Gusto, Insight Partners and Leland to tackle AI agents as early startup hires at Disrupt 2026

Gusto, Insight Partners and Leland take on the AI teammate question

TechCrunch has announced a Builders Stage session for its Disrupt 2026 conference, titled "Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder," focused on what changes when AI agents take over work that would once have gone to a startup's first employees. Speaking are Josh Reeves, CEO and co-founder of payroll and HR platform Gusto; Michelle Johnson, senior vice president at Insight Partners; and John Koelliker, CEO and co-founder of career platform Leland. The conference runs October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, and TechCrunch expects more than 10,000 founders, investors and operators to attend.

Agents are joining the earliest teams

According to TechCrunch, AI agents are starting to handle engineering, customer support, research and operational work that early-stage companies would previously have assigned to people. These systems can complete multistep tasks on their own rather than merely assisting someone through them, which changes the math behind early hiring.

The publication frames this as a shift in the founding question itself: instead of deciding which person to hire next, founders can first ask what work actually needs doing and whether adding an employee is the right way to get it done.

That delegation creates its own problems, TechCrunch notes. Someone still has to review an agent's output, make the final call, absorb the consequences when an agent errs, and decide which responsibilities should never be handed over in the first place.

Three angles on one shift

Each speaker brings a different vantage point. Reeves leads Gusto, which serves more than 500,000 companies across payroll, benefits, compliance, onboarding, HR and retirement, and has layered AI onto more than ten years of serving small businesses. That puts the company close to the day-to-day decisions of how growing teams staff up.

Johnson advises CEOs and chief revenue officers across North America and Europe on go-to-market strategy, revenue organizations and AI implementation at Insight Partners, and previously helped scale Flock Safety from under $1 million to $90 million in annual recurring revenue. Her version of the question targets the revenue organization: if agents can research prospects, draft outreach and analyze customer data, what should the humans on a revenue team concentrate on, and how does that reshape the skills startups should prioritize when hiring?

Koelliker runs Leland, which TechCrunch describes as a career and talent platform for the AI era, and previously held product and growth roles at LinkedIn, Curated and Uber.

The work that stays human

Some of a startup's most consequential decisions do not compress neatly into a workflow, TechCrunch argues: understanding what customers truly need, challenging a weak strategy, taking the blame when something fails, building relationships, and recognizing when the data is pointing in the wrong direction. As agents grow more capable, those responsibilities may matter more rather than less.

In this framing, the early employee's role becomes defined less by how many tasks they complete and more by judgment, ownership and the ability to direct both people and machines.

Why it matters

The session previews a structural change in how companies are built. If agents can absorb engineering, support and operational load from day one, founding teams may shrink or reshape — fewer people hired to execute tasks, more hired for judgment and accountability. That touches hiring plans, skill priorities and org design across the startup ecosystem, and it explains why a firm like Insight Partners is already coaching portfolio companies on where agents fit. For founders, the practical prompt from the announcement is to audit the work before opening a job requisition: decide what must be owned by a person, what can be delegated to an agent, and who stays accountable when the agent gets it wrong.