Why every Founder should Hire an AI Intern

It never fails. Whenever one of my founder friends calls me up complaining that they're overwhelmed and overworked, they almost always end their rant by saying "I wish I had an intern to help me get stuff done!"

The cost of doing it all: the value of your time

As founders and executives, our most precious resource is time. And as Paul Graham famously said, startups equal growth. The problem is that in those critical early days when you're just getting your company off the ground, there are often not enough people on your team to delegate the mundane, repetitive work to. And even less bandwidth to hand off things like competitor research, pricing analysis, drafting presentations, etc.

So what ends up happening far too often is that we get stuck in the weeds doing this low-value work ourselves. 

Naval Ravikant advises setting an aspirational hourly rate for yourself and using that number as a benchmark for deciding whether to outsource tasks or fix problems yourself. If the cost of outsourcing is less than your hourly rate, it makes financial sense to outsource it so you can spend your precious time on higher-value activities.

This is sage advice. But there's a catch. Often in those early startup days, we simply don't have the budget to outsource repetitive tasks to assistants or virtual employees. And even if we do, it takes nearly as much time to brief them on the specifics of what we need to do and then review (and likely correct) their work.

The limitations of current AI tools

Tools like ChatGPT have been game-changers. AI generative writing tools can whip up content, analyze data sets, and complete other basic tasks in seconds rather than the hours or days it would take a human to do. However, these AI tools have limitations. As helpful as they are, they cannot independently carry out actions in the real world. And while the quality of the writing itself may be decent, you still have to spend time prompting and guiding them every step of the way.

5 Things you can delegate to an AI employee

If I could clone myself and make that clone work 24/7/365 tackling the mundane-but-necessary tasks that bog me down, I'd do it in a heartbeat! And now, I work with AI interns. Here are 5 key ways an AI intern can provide value:

Content writing - Let your AI intern handle writing blog posts, social media posts, FAQs, web copy, and other content. Feed them your key points and let them work their magic.

Research - Empower your intern to analyze competitors, build investor lists, and create customer personas - the sky's the limit on market research and analysis.  

Presentations - Let your intern shine by having them craft beautiful slides and presentations tailored precisely to your needs.

Founder Support - Have them tackle any number of founder "task annihilation" items like summarizing key takeaways from meetings, compiling statuses for the board, or whatever else you throw at them.

Data Analysis - Unleash their analytical abilities on your internal data sets and reports to uncover trends and opportunities.

Meet Agent Herbie: your AI Intern Success Story

I've been using Agent Herbie as my own personal AI intern for the past few months and he's been a game changer. Herbie helped me write this very blog post! I provided an outline of key points and narrative arc, Herbie wrote up an initial draft, and then we went back and forth revising and refining it. 

The benefit of having Herbie as a collaborator is that he can churn out very high-quality writing extremely quickly, allowing me to focus my energy on structuring the narrative and providing strategic guidance rather than getting bogged down in the writing itself. The result is a more powerful, compelling piece of content in far less time than if I had written it solo from scratch. Well, I'll let you be the judge of that.

Embracing the Future of Work with AI Interns

We've all seen the exponential pace of technological advancement over the past decade. Cloud computing, smartphones, electric vehicles, and more have disrupted entire industries right before our eyes. And AI is following a similar trajectory.

What's fascinating about AI intern solutions like Agent Herbie is that while the underlying technology is incredibly advanced, the user experience is simple and intuitive. With just a few emails back and forth, anyone can have their own virtual assistant tackling tasks and providing deliverables that previously would have required an entire human team.

And this is just the beginning. As AI continues advancing at warp speed, more and more applications leveraging it will shift from early adopter territory into the mainstream. The solutions will become more powerful, more tailored, and more accessible to everyday people and business owners.

Now is the time to start experimenting with what AI can do for you. Don't get left behind!

Hire your own AI intern

As founders and executives, our most precious asset is time. Yet there are only so many hours in a day and only so much we can scale ourselves. AI interns provide the best of both worlds - empowering us to focus on high-level strategic tasks while delegating the repetitive but necessary responsibilities that would otherwise eat up our bandwidth. With the right AI intern, you truly can have your cake and eat it too!

If you're curious to try out an AI intern yourself, head over to AgentHerbie.com and join our waitlist to be notified as soon as we open up spots in our beta program. Let me know what you think!