The narrative in 2026 is AI layoffs, white-collar disruption, and the “end of work.” World Economic Forum reported in its Future of Jobs analysis that automation and AI will displace millions of roles while simultaneously creating new categories of work, but not for the same people, and not without reskilling. McKinsey & Company estimates that generative AI could automate up to 30% of hours worked in the U.S. economy by 2030. Goldman Sachs went further, suggesting AI could expose 300 million jobs globally to automation.
Governments hear that and should be working for us to find solutions.
They should be building founders.
Tools like Cowork and OpenClaw make something possible that wasn’t practical five years ago: the Startup of One.
Cowork positions itself as an AI-native workspace where individuals operate with autonomous agents handling research, writing, planning, and execution. Instead of hiring analysts, coordinators, or junior staff, you orchestrate AI agents. OpenClaw takes that further into automation; building and deploying AI workflows that act across systems, scrape, synthesize, draft, respond, and execute tasks that previously required teams.
This isn’t “freelancing.” It’s leverage.
A Startup of One is not a solopreneur juggling Fiverr gigs. It’s a founder augmented by AI Personal Assistants that handle the mechanical work of business: market research, customer discovery summaries, sales email drafting, contract redlining, financial modeling, investor updates, content production, and workflow automation.
An AI Personal Assistant is essentially an always-on cognitive layer. It reads, summarizes, drafts, schedules, researches, tracks, and learns your patterns. It integrates with email, CRM, Slack, documents, analytics dashboards. It becomes institutional memory and operational muscle; the difference between a $75,000 employee and a $75/month AI agent is not subtle.
Adeo Ressi, Co-founder of Founder Institute, framed it even further in contextualizing it for people ready to start something, “While other VCs and entrepreneurs spend hours on basic research and manual workflows, you'll automate everything and focus on what matters. 10X your productivity, or keep doing things the slow way.
That’s arbitrage and this is where I want to help accelerate economic development and education policy.
While we’ve been worried about replacing jobs lost, what’s clear now is that countries need to support replacing dependency.
Vibecoding, a cultural shift underpinning this, is building software or workflows by describing intent in natural language and iterating with AI instead of writing traditional code line by line. You describe the vibe of what you want: the workflow, the outcome, and the logic; AI scaffolds it, you refine it, and you’re live.
You don’t need a computer science degree to build operational tools anymore, you need clarity.
Founder Institute is live with how we get there, with an AI Productivity Bootcamp launching today, training founders to use AI-native tools to build MVPs, automate workflows, and prototype ventures without traditional engineering teams. This is not a coding class, it’s a leverage class, it’s a Startup of One class.
If AI displaces administrative assistants, junior analysts, paralegals, entry-level marketers, and support roles; the response is not to subsidize declining job categories, the response is to give those people the tools to operate independently.
Imagine a government response to AI disruption that says:
Instead of retraining you to compete for fewer roles, we’re equipping you to launch a revenue-generating micro-venture with AI infrastructure.
A single AI-augmented founder can now:
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Research a niche
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Validate demand
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Build a landing page
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Automate customer onboarding
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Handle support
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Generate marketing content
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Run paid acquisition tests
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Draft legal documents
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Track analytics
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Send investor updates
All without hiring a team.
Platforms like Cowork and OpenClaw reduce operational friction to near zero and when friction drops, formation rates rise. When formation rates rise, economic dynamism follows. The Kauffman Foundation has long tied startup formation rates to economic growth. If AI tools lower the barrier to starting, then AI is not a labor destroyer, it’s a capital formation accelerator.
But only if people are trained to use it.
McKinsey’s own analysis notes that productivity gains from AI depend heavily on adoption and skill adaptation. Technology alone doesn’t produce growth; behavior does.
Governments worried about AI layoffs have a window now to enable founders.
They can subsidize unemployment.
Or they can subsidize agency.
They can fund job placement centers.
Or they can fund AI bootcamps.
They can protect declining labor categories.
Or they can create millions of Startups of One.
The irony is amusing; AI will concentrate wealth for those who understand leverage but it simultaneously democratizes capability for those willing to learn. We are watching the collapse of the assumption that entrepreneurship requires payroll.
For founders, this is obvious; for governments, it’s still uncomfortable so let’s talk about it.
And for investors, it changes diligence entirely. If one founder can execute like a five-person team, capital efficiency explodes, that shifts valuations, burn expectations, and growth curves.
This is not speculation; it’s already happening in micro-SaaS, AI-enabled agencies, independent product studios, and solo consultancies operating at six- and seven-figure revenue with no staff. But, think of a Startup of One not a lifestyle business but a new economic unit and ask not “How many jobs will AI eliminate?” It’s “How many founders can we create with AI?”
If your region is bracing for white-collar layoffs, are you building safety nets or building leverage? The tools are here to create founders, the only constraint is whether you teach people to use them.
