Chatbase 創辦人 Yasser Elsaid 承認看錯 AI 時代精簡團隊策略
A tech founder says he was 'pretty wrong' about lean teams in the AI era
Chatbase 創辦人 Yasser Elsaid 承認自己對 AI 時代精簡團隊的判斷「相當錯誤」，並計劃在未來六個月把現有 40 人團隊擴大一倍。他表示，Chatbase 工程師目前約 90% 的工作是產品工作，包括研究、與客戶交談和把想法整理成供 Agent 編碼的規格。他認為模型仍未能完全獨立，仍需人類決定開發方向、提供指引並確認成果能否滿足客戶需要。
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As some companies race to use AI to shrink their teams, one startup founder is going against the grain by planning to hire more people.
Yasser Elsaid, the founder of customer-service AI startup Chatbase, said the company now has 40 employees and plans to double its team over the next six months.
"I might have been wrong about building with a lean team in the age of AI," Elsaid wrote in a post on X this month.
Elsaid previously embraced smaller teams. In a LinkedIn post in January, he said Chatbase, a San Francisco-based startup that lets companies build AI agents for customer service and support, had stayed at 17 full-time employees for much of its first three years, with most hires in engineering.
However, in comments sent to Business Insider, Elsaid said that he now considers his bet on lean teams "pretty wrong."
"I think it's a big mistake for founders to live in a future that doesn't exist yet," he said.
Elsaid said that more capable coding models, including Anthropic's latest Claude model Opus 5.5, initially made him think Chatbase could get by with fewer people.
But Elsaid said that this conclusion only holds if a startup keeps the same roadmap it had before AI. Rather than accept that code had become a commodity, he decided Chatbase should set its sights higher.
"If building is easier, build harder things," he said. "Most moats in software come from someone doing something hard for longer, and being right. That hasn't gone away."
'Not fully independent'
That view runs counter to a broader push toward AI-powered lean teams.
Block cut nearly half its workforce in February, with CEO Jack Dorsey saying AI and "smaller and flatter teams" were changing how companies are built.
Coinbase, meanwhile, cut 14% of staff in May, citing engineers' ability to ship in days what once took teams weeks; it is now testing smaller AI-native pods and "one person teams."
The same logic has powered the "tiny teams" startup trend: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted a one-person billion-dollar company, while Cursor grew from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under a year with fewer than 50 employees, according to private market research platform Sacra.
But Elsaid said the best models are not yet independent enough to replace people. They still need humans to decide what to build, give them direction, and make sure the result works for customers, he said.
"Code is largely right or wrong: it does what you want or it doesn't," Elsaid said. "But what to build, how it should work and what the experience should feel like is what makes your product different."
He estimated that about 90% of Chatbase engineers' work is now product work: researching, talking to customers, forming an opinion, and turning that into a specification an agent can code.
The rest requires engineers who can understand the code and make sure different AI agents are not working against each other, he said.
Chatbase is also hiring customer-facing staff, particularly in sales and customer success, he said, because enterprise customers still need to be heard and persuaded.
The models are "extremely smart and capable, but not fully independent," he added. "Maybe that changes and one day you won't need humans in the building process at all. But that isn't today."
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Thibault is a tech reporter at Business Insider's London office.He covers the intersection of technology and work — focusing on AI’s impact on the workplace, job and cognitive skills, and how economic changes are affecting careers.Before moving to the trending team, Thibault covered international affairs, including the Russia-Ukraine war, tensions in the South China Sea, and Russia’s economy on the news desk.He has previously worked at the Daily Express and held internships at Agence France-Presse, Politico Europe, and Factal.Il parle français. Habla español.Email Thibault at tspirlet@businessinsider.com, connect with him on LinkedIn @ThibaultSpirlet, or follow him on X @ThibaultSpirlet and BlueSky @thibaultspirlet.bsky.social.Expertise
- AI and the future of work
- Job and cognitive skills in the AI economy
- Workforce trends
- First-person, "as-told-to" stories
來源：Business Insider Tech · businessinsider.com