The Autonomous Business OS
Behind The Scenes of the First Autonomous Business
Welcome to NEW ECONOMIES, your go-to newsletter on the latest technology trends that are transforming our world.
Our work is primarily reader-supported, with additional support from select sponsors. Stay on top of the latest trends and help sustain our work by subscribing—free or paid. Your money goes directly towards reporting costs.
THIS WEEK’S COLLABORATION
This week, we are excited to welcome back Amos Bar-Joseph, CEO and Co-founder of Swan as our guest contributor. Swan powers GTM teams with AI agents that turn anonymous website traffic into qualified pipeline—autonomously and intelligently. Try it out now.
Throughout this edition, we discover ‘The Autonomous Business OS’ — the hacks on growing from $0 to $30M ARR with just three founders and a swarm of AI agents. No employees, no bloated teams.
THE AUTONOMOUS BUSINESS OS
At Swan AI, we're building towards $30M ARR with just three founders and a swarm of AI agents. No employees. No bloated teams.
Just intelligent leverage.
We call this playbook 'The Autonomous Business OS'.
But here's what we've learned after 120% MRR growth for 3 consecutive months: The difference between autonomous businesses and traditional companies isn't the AI—it's how fast you can make decisions.
Most founders think they're competing on AI features, talent, or funding.
They're wrong.
ESCAPING THE INEVITABLE BLOAT TRAP
OpenAI has 10,000x our engineering capacity. Salesforce has 100x our sales team. HubSpot has infinite marketing budget.
And yet, we just hit 120% MRR growth for 3 consecutive months. With only 3 people. In a market where huge incumbents and 20+ funded AI SDR companies are throwing millions at the same problem.
Here's the brutal truth: They can out-engineer you. Out-market you. Out-sell you. Out-hire you.
The only thing they can't do? Make decisions faster than you. Because every hire they make slows them down.
More people = more processes.
More processes = more approvals.
More approvals = decision paralysis.
Their strength becomes their weakness.
While they're scheduling alignment meetings, you're shipping. While they're getting legal approval, you're iterating. While they're syncing stakeholders, you're already pivoting to what works.
DECISION VELOCITY BY DESIGN
That's why we're building Swan AI as an autonomous business—not just eliminating hierarchies, but replacing them with intelligence networks.
Traditional companies scale by adding people. We scale by adding AI agents. The result? 3 founders operating like 30-person departments. We're not just optimizing for decision velocity—we're architecting an entirely new operating system that turns intelligence into execution speed.
We stripped away every layer of traditional business architecture and found the core: 3 new functions that can scale a business indefinitely with intelligence, not headcount.
Revenue Creator, Product Creator, and Agent Creator.
Revenue Creator owns the entire customer lifecycle—from demand generation to pipeline conversion to customer success and upsells. One person, one metric: sticky revenue growth.
Product Creator doesn't write code—they orchestrate AI developers to ship features and infrastructure at enterprise velocity, focusing purely on product/tech decisions that drive sticky usage growth.
Agent Creator builds the intelligence backbone that powers everything—crafting bespoke internal agents that empower the revenue and product creators to scale with intelligence, not headcount.
The real innovation is the Agent Creator function. While Revenue and Product creators execute, the Agent Creator ensures they scale with intelligence, not headcount. Their superpower isn't coding—it's identifying friction points and building bespoke internal agents to eliminate them. They require a unique skill set: product intuition to spot leverage points, low/no-code proficiency to build fast, data fluency to measure impact, and an obsession with internal automation.
This isn't theory—it's how Swan AI actually operates. Three founders, three functions, zero FTEs. I handle the entire revenue engine. Niv ships product at enterprise speed. Ido builds the AI backbone that powers both of us to operate like departments.
RETURN-ON-MANAGEMENT OPTIMIZATION
Compare this to traditional SaaS companies: They split revenue across 6 departments —marketing, SDR, AE, CS, support, ops. Each with managers, directors, VPs. Product becomes engineering, design, product management, DevOps. What we do with 3 people, they need 50+ to accomplish with endless meetings between silos.
Here's why: Every manager you add doesn't just slow decisions—they multiply decision friction exponentially. 50 people need 12 managers. 12 managers need 3 directors. 3 directors need 1 VP. Suddenly, a simple product change requires 16 people and 8 meetings. We call this negative Return on Management (ROM)—where every layer of oversight reduces actual output.
This is the hidden killer of decision velocity—ROM declines as you scale, creating exponential friction.
But autonomous businesses flip this equation. Instead of adding management layers, they add intelligence networks. Every new agent increases the ROM and decision speed simultaneously. More intelligence, faster decisions, zero overhead.
BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF THOUGHT
Want proof this actually works? Last month, we faced a classic scaling crisis: we found ourselves drowning in 120+ demos per week, with our high-touch sales process hitting a hard ceiling and founders burning out on low-value calls.
The traditional SaaS playbook would say: Hire an SDR team to qualify better leads. Add AEs to handle volume. Build a customer success team for onboarding. Recruit a VP of Sales to manage the chaos. Six months, $2M in salaries, and endless coordination overhead.
We chose a different path entirely. Instead, we triggered our autonomous business OS.
In 7 days, we managed to completely change our GTM strategy. Here's how it played out:
Day 1: I (revenue creator) Identified our high-touch sales process was a bottleneck—all 3 founders met and decided we need to change it to a low touch motion with a free trial.
Day 2: Ido (agent creator) prepared an MVP version for how a product-led sales motion would look and what AI agents we need to support it.
Day 5: Niv (product creator) finished the technical modifications.
Day 6: Ido finished updating/creating the AI agents and connecting them to a new CRM deal lifecycle.
Day 7: New GTM motion fully operational.
30 days later—ARR grew by $300K. Trial-to-paid conversion hit 45%.
THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE. IT’S JUST DISTRIBUTED UNEVENLY
We're not just building a fast growing company. Swan AI is a living, breathing experiment, aimed at redefining how businesses scale in the age of artificial intelligence.
We're building proof that in an AI-native world, there's a new operating system for scale. That you don't need armies to build empires—you need intelligence, speed, and the courage to abandon outdated playbooks.
Stop adding headcount and management layers. Stop measuring valuation as a north star. Stop architecting corporate bureaucracy.
Start building intelligence networks. Start measuring ARR per employee. Start architecting for decision making velocity.
The autonomous business OS isn't coming—it's here. The question is: Will you be building it, or competing against it?
RESOURCES
1. THE NEW OPERATING SYSTEM
In 2020, reaching $30M ARR meant building a 250-person company. In 2025, AI-native businesses are hitting the same milestone with just 3 operators. This isn't just about doing more with less—it's about a fundamental shift in how companies scale.
This transformation isn't just possible—it's becoming necessary for survival. READ IT NOW.
2. THE AUTONOMOUS BUSINESS AGENT
If today’s piece on the Autonomous Business model blew your mind, wait till you meet AutonAmos—the AI twin of Swan AI’s founder Amos Bar Joseph. He’s not just talking about scaling to $10M ARR per employee—he’s teaching operators how to actually do it. From Swan's AI agent stack to zero-headcount GTM systems, AutonAmos is your behind-the-scenes guide to the future of company building.
3. THE BIG SHIFT NEWSLETTER
Amos has his own newsletter called The Big Shift, a front row seat to Swan's journey to $30M ARR with just 3 founders—sharing the learnings, experiments, wins and losses.
If you enjoyed reading this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post. Subscribe to avoid missing future editions.
 | A guest post by
|
Thanks for shining light on this, @Ollie Forsyth ! Very interesting read
Really enjoyed this one. The framing around an autonomous business OS captures something a lot of early-stage teams are chasing—freedom from the chaos of reactive decision-making.
It reminds me of how I’ve been thinking about shifting founder-led sales from manual to smart systems. The tools are here, but the key is designing processes that keep customers at the center.
I unpacked some of that thinking here if it’s helpful:
👉 From Manual Chasing to Smart Systems: https://open.substack.com/pub/engsales/p/from-manual-chasing-to-smart-systems?r=jhbvp
Great insights, bookmarking this for future reference.