Fighting for Your Company’s Life

Can you guess either company described below?

$343 million in revenue, up 25% year-over-year, reaccelerating from 10% growth the year before.¹

$310 million revenue, $1.4 million raised, and a $5 billion valuation.²

Both were founded in 2011.

AI is an existential threat to both.

If you guessed Intercom for the first company and Zapier for the second, you were right.

Over the past ~15 years, Intercom and Zapier built category-defining businesses that are the envy of every founding team and early-stage investor. Suddenly in the past two years, they faced a GPT-4-shaped gun.

The companies have bravely fought back against the threat of generative AI. One company has cannibalized its business model with a new product, and the other has rebuilt its hiring process from scratch.

Whether the threat of AI to your company is immediate and existential or just existential, not fighting the right way will lead to death at the hands of a competitor that rebuilds your business or makes it irrelevant with a more effective product and a faster AI-driven team.

The coming bifurcation

Humans are lazy, especially highly paid knowledge workers.

If a company doesn’t empower employees and guide their use of AI, the benefits will accrue exclusively to the employee, not the company.

The average employee minimizes effort, prioritizes work-life balance, and maximizes their effective hourly rate when left alone. Disagree? Consider the reduced work output during the work-from-home era. LLMs and GenAI apps will magnify this reality.

Companies that are unaware they’re fighting for survival will view this positively. They will not focus on the drop in employee hours worked, but encouraging examples of team members using AI to solve real business problems. “You accepted our challenge to adopt AI - and the results have blown us away!” The issue is, employees will use AI to do their typical work faster, not to do things beyond their previous capabilities.

Then desperate competitors fighting for their lives, or an AI-native startup building from scratch with current knowledge of AI, will blow these companies away.

How? Why?

Companies that treat AI like life or death will rethink work from the foundations and solve previously impossible problems, instead of doing the same old work, just faster.

Companies that do the impossible will grow their market share and smother competitors stuck in the past.

The complacent majority

Most companies say AI is an existential threat, few act like it.

“Write a memo to employees explaining that AI is an existential threat to our business, their careers are in jeopardy, they need to experiment with AI tools, and announce a hiring freeze.”

Paste the above prompt into Claude or ChatGPT, and you’ll get a response similar to the recent batch of “AI-first” internal memos that CEOs have shared with employees (and followers on X).

What stands out from these memos is the range of specificity, actionability, tone, and quality. The ones that read more like an assurance to shareholders that “we know AI is important” than a concrete guide to employees should be seen as a red flag that senior leadership is not taking the AI threat seriously enough.

If you work at a company and wonder how seriously senior leadership is taking the threat, here are a few red flags:

• A new “AI Committee/Red Team” was announced, but few know its purpose.

• A “Head of AI” has been appointed, and is not within one level of the C-suite.

• No one at the company is responsible for AI enablement of employees.

• ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude were rolled out across the organization with minimal internal support.

• You received a survey about your AI use cases, but you haven’t seen any shared prompts or templates created afterward.

• The use of AI by certain departments (e.g. Engineering) seems to far outpace others.

You should be concerned if these bullets sum up your company’s response.

The fighters

If you’ve been in a street fight (or watched one on WorldStarHipHop), you know the person who throws the first punch usually wins.

If you can’t throw the first punch, your next best bet is to find a heavy object and swing.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT, they punched every company offering automation or serving a customer base that does repeatable tasks.

Zapier and Intercom realized their customers would switch to ChatGPT or OpenAI’s API for tasks they were once relied on for.

They responded by picking up heavy objects and swinging.

Intercom

Intercom bet their entire company on a new product that is cannibalizing its subscription SaaS business model, realizing their customer service software was in the “AI kill zone.”

In launching Fin, an AI agent for customer service that autonomously resolves support tickets and charges for successful resolutions, Intercom is pitting a transactional per-resolution model against the per-seat subscription model their business was based on.

Few bets are riskier for a company than one that competes with your business model. Intercom knew they had to make it because a world with AI likely means smaller customer support teams.

Zapier’s response was different but similarly consequential.

Zapier

AI makes acquiring technical skills easier for “non-technical” people, and Zapier understands a team that isn’t bottlenecked by a lack of engineering resources can solve intractable problems and make customers happier.

To rebuild their company through this lens, Zapier instituted a new hiring standard, requiring 100% of new hires to be fluent in AI. Each candidate receives AI training materials and guidance, and new hires undergo an onboarding process focused on product mastery and AI skills.

Kudos to your CEO if he/she goes beyond lips service, updating hiring and enablement practices to change the make-up of the company.

Beware over-correction

In 2023, Klarna announced plans to “do much more with less” ahead of their upcoming IPO.

Less employees, that is.

Klarna stopped hiring for over a year, replaced many workers with AI, and became OpenAI’s “guinea pig.”

By 2025, the CEO rolled back the strategy, hiring humans again because “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.“

While it’s critical to dive in the water head first at a time like this, check how deep it is.

If your stated goal is to replace as many workers as possible with AI to cut costs, you’ll risk lower quality and face backlash from employees, customers, and a market hoping to see you fail.

Your turn.

The real question isn't "how do we implement AI?" but "how do we rebuild our company from scratch with our current knowledge of AI?"

Zapier and Intercom asked tough questions about business model, talent strategy, product strategy, and more.

I encourage you to pressure-test your business across areas that can be reinvented (all of them). I’ve included examples from Zapier, Intercom, and other companies leading the charge - along with the hardest “what-if” questions their AI bets were likely anchored on.

Whether you copy their moves or not, start by copying the level of introspection in their questions.

Hard questions worth asking

• “How can we help every employee automate their job?”

• “Do we have enough proprietary data four our product to beat commodity GPT?”

• “Where are our worst human-centric throughput bottlenecks?”

• “How do help employees move from AI experimentation to daily habit?”

• “Will a rival cannibalize our business model if we don’t?”

• “Should we be in the seat-rental or resolution business?”

• “How fast can a small team ship a v1 of a new product or internal process to learn?”

• “How can we reshape our hiring funnel to inject AI-fluency into our organization?”

• “If GPT-4 makes every teammate technical, what is the highest leverage role for our engineers?”

• “How aggressively can we compress our roadmap with generative AI?”

• “When and how do we replace contractors with models without ruining trust?”

Run this playbook

• Assume no humans. Build your internal processes and products for a future in which you and your customers have far fewer human employees.

• Attack your biggest bottleneck. Duolingo pinpointed “authoring new language courses” as its rate-limiting step and replaced manual course creation with GPT-4-driven templates plus human review, compressing 12 years of work into 12 months and shipping 148 courses in one year.

• Run Hackweeks. With AI tools and technology changing so rapidly, the only way to keep up is to keep experimenting. Be sure to invite participation from everyone in the company and ground experimentation in solving problems for customers and internal operations.

• Create a cross-functional AI team that owns employee enablement. Zapier’s “ZapAI” team devotes full-time to the company’s AI initiative, including AI fluency and the ability of employees.

• Institutionalize deep AI literacy, not tips. Rekki runs “Learning Fridays” and Zapier created onboards AI fluency onboarding experience for all new hires. What can you do to ensure the team has the know-how they need to enhance their work?

• Stage comms as carefully as the tech rollout. Klarna’s message of doing more with less sparked social-media fury that we all want to avoid. Everyone is anxious about AI it implications. Communicate with empathy.

• Make “AI-native” the default hiring bar. Change the composition of your team if you want to change your company. Zapier’s AI-first revamp evaluates every candidate’s ability to build AI-enabled workflows in the interview process.

• Turn domain experts into builders – Everyone can build now. Rekki’s CTO armed ops staff with code-gen tools and shifted engineers to curate reusable primitives.

• Measure and celebrate adoption. Zapier tracks weekly AI-active headcount by team, spotlighting laggards and turning usage data into training agendas.

The companies that survive and thrive in the AI era won't be the ones that bolt AI onto existing processes—they'll be the ones that fundamentally rebuild their foundations with AI at the core. Whether you're fighting for your company's survival today or preparing for tomorrow's battle, the time to stop theorizing and start executing is now.

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^{1 Zapier revenue, valuation & growth rate | Sacra https://sacra.com/c/zapier/
2  Intercom revenue, valuation & growth rate | Sacra https://sacra.com/c/intercom/}