What happens when your first 10 hires aren’t people at all? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 , happening October 27–29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, we’re digging into the new wave of startups replacing or augmenting early employees with AI agents. Think outbound sales, billing, and customer support — automated from day one.

This panel, hosted on the Builders Stage , features a mix of technical founders and seasoned operators who are actually doing it, debating where the line between human and machine should be drawn — and how far is too far.

Meet the speakers

Caleb Peffer , founder and CEO of Firecrawl , is helping over 350,000 developers (and companies like Shopify and Zapier) plug AI directly into the live web. His dev-first platform is already reshaping how AI agents intera

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