Every Public Company Will Eventually Have an AI Workforce
The workforce of the future won’t consist solely of employees. It will include AI agents working alongside humans.
For decades, investors have evaluated public companies using familiar metrics. How many employees does the company have? How quickly is it hiring? What is its revenue per employee? How productive is its workforce?
Those questions aren’t going away.
But I believe they’re about to become incomplete.
The workforce of the future won’t consist solely of employees and contractors. It will also include AI agents operating alongside human teams. Not a single chatbot or a handful of software tools, but thousands of specialized AI agents performing work across nearly every function of the enterprise.
These AI agents will write software, analyze financial statements, conduct research, prepare presentations, review contracts, respond to customers, monitor supply chains, generate marketing campaigns, and assist with countless other tasks that today consume human time.
This is more than automation. It represents the emergence of an entirely new category of worker.
As a result, I believe the way we evaluate public companies will fundamentally change.
Today, companies report headcount. Tomorrow, they may report the size of both their human workforce and their AI workforce. Investors may begin comparing companies based not only on revenue per employee, but also on revenue per combined human and AI worker. Analysts may develop entirely new measures of productivity that reflect how effectively an organization integrates people with intelligent software.
The companies that build the best human-AI organizations could dramatically outperform their competitors.
Historically, scaling a business required hiring more people. More customers meant more salespeople. More products meant more engineers. More growth meant more managers.
That relationship is beginning to change.
Tomorrow, a company may be able to double its output while increasing human headcount only modestly because much of the incremental work is performed by AI agents. Organizations will become more scalable, more efficient, and capable of moving at speeds that were previously impossible.
The winners won’t necessarily be the companies with the largest AI budgets.
They’ll be the companies that best integrate humans and AI into a single, highly productive organization.
That’s an important distinction.
AI will not replace leadership. If anything, it will make leadership even more valuable. Human judgment, creativity, capital allocation, strategic decision-making, relationship building, and trust will become increasingly important as routine work is delegated to AI.
The future belongs to organizations where humans do what humans do best and AI does what AI does best.
This shift also raises interesting questions for investors.
Will annual reports eventually disclose the number of AI agents deployed across the business? Will analysts ask management about AI productivity during earnings calls? Will investors compare companies based on the effectiveness of their AI workforce just as they compare operating margins and revenue per employee today?
I believe the answer is yes.
Every major technological revolution has introduced new ways to measure corporate performance. The Industrial Age emphasized manufacturing efficiency. The Information Age rewarded software and intellectual property. The AI Age will require investors to understand how effectively companies deploy intelligent systems alongside human talent.
That’s why I don’t believe AI should be viewed as just another software tool.
It is becoming part of the workforce itself.
The public company of the future won’t simply employ people. It will manage an integrated workforce of humans and AI agents, each contributing their unique strengths to create a more productive, more scalable, and ultimately more valuable enterprise.
The companies that recognize this shift early may define the next generation of market leaders.