Behind the Craft · Sunday, September 13, 2026
Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, suggests that the future of AI in business lies in building "virtual employees" rather than open-ended agents. He emphasizes the importance of making these AI entities behave and feel like real people, citing their internal recruiter AI, 'Jim,' as an example of an AI that acts like a coworker.
“If someone starting a company today I think the question is like why shouldn't you just be you. And agents, the best way to to go about it is to focus on this idea of building virtual employees versus open-ended agents that could do a million things.”
“The fundamental thing that we spent time on was how to make it behave look and feel like a real person.”
“Jim is our open call recruiter. He does like effectively three things. He sources people. He filters all inbound. And third is serves as an analytics layer. It's just like actually behaving like a coworker.”