Jay Hack built CodeGen, one of the first autonomous coding agent companies, got acquired by ClickUp, and now runs AI across the whole organisation. I sat down with him for The AI Revolution Show and came away with a clearer picture of what agent adoption actually looks like when someone is doing it properly.
Rather than talking about it.
ClickUp's CEO has been public about agents outnumbering employees inside the company. Jay thinks that number is probably understated by now. His point is that the ratio misses the point anyway. The better question is what percentage of day-to-day work is done autonomously and how much time that frees up for things that actually matter.
The adoption path he's seen follows a consistent order. Autocomplete first, so frictionless people don't even think about it. Then a sidebar where you give an agent a task and watch it work. Then asynchronous agents run in the background while you're doing something else. Each step makes the next easier. You can't skip to the third without going through the first two.
The way they drove adoption internally is worth stealing. When someone publicly tags an agent in a channel and gets back a useful answer, everyone watching can see it happen. The demonstration is the adoption mechanism. No training programme needed.
On hiring, he pushes back on the question I think most founders are asking right now, which is: before we hire a human, can an agent do this? His answer is that this frames it wrong. When you introduce automation the scope of what you can attempt expands. ClickUp is hiring more people, not fewer, because their ambitions have grown with the capability.
Practical starting point for anyone who hasn't moved yet:
Open a chat client, map out what you actually do each day, and ask it which of those things could be automated.
Then spend an hour walking an agent through the process and ask it to build an automated version. It won't be perfect. It will get better.
The full conversation is on The AI Revolution Show. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
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