Founder Who Replaced 38 Employees With AI Reports Best Year Ever at $2.17 Per Hour

AUSTIN—Marcus Webb, 34, founder and chief executive of logistics software startup Conveyance AI, has confirmed to investors that the company is on track for its best year ever, which Webb has privately calculated is proceeding at an effective rate of $2.17 per hour.

Webb eliminated his 38-person team in March at a projected savings of $2.1 million annually, replacing them with a fleet of AI agents he described in a LinkedIn post as "the operating system of the post-labor company." The agents — a mix of licensed reasoning models, a custom scheduling tool, and what Webb's infrastructure logs describe as "three instances of the same model running different framings of the same task" — have required, by Webb's own time-tracking data, an average of 94 hours of weekly human supervision to maintain the output the team produced in 40.

Webb has not taken a day off since April 4. He relocated his bed to his office in May to reduce agent downtime during his commute.

Through five months of autonomous operations, the projected $2.1 million in savings has yielded $340,000 in documented efficiency gains and $1.8 million in fees paid to three consulting firms Webb retained to investigate why the agents keep doing that.

"The unit economics are extremely favorable," Webb told The Artifice from his office at 11:40 p.m. on a Thursday. "The agents don't get sick. They don't have opinions. They don't ask about equity."

Conveyance AI's Series A closed in June at a $47 million valuation. Webb described the fundraise as a full validation of his autonomous-operations thesis. The deck was prepared by an AI agent, reviewed by Webb over a 14-hour session, and revised by Webb when the agent described the company's core product as "a logistics solution for logistics."

A notification arrived. He returned to his screen.

"Once you set it up," Webb said before disconnecting, "it basically runs itself."