Gusto’s head of technology says hiring an army of specialists is the wrong approach to AI
As founders plan for an increasingly AI-centric future, Gusto co-founder and head of technology Edward Kim said that cutting existing teams and hiring a bunch of specially trained AI engineers is “the wrong way to go.”
Instead, he argued that non-technical team members can “actually have a much deeper understanding than an average engineer on what situations the customer can get themselves into, what they’re confused about,” putting them in a better position to guide the features that should be built into AI tools.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Kim — whose payroll startup generated more than $500 million in annual revenue in the fiscal year that ended in April 2023 — outlined Gusto’s approach to AI, with non-technical members of its customer experience team writing “recipes” that guide the way its AI assistant Gus (announced last month) interacts with customers.
Kim also said that the company is seeing that “people who are not software engineers, but a little technically minded, are able to build really powerful and game-changing AI applications,” such as CoPilot — a customer experience tool that was rolled out to the Gusto CX team in June and is already seeing between 2,000 and 3,000 interactions per day.
