeah. So one automation, I think it might be actually one of our idea, our canned automation that comes out of the box is like do a weekly analysis of what my competitors are doing and send me a report over email or Slack, Slack me a report of what's going on with our competitors and give me three ideas of things that I can do to stay ahead. Yeah. Right. And Gus and CoFounder will do that for you.

You'll wake up, right? Yeah. And I love those automations. I have one for competitors and I also like running audit of like what I'm doing. Inside AI, inside my dogs and saying what can I optimize, what do you see? It's very repetitive. Exactly. Same with Gusto, right?

Right. What is, what am I repeating inside Gusto manually? Yeah. What could be automated? Right. Give me three ideas. Can you talk about your own experience inside Gusto, how AI has changed processes? Like, what process looks like two years ago?

what does it look like now? Something practical that small businesses can also copy from you. The way Kusto co-founder was built was really interesting. It was built over nine weeks with a team of five. But what was even more interesting about that was what we didn't do. And it was like we got rid of all meetings. We got rid of all documents. We got rid of like sprint planning, retroes. We got rid of Figma's and product roadmaps. And the only thing that is that we got rid of the only thing that we did was we kept a 24-7, we call a permissume. So we just kept the Zoom meeting going. And people would just, because the team is mostly remote, people would just be in that Zoom all day. And literally just talk to each other.

Oh, that's a cool idea. I've never heard of that before. It's so simple and so obvious. But it really changed, it blew my mind at how much we were able to get done, how quickly we moved. And it's not like it was an AI slot. thing. This is like the best code that I've written in my whole life, I think. How much of it is AI code? So it's, it's, it's most of it, I would say like 99% was, I would say, authored by AI. But like most of the time, I was actually one of the five builders on this personally. Yeah.

Most of the time is spent like reviewing, editing, making sure the quality is that is the thing that like you have to really be really, really careful of. The writing is now very, very trivial. And then it's reviewing, making sure it's actually what you want. And then editing and deleting, right? The cost to build now is so small that you can build really, really quickly. And if you don't build the wrong thing, just be really disciplined about deleting it, right? And trying something new.

That's actually much faster than like having all these meetings and documents and figmas. That made sense in the old world where the cost to build was so high. that you have to like measure like 10 times and then you cut once right because like the engineering resource the time to build is is like so you're so scarce on that resource that you have to like damn well make sure that you got it right that first time but I think that's no longer the case you can cut like a hundred different times and one of those cuts each each cut is really quick and like maybe one of those cuts like is really really good just take that one yeah how much of the code have you edited just just so when I understand like for engineering how good

is AI these days from your perspective? I'm probably changing about 30% of the code it writes. 70% is good. What was it like a year ago? And what will it be like in a year? What do you think? A year ago was like 80%. I was one of the first people that used cloud code when it came out.

And I thought it was cool, but like I could code faster than cloud code. Right. And now like in the last, I would say four or five months, it's gotten so much better. And you can move so much faster. And it's also just, by the way, it's so much more fun. You can build at this pace and you can just go from my idea to like landing something in production, like in the matter of like one hour. Like that's really fun. Can you talk to me about the most unerated AI use case for any small business that most people aren't talking about?

Like we talked about daily briefing, automating payroll. Is there something that you think can be transformational so that every business owner who's listening, to us now, just go deploy it and be fascinated by what it does. I know I keep talking about it, but I would say the, it's just the running, the running payroll. Like get that off your plate. Like basically don't have to, you know, do all of the work before the work. The exporting from your X system, the data manipulation in Google Sheets, then the importing into Gusto, like basically spend maybe 10 minutes with Gusto co-founder to like just tell it how you think about this process and then just have it run for you like a couple times.

And I think it's kind of like a gateway drug to like saying, okay, it did this thing. Yeah. And that's kind of how you get started, right? Like you just need to start with like one actual useful thing that it's done for you. And then you start to like realize, okay, I'm doing this thing. Like I could probably have it automate that. And I'd say the second most underrated thing. And it blew my mind as well from like.

setting up and using OpenClaught because it sounds so obvious. It's really just the ability to message from text. It turns out that this age-old technology, before we had smartphones, SMS, is like the best interface to run your business. It's very simple. And it's something about like it's just so easy to like get. I don't have to log into something. I don't have to open an app.

And it just replies to me in this way that, like, I text, you know, my friends and family. Yeah, it sounds crazy when you think about it as an advantage. Like, why can't open an app? But then once you're in the process, you really don't want to switch apps. You want to be in the same context. Exactly. Yeah.

For a small business owner in 2006, can you rank by how much AI transforms the following jobs, tasks? Bookkeeper. like just kind of high. From zero to 10. Zero not transformed, 10 super transformed with AI. I think bookkeepers, I mean, there's aspects of bookkeeping that is very mechanical

and like just formulaic. I think that gets transformed through AI. But there's actually a lot of bookkeeping, a lot of respect for accountants and bookkeepers that they do. That is more than just like what the name implies of like keeping the books, right? They do, they are oftentimes like proactive advisors, There's confidons and strategic partners to the small businesses.

And I think some of that stuff is hard to replace with AI. So from zero to ten? What would you say? Three. Three? So some basic stuff is transformed. Yeah, I think there's stuff that gets really transformed and stuff that like is like, it's hard to have AI, like, know that all the nuances of your business and history of like,

you know, they have deep, a business owner and a bookkeeper have deep relationships that go many, many years. Oh, yeah. You know what's interesting? And can you rank engineering from zero to 10? I just wonder, so what I'm seeing right now is this, how AI has impacted engineering and you say, you only edit 30% of the code.

I feel like it's moving into the knowledge workers markets, and we're going to see the same transformations for knowledge workers in the next couple of years. I'm not seeing it quite yet. Yes, it's helpful, but if I rank my job, con creation, yeah, like two, three, out of 10. It helps us a lot, but it's not like it's fully there. Yeah, totally. So what would you say about software engineers from 0 to 10? Well, it's probably a little bit ahead, but actually, like,

content creation is probably a lot like using AI. Content creation through AI is probably a lot like writing code through AI. If you just tell AI to like write the thing and just take it, like it sucks, like it's slopped, you know, like nobody's going to read it. Everybody knows is written by AI. Like, it's kind of like the same concept, but like, I, I, I, it's, I, I'd say like the difference of content creation is there's probably a little bit more taste in like what what is good content than like there's still a lot of taste in software engineering, but it's much more like defined, I think. Like what is a good engineer looks at a piece of software and they're like a piece of code and they're like, this is good code or this is bad code. I think there's like mostly universal. Yeah.

Yeah aspect. Whereas content is a little bit more like it's like there's such a variety of taste. Where was like it? No, we're ranking jobs. So I think engineering is, to me is, I mean, it's a 10. Like, it's trend. Engineering has transformed significantly for me personally. Like the way I spend my time is significantly different.

Now, it doesn't mean it, 10 doesn't mean it goes away. I think of anything, like engineers like myself, like have superpowers to do way more incredible things. Yeah. You go to the whole product in nine weeks with five people. Right. And so it's transforming in a way that like you have now superpowers. Right? Not that you're, not that engineers are absolutely. Interesting. Like I wonder when I will be able to say for congen creation,

10 out of 10, because now I'm a two or three. Okay, recruiter. Maybe like a six or seven. Um, there's an aspect of recruiting that I think is, uh, very, um, mechanical. You have like kind of these requirements. Um, you need to go search for people that fit those qualifications. And you need to sort of like do kind of some high level vetting of like,

do they actually fit versus just kind of what they say on LinkedIn? Go into pro. Yeah, yeah. Very manual. But I think there is a, you know, having spent a lot of time recruiting myself. And this is probably the most important part of recruiting is like sort of the relationship building to see if there's an actual fit between you and the company, both ways. Getting to know them, helping them to like kind of just this like, like,

personal aspects of recruiting that is really important. And I think that's hard for AI to replace. Totally. Customer support. Customer support is also, I think, very similar. There is a part of customer support where just a lot of mechanical things that are just kind of very common workflows that like the customer doesn't want to talk to a human and the human doesn't want to be doing the mindless things like day in and day out from 9 to 5

every single day. I think that that's class of customer support problems like goes away. So I'd say like 10 on that one. But there's a class of customer support problems that are much more complex, like the ones that like us oftentimes has to handle. You know, someone just got a tax notice in the mail from the IRS. They're really stressed out. They want to talk to a human. The human like can, you know, just walk them through. Assure them. Those situations you really want a human. You're like, oh. 100%. Yeah. Lawyer. I think seven. I think there's a lot of legal documents and I get these like 100 page documents and I just want to know like what's where are the critical like things that I need to know about and what's like kind of the template boilerplate

stuff right and it turns out like I've seen so many like documents legal documents I'm pretty sure lawyers that have some system where they say okay I want this like confidentiality agreement and it's just copy pasted this is like pretty standard stuff everybody kind of like mostly agrees with it. There's nothing, like, crazy out there. And then there's this one, like, section, if you're, if, if they're nice, it's like kind of in the appendix clearly laid out. But sometimes it's like buried within like all that template stuff.

I think AI can like suss all that out like really, really quickly. Cool. Okay. I have a few final questions. Finish this sentence. In 2030, every small business will have. In 2030, every small business will have a co-founder type agent that is running their business for them.

And they're really just focusing on why they started that business in the first place. What are they not doing at all? They're not doing any of the back office stuff that, like, they have to do to keep that business compliant and running, but they don't want to do. Does it help with strategic execution as well? It does, because, again, like, I think it'll free them up to think a little bit more strategically about their business. And then AI combined with, like, all the information that we have about that business, cannot proactively, like, let the customer know about, you know, strategic things that they should be thinking about, that they're not. Top three AI tools, every business owner should start using right now.

Well, obviously, Gusto co-founder, I'd say Claude code. Even for non-technical? Yes, because I think you can use Claudecode. And actually, at our company, we have a lot of folks in the finance team, the marketing team actually using CloudCode. When you talk to CloudCode, like, there's nothing in there that says it can only code for you, right? It can do... Just the name. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It isn't. Yeah, and some people have figured out the secret that like, if I ask Claude code to, um, go tell me the weather today,

it'll actually respond. Yeah. And number three. Voice dictation. So I use a whisper flow. And these days I don't really type. Uh, I just talk. And it's so much faster. Like, totally. It's kind of also one of those like musings that I have is like, like, like AI has accelerated so many things that like actually these like 10 things that you have for those on audio. I'm wiggling my fingers right now. These are the bottlenecks now. These are actually the bottlenecks.

And so if you're still typing, you're slowing yourself down. Oh yeah. It's funny how we go from one bottleneck to another. And some of them are really funny. It's like, hey, this is not the bottleneck. What? Exactly. Thank you so much.

I think it was really useful. Well, thanks for being such a great customer. I also write a newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools that I use, career strategies, and things I can't fit into a 60-minute podcast. It's free. Link is in the description.