Disrupt 2026 panel: hiring when AI is a co-founder

The framing here is not that AI agents are a future threat to startup hiring, but that they are already changing the first question a founder asks. The article's central distinction is between "Who do we hire next?" and "What work needs to be done — and is a person the best way to do it?" Engineering, customer support, research, and operational work can increasingly be handed to systems that complete multistep tasks rather than merely assist an employee.

The three panelists bring different vantage points to that question. Josh Reeves sits at Gusto, which supports more than 500,000 companies, giving him a wide view of how small businesses actually staff up. Michelle Johnson comes from Insight Partners, where she works with CEOs and CROs on go-to-market strategy and AI implementation, and previously helped scale Flock Safety from less than $1 million to $90 million in ARR — so her version of the question is what human revenue teams should concentrate on. John Koelliker, through Leland, sits at the intersection of talent and AI, which points at how hiring priorities and skill development may shift.

The article does not resolve where the line should fall. It lays out the questions — who checks an agent's work, who makes the final decision, what happens when an agent gets something wrong, and which responsibilities are too important to delegate — and argues that judgment, ownership, and the ability to direct both people and machines may define the early employee more than task volume does. For founders, the practical test is likely to be which responsibilities they are willing to hand over, and which they keep precisely because someone has to be accountable.