Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett is the latest high-profile CEO to tell staff to make a case for why roles can’t be done by an AI Agent first before hiring.
AI Agents are autonomous intelligent systems performing specific tasks without human intervention.
Earlier this year Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees in a memo that they’ll have to show jobs can’t be done by artificial intelligence before asking for more headcount and resources.
In February 2025, Graham Donoghue, CEO of Forge Holiday Group, predicted that 2025 would be the year of the AI Agents.
Bartlett decided to put the power of AI Agents to the test at his own company – FlightStory – to see what difference they made over a 60-day period.
He said the two-month ‘competition’ involved every team in the business and was so successful it resulted in $1.18m (£860k) of efficiency savings and unlocked 65,284 hours of productivity.
The 32-year-old host of The Dairy of a CEO podcast said the findings would help redesign their entire business model going forward.
Bartlett said the $1.18m saved by automating the routine processes his staff didn’t like doing would be reinvested in new projects, additional hires and their continued global expansion.
He said: “This wasn’t an AI competition it was about inspiring a mindset shift.
“Making change fun, exciting and going on the journey of change together. Yes we saved money and team time, but the most wonderful thing to see was how excited, fired up, engaged and happy people were to be learning something new that ultimately made their lives easier and made them more capable.”
Bartlett has described AI Agents as the ‘biggest professional shift of our lives’ and said they needed to be viewed as co-workers rather than just tools.
During the period of the 60-day AI competition every team was given support to integrate AI agents into their workflow and anyone wanting to make a hire first had to make the case in writing on why the role couldn’t be done by an AI Agent.
Bartlett said hiring criteria would now focus more on traits useful in an AI world ie: mindset, adaptability, initiative, creativity, and taste.
FlightStory teams created 48 AI tools during the 60-day competition, with the winning team landing a $20,000 prize.
In April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told staff wanting to increase headcount that they must first demonstrate why the work can’t be done by AI.
In a far-reaching memo he also said that the staff’s use of artificial intelligence would form a key part of their performance reviews.
The memo sparked a widespread debate with Jeetu Patel, EVP and chief product officer at Cisco, saying the time for scepticism towards AI was over.
He said: “This note from Tobi to his employees at Shopify isn’t much different from what we have been discussing at Cisco for the past several months.
“The reality is that the time for us being rationally sceptical of AI has now come to an end. It is now irrational to not be going full speed in AI adoption.”
In February 2025, Graham Donoghue told The Dealmaler Uncut podcast that 2025 would be the year of the AI Agents.
“We are using a lot in our business,” he said. “We have agent handling conversations with owners and guests. We use AI in a lot of marketing technology. It gives us a real competitive advantage.
“We’ve just gone through an AI maturity study, where we’ve tried to work out where are we? What does good look like? How do we get to superpower / world class?”