‘The ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero’: why AI gives company owners what they think they want
Daniel Miessler has spent 25 years in technology—advising Fortune 10 companies, building open-source security tools used by penetration testers worldwide, and leading cybersecurity operations at firms like Apple and Robinhood. But his most provocative argument isn’t about malware or zero-day exploits. It’s about something far more disruptive: the end of the job itself.
“The ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero,” Miessler wrote in a recent essay and YouTube video. “Companies are extremely unhappy with their current workforces, and just now— starting in 2023 and 2024—it is actually becoming possible to replace human intelligence tasks with technology.”
It’s a blunt claim. But Miessler, who now runs a company called Unsupervised Learning that focuses on “upgrading humans” for an AI-driven world, argued that this isn’t cynicism—it’s capitalism following its oldest instinct.
In a statement to Fortune, Miessler doubled down, adding the rational is pure economics 101. “It is my belief that companies would rather be doing all the work themselves if they could, as opposed to paying humans to do it. Just the same way that they would rather have machines in a factory than have a bunch of humans doing those machine jobs.”
Not only can the work be done by a machine at a cheaper and achieve higher levels of consistency and reliability, Miessler told Fortune, but the same is true of AI, just swap out mechanics for intelligence.
“This whole AI thing isn’t really anything special in that frame. It’s just the thing that allows us to continue what the Industrial Revolution started,” Miessler said, adding he wasn’t throwing the “zero” number around—there’s a specific reason why he truly believes no one will be working.
“When I say zero, I mean zero workers. As in factory [or] machine jobs. Like regular working people,” will be out of a job in the AI boon. There may be some “few rockstar generalist managers,” Miessler said, but they too might soon become obsolete, working to manage their AI counterparts “until superintelligence, but that’s not even worth commenting on because who knows what that world looks like.”
Miessler’s arguments aligns with several viral doomsday essays that jumped the track from social media to stock markets and rattled investors in February: Matt Shumer‘s prediction of just 18 months left for knowledge work and Citrini Research‘s gloomy scenario of a 2028 rocked by white-collar recession. Miessler has been arguing this for some time, though: “Capital has always seen labor as a foul necessity,” he wrote in December 2025. “The moment they could find any way to reduce or eliminate it, they would.”
Ben Shiller, associate professor of economics at Brandeis University, specializes in researching how technology reshapes markets, and he told Fortune that he agrees with this assessment. “To be honest, I am scared for the future.”
A $50 Trillion Reckoning
The scale Miessler describes is staggering. In The Great Transition, he estimated that knowledge workers globally receive roughly $50 trillion per year in compensation—and argued that companies are now, for the first time, technically capable of not paying it.
“That is how much money companies are spending to pay humans,” he said. “And the major transition here is they don’t want to be paying those humans. They actually never did.”
The shift is not incremental, he said, it’s structural. Prior waves of automation replaced specific tasks. A factory robot could weld a car door, but until now, it couldn’t write a legal brief, file a customer complaint, or draft a marketing strategy. AI is different because it replaces intelligence, not just labor, Miessler wrote—and that changes everything.
Shiller agreed that AI offers companies a good excuse to conduct layoffs, either as a reason or if they genuinely see AI as a good replacement, but he said he’d also argue that AI workers have a number of other advantages over human workers. For one, hiring and firing are both full of friction, but “you can scale up an arbitrary number of workers almost instantly with AI. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3 p.m. in the afternoon or midnight. You have an idea, you want someone to respond immediately, you can use it. There’s a lot of reasons why AI workers are actually advantageous over human workers.”
Furthermore, Shiller said, it’s just “so much cheaper” to use AI workers than human workers. Even if the work is a little bit worse than human work product, “it’s so much cheaper that it doesn’t matter.”
Alex Imas, professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, also agreed, with an important clarification. It’s “trivially true” that businesses ideally wouldn’t need any human workers, he told Fortune, “but from the perspective of, like, if you did that tomorrow, you would end up in a very bad place for many, many different reasons.”
If nobody is working, then nobody is buying products, Imas pointed out, and he traced the issue to a larger issue. “The people in the tech world like to think about supply and nobody talks about demand.” So if you make a lot of stuff at zero cost, then “everybody has everything,” but also nobody has money to buy the things that are being made. He chalked this up to tech executives’ incentives and education: “I don’t think they’ve taken many econ classes,” he said, arguing that tech executives are judged by what tools and software they’re releasing, a supply story only, whereas economics trains you in “equilibrium thinking.”
The New Model for Business
In Miessler’s vision of a fully AI-managed company, human employees aren’t the ones executing work—they’re the ones holding AI accountable for it. “Humans are still there,” he explained, “but they’re the ones responsible for improving the AI.”
He called this “the new model for business”—and warned that companies still running on pre-2023 org structures are in existential danger. His timeline is specific: 2026 brings accelerating layoffs and startup disruption; 2027 is when “it really starts to hit hard”; and by 2028, he wrote, “most companies with a pre-2023 structure and workforce are now considered in danger of going out of business.”
The winners in this transition, Miessler argued, will be what he calls “high-IQ, high-agency generalists”—people who can direct and manage armies of AI agents rather than compete with them. The losers will be anyone whose value was tied to executing routine cognitive work: the writers, analysts, coders, and coordinators whose roles are already showing measurable decline.
McKinsey research from 2025 supports the general direction of Miessler’s argument: 75% of knowledge workers already use AI tools, and 30% of current hours worked could be automated by 2030. Miessler isn’t calling for panic—but he is calling for urgency. “This is colossal,” he wrote. “This is economy changing. This really is the end of labor.” For a man whose career has been about securing systems against outside threats, the biggest vulnerability he sees now isn’t a hacker. It’s a hiring manager who still thinks the org chart is safe.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com