'You just hired a million bad employees': How the brief tokenmaxxing era delivered the opposite of what it promised

tokens (Credit: Getty Images)

George Sivulka, the 27-year-old Stanford grad who founded and runs the AI enterprise startup Hebbia, has put his finger on the defining anxiety of the AI agent era: companies raced to deploy AI workforces without building any of the management infrastructure to run them.

Hebbia already serves clients including BlackRock, KKR, and the U.S. Air Force, giving Sivulka a front-row seat to how badly this is going inside real enterprises. His essay, published on a16z’s newsletter, argues that AI didn’t cut labor costs—it inverted the equation entirely: “for the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software.” And for all those CEOs who rushed headfirst into the agent era briefly known as “tokenmaxxing,” he offered a warning: “you just hired a million bad employees.”