Stop Building AI Agents. Start Building AI Employees

Pedro Franceschi, chief executive of Brex, says each AI agent should be set up like a new employee, with one job, written instructions, a human manager and a budget.

Peter Yang, who runs the interview newsletter Behind the Craft, interviewed Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and chief executive of Brex, a company Yang describes as a $5 billion business. Franceschi argues that most people build AI agents the wrong way, and that each agent should be onboarded like an employee. The full episode is for paid subscribers, and this account comes from the open part of the post.

• Each agent gets four things a good employee has: one clear outcome to own, specific instructions and limits, a human manager to turn to when unsure, and a budget.
• The budget is set in tokens, the units of text an AI model processes, and depends on what the outcome is worth.
• Brex's example is Jim, an AI recruiter that finds candidates, filters job applications and runs hiring analytics in the hiring software Greenhouse and in LinkedIn. Jim passes a case to a person when he is unsure.
• The episode also covers why Franceschi spends half his time reviewing work, and how Brex stops its AI agents from leaking data.

A product team that deploys an agent can write down the same four things before launch: its job, its instructions, the person it turns to and its budget. The application to product teams is an inference and is not Franceschi's claim.

16 September 2026: when AI helps produce work, a person still checks it before others rely on it.