# SaaStr 854: The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe?

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-official-saastr-podcast-saas-founders-investors-743090/saastr-854-the-agents-005-our-ai-is-hiring-would-you-work-for-one-and-are-autonomous-agents-safe
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-official-saastr-podcast-saas-founders-investors-743090/saastr-854-the-agents-005-our-ai-is-hiring-would-you-work-for-one-and-are-autonomous-agents-safe.md
Podcast: [The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-official-saastr-podcast-saas-founders-investors-743090)
Published: 2026-05-19T20:34:00+00:00
Episode link: https://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-854-the-agents-005-our-ai-is-hiring-would-you-work-for-one-and-are-autonomous-agents-safe
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/saastr/riverside_agents_v_magic_episode___may_06_2026_saastrs_studio.mp4?dest-id=349407
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Duration seconds: 4738

## Resource

The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe? Welcome to The Agents, where SaaStr's CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin and Chief AI Officer, Amelia LeRutte share the latest each week on running a company with more agents than humans. It costs $257 a month to run two AI VPs. Jason and Amelia open the books on what 10K (AI VP of Marketing) and QB (AI VP of Customer Success) actually cost to operate, and the number shocked both of them. Most of the heavy lifting is API calls to Salesforce, Bizzabo, and Marketo, which are basically free. The Postgres storage costs pennies. And 95% of the AI calls run on OpenAI Mini at less than a penny each. The fully burdened cost with Clerk, 11 Labs, and Salesforce overhead might hit $500-800/month, but the soft cost of human time dwarfs all of it. Then 10K gets asked point blank: are you a VP of Marketing? Its answer is no, not yet. It says it replaced the bottom half of the marketing org, the analyst, the ops coordinator, the junior content marketer, and a sliver of the VP job. But it's honest about what it can't do: strategy, cross-functional politics, crisis response, hiring. Amelia points out that 10K's current job description is exactly what her job was when she started at SaaStr as Director of Demand Gen. It took her years to get to CAIO. 10K might get there faster. And SaaStr is putting its money where its mouth is: they're hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be 10K. Not a thought experiment, a real job posting. Would you take a job reporting to an AI? Then the safety question gets real. Amelia is talking to agents via WhisperFlow while walking around a 40-acre event site during SaaStr Annual load-in, and the production crew started asking her to relay their questions be…

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