6 AI Employees Waiting to be Built

Hey y’all — on Y Combinator’s job board for their portcos you’ll find something interesting.

A startup called Firecrawl has listed two roles… specifically for AI employees:

It’s of course possible they’re not the first to do this, and it may just be a fun marketing stunt, but it made me think…

What other AI employees are out there, yet to be built?

The parent company of Devin (the AI engineer) recently raised at a $4 billion valuation, and the legal AI assistant Harvey is reportedly raising at $5 billion.

Here are 6 more you could create (not including the two that Firecrawl is looking to pay/hire):

6 AI Employees Waiting to be Built

Supply Chain Optimizer

• What it might do → Manage logistics, predict inventory needs, and optimize routes while integrating with existing tools and collaborating closely with customers’ warehouse teams.

• Why it would work → Supply chain is a gigantic, $1T+ market that deals with tons of inefficiencies, crises, and regulations. If built at the right altitude, it could deliver the same value to multiple huge industries (ecom, manufacturing, retail).

Clinical Trial Coordinator

• What it might do → Manage trial protocols, track participant data, and ensure regulatory compliance. Heavy on integrations.

• Why it would work → Drug development is going to explode over the next few years. AI will help create real breakthroughs. There won’t be enough humans to unlock true scale in terms of the number of trials that can be safely and compliantly run.

Cybersecurity Monitor

• What it might do → Autonomously detect threats, patch vulnerabilities, and generate alerts.

• Why it would work → As a larger percentage of code is written by AI (Microsoft says this is already 30% for them), hallucinations may cause the number of bugs that make it to production to increase. Additionally, AI will be used aggressively by hackers to penetrate legacy codebases in new ways. The need for cybersecurity protections should increase.

Manufacturing Supervisor

• What it might do → Monitor production lines, predict maintenance needs and issues, optimize team and machine workflows. This one will be heavy on computer vision.

• Why it would work → You might have seen China’s new autonomous and pitch black factories. But even factories that are still managed by humans have workflows that will need to be optimized. Facilities management can likely be done better by an AI that sees everything at once than a human who, at best, is trying to pay attention to a bunch of cameras.

Agricultural Advisor

• What it might do → Analyze soil and crop health, monitor and predict yields far ahead of each harvest, recommend crop rotation, orchestrate autonomous tractors and other equipment.

• Why it would work → Farms are stretched thinner than ever. Especially smaller farms. The industry has been in a consolidation phase for years due to regulatory pressure and international money flooding in. Anything that can be deflationary in this space will be jumped on.

Patent Analyst

• What it might do → Proactively identifies opportunities for you to set up intellectual property protections, and then executes them on your behalf.

• Why it would work → When you’re starting a startup, you generally skip pursuing intellectual property protections because it’s expensive, your product may change, and it takes a long time. Oh, and it’s expensive. Some of these expenses can’t be removed by removing a lawyer from the process, but others can.

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