Enterprises keep doubling down on AI. Small businesses, however, are still trying to figure out what to make of it.
That's what led Eddie Kim, co-founder and CTO of payroll startup Gusto, to create a solution. It was one that took him and his team just nine weeks to ideate and build. On Tuesday, the company announced Gusto Cofounder, an AI agent purpose-built to connect a business's disparate platforms and handle tasks.
“I think this is the most exciting thing we've launched since the launch of the company, personally,” Kim told The Deep View.
Cofounder, which Kim said is built on top of foundation models from OpenAI, allows businesses to delegate tasks such as handling payroll, generating reports and reviewing expenses to an agent using only plain-language prompts. Kim called this "the work before the work," or tasks that take away from a business owner’s time for their core product or passion.
Gusto Cofounder also solves what Kim calls the "blank canvas problem." There’s no doubt that small businesses stand to benefit from AI. In a recent Gusto survey of 1,500 small business owners, a third said AI has already made it easier for them to start their businesses. But getting started, Kim said, can be the hardest part. For instance, these operators generally don’t have the time and resources to set up their own OpenClaws, and aren’t going to get significant returns just using chatbots.
“I think, to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technology that powers Cofounder already exists today,” said Kim. “The thing that Gusto does uniquely is that we're starting from the problems that we're already solving for small businesses.”
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Because Cofounder already knows your context, such as team, payroll cadence, benefits and compliance calendar, the platform is useful from the first prompt.
- The platform comes with 20 pre-built automations that help small business owners figure out where to start, and proactively surfaces risks, anomalies or upcoming documents that need to be filed.
- Cofounder also integrates with all the other places where small businesses operate, such as Slack, Google Workspace and Notion.
- Additionally, Cofounder has multiple layers of built-in security. This includes the permissioning measures already built into Gusto’s flagship payroll product, as well as a consent framework that keeps business owners in the driver's seat.
“I think the future is that this is how small businesses are run,” said Kim. “Where you have this whole part of your business that you automated that Cofounder is running for you, and that frees you up for why you started your business in the first place.”
Our Deeper View #
Small and medium-sized businesses represent a massively untapped market for AI. However, these businesses largely don’t have the budget, technical expertise, or time to embed AI in their operations. And Gusto isn’t the first company to consider this market. Anthropic launched its own Claude for Small Business tool targeting the same use cases. But Gusto, already being embedded within thousands of organizations, has a significant advantage in reaching those markets more natively. It’s the same reason Apple has the potential to sweep the consumer AI market. Though these firms aren’t making models themselves, they are meeting customers where they’re at and providing a seamless interface to the people who need to use the tech every day.