Zero-employee AI Companies are Coming in 2025: Multicoin Capital

Whether the idea of zero-employee companies run by artificial intelligence (AI) excites or horrifies you, they are coming.

And they are coming soon, according to Kyle Samani, managing partner of venture capital firm Multicoin Capital.

“I think we will see the first attempts at this in 2025, and the first mildly successful ones in 2026,” Samani told The Defiant in an email interview.

Those companies may be managed and run by an AI agent, but their governance will likely be overseen by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). This refers to a blockchain-based governance model for a smart contract-controlled organization where participants vote on issues based on the number of governance tokens they possess.

“No AI is going to be perfectly autonomous,” Samani explained. “The AI will need guidance in terms of strategy. They will also need guidance in terms of getting things done,” he added, giving the example of “contracting with a construction company to build a house.”

With AIs prone to flights of fancy, there will have to be some human oversight of how it spends its limited amount of money, he said. “A DAO can provide that governance.”

The Human Factor

Human guidance will also be necessary “as inevitably the AI will make mistakes and probably exceed its context window,” he wrote in Multicoin’s Frontier Ideas for 2025 report. “Over time, I expect the degree of human guidance to decrease as AIs continue to improve self-correction and probably exceed their context windows.”

A context window refers to how much information the AI can “think” about at one time.

So, a zero-employee business will still need a boss of some sort. But a DAO does more than just provide governance and strategy, Samani said.

“Tokenizing the DAO allows for easy capital formation,” he told The Defiant. “There will need to be separation between the board of directors, though, and the people working to guide the AI on a more granular basis.”