Open Machine CEO Allie K. Miller talks to Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi about how she manages an autonomous workforce of 34 AI agents that handle product management and serve as specialized watchdogs analyzing her daily workflows.
How do you manage 34 agents? So, I only have to manage one, technically. Like the the whole thing that people should be doing right now. If you want to be the most up-to-date in 2026 in AI, what should you be doing? You should be building the system that allows for work and tasks and goals and whatever to be optimized. And so you should be thinking, how am I putting goals into this system? That's a really big one.
How am I connecting the system into context? So for the example with you, does it connect into YouTube and can it see all your previous things? Does it connect to your desktop and can it see all the upcoming shows that are not yet published on YouTube but that you're working on? Does it have access to your email so it can see all the conversations that you've had with your producers to see what shows are getting delayed or what topics are really hot if it's looking, you know, at Reddit or online forums to be able to see what's trending.
So, as you're thinking about giving it goals, gathering context, that is really the system that I'm building up. So I manage just my AI chief of staff,
You have an AI chief of staff?
I do.
You you pay that as a You can't, you can't hire him.
Oh my god.
I'm trying not I'm trying not to curse. I'm like after I realize like I'm not in a bar now, like I don't want to curse. That's F and awesome. That's just really cool.
I curse. And and I think what is cooler because any anyone can have that like single AI agent that's doing um, uh, wide tasks for them. I think where it gets interesting is that so Simon has six directs that are named after the Friends characters.
Simon's your Chief of staff?
Simon's the AI Chief of staff, yeah. And then underneath Simon there's Chandler, Joey, Monica, Rachel,
From friends for you folks out there, okay.
Yeah. Rachel does the client work because she handles clients very well. Monica is obviously operations. Phoebe is just like the wackadoo in the corner, just like dreaming. Ross is education, Joey's product, Chandler's marketing. And underneath them, they have like task-based agents.
The coolest person, AI person that I brought into the workforce, is not anyone that I've already named. I've named 33 now. The 34th is that I gave Simon an AI assistant. And so this AI assistant's entire job is just to be like a watchdog looking over the whole system going, that's wrong. That's a lot of friction. How come every single time we do this task, she keeps giving us feedback like this. Every time we do this task, how come we're missing memory on this?
And so it's like a gap analyzer. It's a watchdog. And I think what people are realizing now is that we used to hire jobs like marketing manager or producer or whatever. And because of AI, because of the margin, you can basically hire any AI agent you want. All of a sudden, you can hire for any role ever. Right? Maybe you're only getting 5% of the value.
Just like a shout out to my producers. I love you all. You're all, you are a human and you're all my favorite. Love you guys. Very nice.
But, but in addition to that like human producer, maybe that human producer wishes that they had this research watchdog that could look over all of your competitors or contemporaries to see what they're doing. They wouldn't be able to hire a human for that, right? Because maybe the revenue didn't make sense or uh the time for how long a human would take to do that task didn't make sense.
But now you can just bring that in. And then by the way, if there's no value behind it, you can spin it down. But all these things are fractions of a dollar to be able to test out. All of my agents run within my $200 a month subscription. So this is not like the stories, you know, tokenomics of like, oh my god, she's burning million. No. Everyone in my company, we spend about like six, 7k per head and all of the workforce stuff that I'm talking about is within that subscription.
