Learn about AI in HR at Disrupt 2026

The first few hires at a startup can define the company. But increasingly, not every new capability requires a new employee. AI agents are beginning to take on engineering, customer support, research, and operational work that would previously have been assigned to early team members. For founders, that creates a new question before they even open a job requisition: What should people own, and what should be delegated to AI? This sessionwill explore how early-stage companies are building teams where humans and AI agents work alongside each other — and how founders can do that without sacrificing speed, accountability, or culture. For an early-stage company, every hire is a trade-off between capability, cost, and speed. AI agents add another option. Engineering tasks, customer support, and operational work can increasingly be delegated to systems capable of completing multistep tasks rather than simply helping an employee complete them. That gives founders an opportunity to rethink what their earliest teams should actually look like. Instead of automatically asking, “Who do we hire next?,” the starting question can become: “What work needs to be done — and is a person the best way to do it?” That distinction matters. Giving work to an AI agent can help a small team move faster, but it also introduces new questions around ownership. Who checks the work? Who makes the final decision? What happens when an agent gets something wrong? And which responsibilities are too important to delegate? Those are no longer theoretical questions for companies building AI-native startups. Josh Reevessees the shift across a particularly broad customer base.Gustosupports more than 500,000 companies across payroll, benefits, compliance, onboarding, HR, and retirement, while combining AI with more than a decade of experience serving small businesses. That puts Gusto close to the day-to-day realities of companies deciding how — and when — to grow their teams. Michelle Johnsonbrings the startup scaling perspective. AtInsight Partners, she works with CEOs and CROs across North America and Europe on go-to-market strategy, revenue organizations, and AI implementation. Before joining Insight, she helped scale Flock Safety from less than $1 million to $90 million in ARR as an early sales and revenue operations leader. Her perspective raises a different set of questions. If AI agents can research prospects, prepare outreach, analyze customer data, or manage parts of the sales process, what should the human members of a revenue team concentrate on? And how does that change the skills a startup should prioritize when hiring? John Koellikersits directly at the intersection of talent and AI. As CEO and co-founder ofLeland, a career and talent platform for the AI era, he brings experience across product and growth roles at LinkedIn, Curated, and Uber, alongside building a company focused on how people develop and apply skills in a changing labor market. Some of the most important decisions inside a startup are difficult to reduce to a workflow. Who understands what customers really need? Who challenges a bad strategy? Who takes responsibility when something fails? Who builds relationships, motivates a team, or decides when the data is pointing in the wrong direction? As AI agents become more capable, those questions could become more important, not less. The role of an early employee may increasingly be defined by judgment, ownership, and the ability to direct both people and machines — rather than simply completing a larger volume of tasks. That has implications across the startup ecosystem. Early-stage companies have always competed on their ability to do more with less. AI agents could take that principle much further. But a company is more than the sum of the tasks it completes. Founders still need people who can make decisions, take responsibility, understand customers, and create the culture around which a business grows. The challenge is deciding where those people create the greatest value — and where an agent might do the job instead. That’s the conversation Josh Reeves, Michelle Johnson, and John Koelliker will take on at Disrupt. Join them on theBuilders Stage, and explore what happens when AI doesn’t just help your startup — but also becomes part of the team. Then continue the conversation with 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators across Moscone West, the Expo Hall, Startup Battlefield 200, and countless networking opportunities.