POV: from TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

“Ding.” A new red notification appears in your mailbox. You open the email to see a new applicant for your team’s business manager position—a candidate skilled in social media content creation. As you open the attached resume, you notice her recent career achievements. Her strengths are clear: multilingual abilities and exceptional productivity. You schedule a Zoom interview, and she seems like a great cultural fit, demonstrating resilience and understanding of your startup’s fast-paced environment. You’ve decided to hire her, a virtual candidate named AVA. Her only condition? She must work remotely.

Virtual Employee, Not Human? Why Not?

AVA, the AI Business Development Representative (BDR) launched by ARTISAN, can handle tasks like sending cold emails, responding to inquiries, and managing local sales leads. AVA can even draft LinkedIn posts, making her an increasingly realistic “hire.”

For startups developing applications, the solution may no longer require a full team. Instead of hiring a tech-focused co-founder or building a development team, you can simply leverage a service like Builder.ai. Provide instructions, and within minutes, the AI delivers a fully designed application wireframe. There’s no need to hire developers, UX/UI designers, or UX writers. What does this imply? Hiring platforms are now competing with custom LLM platforms, as tech startups increasingly choose tailored AI solutions over human employees.

AI Like AVA: Productivity Redefined

AVA and builder.ai offer companies unmatched productivity. Traditional HR tasks like hiring, onboarding, and terminations incur significant costs. By “hiring” AI, companies avoid both tangible and intangible expenses. With human hires, HR can’t always be confident about the candidate’s personality and job fit; however, AI operates within controllable parameters. A customized AI model can complete tasks for a two-week sprint in minutes. So, what will companies ultimately choose: human hires or AI services?

Why Not, but Not Yet.

It still seems unlikely that AI will fully replace humans. In terms of accuracy and maintenance, human oversight remains essential. This was clearly demonstrated at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, where several startups offering recruitment solutions were showcased. Among them, Qlay, co-founded by Japanese entrepreneurs, provides a headhunting service specifically for hiring engineers in Vietnam, helping conduct interviews and manage hiring processes. Similarly, CoffeeSpace helps startups find co-founders with the experience to launch and grow ventures—not just employees but leaders.

These solutions highlight the trend toward niche recruitment markets. For example, Korea’s super-app WANTED initially focused on hiring verified developers through recommendations. Over time, WANTED expanded to support startup hiring and even corporate recruitment for a variety of roles. Through super-apps, companies can screen candidates and build a diverse talent pool. However, as user numbers grow, early adopters who initially sought high-quality candidates now turn to specialized services like CoffeeSpace and Qlay alongside these broader apps.

Moving beyond the complexity of super-apps, companies increasingly adopt niche services aligned with the startup-style process of “defining a problem” and “proposing a solution” for faster recruitment. However, this again puts AI capabilities against human skills. There’s a stark difference between a service that can deliver exactly what’s needed in five minutes versus a traditional hire taking five weeks, followed by another five weeks of onboarding.

HR resources are notably substantial, especially in handling layoffs. The Newond service, created by Japanese entrepreneur Sumina Koiso, helps conserve HR resources in layoff processes. It simplifies what used to be managed manually through spreadsheets by offering an intuitive SaaS platform, allowing HR personnel to quickly check and process necessary information. While layoffs are never an easy topic, they remain an essential responsibility for HR departments.

Future Co-workers

Returning to the scenario of hiring AVA, we may soon see marketing messages urging us to “hire AI services.” For tech-based companies, adopting AI is easier due to the productivity levels it achieves—far beyond human capabilities. How, then, will the job market and HR evolve?

Services that compare and recommend multiple LLM (Large Language Model) solutions tailored to specific tasks could become competitors to traditional hiring platforms. So far, recruitment platforms focused on finding suitable human teammates, but in the future, startup leaders might hire LLMs for efficient work and recruit people who are a good “personality fit” with AI systems to support customization. After all, HR is about people, and people sometimes make emotional, illogical decisions that AI wouldn’t.

Currently, AI assists in screening applicants, but we’re moving toward an era where AI could become a colleague. Opinions on this shift are split—50/50. Our remaining option might be to accept AI as a teammate and learn how to work alongside it. While the synergy from human collaboration is appealing, AI’s “personality” tends to sync well with user needs.

Human-aligned synergy can easily break due to individuals’ autonomy and unique contexts influencing their decisions. However, AI actively interprets prompts and adapts to the user’s intentions, creating a responsive dynamic. Even if it’s somewhat illusory, AI’s alignment with the user’s ideas showcases LLMs’ universal adaptability.

For some, an inefficient process can hold immense value, while others place higher value on fast, tailored results. Ultimately, it’s a 50/50 split in how we value these outcomes.