Artificial intelligence has upended this relationship, decoupling a company's potential productivity from its headcount and redefining which businesses will fare best. As a result, America's mid-sized companies are disappearing: the number of businesses with between 250 and 499 employees has fallen by 22.5% since 2020.
Last year, one category AI absolutely dominated was being an extremely agreeable coworker. While this might sound nice, this can turn into a problem for founders who rely on AI as their only teammate. When your head of legal, HR, and supply operations are all AI agents, unsubstantiated flattery can create costly blind spots. That's one of the reasons OpenAI said goodbye to its " yes-man" version of ChatGPT, and why some AI-powered solo founders are training their tools to push back.
I've worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years I've earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years it's been a little more. I'm naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, there's always been enough to cover the basics-plus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that I'm only one missed invoice from financial collapse.
At Gusto, we recently studied nearly 25,000 owner-only businesses. To focus on sustained business activity, we specifically looked at businesses that stayed open for at least five years and paid themselves during 75% of the months or more that they were on Gusto, indicating consistent business engagement. Our research showed that these folks-who I'll refer to as established solopreneurs-were running real, sustainable, and growing businesses across every corner of the economy.