Replit's CEO thinks AI will end soul-crushing corporate work — and bring entrepreneurship inside big companies
Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images
- Replit CEO Amjad Masad said AI lets workers act like entrepreneurs inside big companies.
- He said modern org charts alienate employees, cutting them off from seeing the impact of work.
- Masad said people lose pride when they can't see the results of their work.
Amjad Masad thinks the modern workplace is broken — and he believes AI can help fix it.
The Replit founder and CEO says traditional corporate work has become deeply alienating, with employees siloed into narrow roles where ideas die in backlogs.
"One thing that I found extremely depressing is how atomized and siloed people are," Masad recently said on the "Possible" podcast with Reid Hoffman. "People become sort of cogs in the machine. And I don't think that is conducive to the human spirit."
AI, he said, is starting to reverse that dynamic by letting people inside big companies build, test, and ship ideas themselves — without waiting for engineering approval.
Masad's bet is that AI agents can automate much of the repetitive, standardized work that dominates corporate life — documentation, internal tools, workflows — freeing employees to think and act more like entrepreneurs.
"As the boring things, the automated things actually are taken care of by machines, we're left to be more entrepreneurial and more creative," he said.
Masad isn't the only tech leader seeing huge potential in deploying AI agents.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said AI agents can already handle work typically done by junior employees, Microsoft's AI platform product lead Asha Sharma has said they could flatten corporate hierarchies, and McKinsey's CEO Bob Sternfels has said the firm is already deploying 25,000 AI agents alongside its human workforce.
On the "Possible" podcast, Masad pointed to one case, where an employee at a big real estate marketplace had an idea to improve how buyers were routed to agents, but couldn't get engineering resources.
In the past, Masad said, "the idea is dead," but now, the employee built a working routing algorithm himself using Replit, an AI-powered coding platform that lets users build and deploy software without traditional engineering support.
"He built a new routing algorithm that drove tens of millions of dollars, if not hundred million dollars, to the business," Masad said.
The result wasn't just business impact — the employee was promoted repeatedly and now helps guide the company's AI strategy at the board level, he said.
Masad sees this as a form of entrepreneurship inside a large business where domain experts — not just engineers — can turn insight into execution.
That shift, he said, restores meaning to work by reconnecting people with the outcomes they create.
"Humans are fundamentally creative," he added.
If AI succeeds at removing drudgery rather than replacing judgment, Masad believes corporate jobs could become less soul-crushing and far more human.