Recently a story did the rounds that stopped a lot of people in their tracks. The American company MEDVi reached several hundred million dollars in revenue with two employees. The founder and his brother work from home in Los Angeles; artificial intelligence and contractors cover the rest.
To be clear from the start: MEDVi is not a company anyone should model themselves on. It has plenty of problems of its own, from regulator warnings to lawsuits. But that is not even the point. The point is that a figure like that with such a small team was simply impossible five years ago. And it is that shift we think deserves attention.
In the second episode of the podcast we talked about what this means for Slovenian companies. Not for someone in Silicon Valley, but for the owner of a repair shop, an agency, a shop or an accounting firm here at home.
Young companies have an edge, but they are not the only ones
When you start a business today, you have no systems in place yet. Paradoxically, that is your advantage. You have no twenty-year-old processes to take apart, and no team that is used to working the old way.
We built our company around what we call an AI operating system. At the centre is Claude, connected to all the tools we use. We do not take notes in meetings; Fireflies does that. The recording and transcript turn into summaries, and the system writes the brief itself and assigns tasks across the team in ClickUp. A person still reviews it, but we save an enormous amount of time.
That does not mean established companies are doomed to fall behind. We have heard of large companies that chose to set up individual processes from scratch rather than rework the old ones. Sometimes it really is easier to build from nothing than to change something that is already running. But both can be done. The key is not the age of the company, it is the approach.
Employees are not afraid of AI if you approach them the right way
We often hear that people are afraid AI will replace them. In practice we see something else. When you tell an employee that this is a tool that will give them back time and take work off their plate, there is almost no resistance. Nobody wants to spend twenty years copying data from one Excel file to another.
Our advice to owners is simple, though not always easy: communicate openly. Say why you are doing it, what the goal is and what it will mean for the team. Bringing in AI must not come across as a threat, but as support. And it matters that it does not stop at "here is a tool, now figure it out". You have to take people through the process, show them concrete examples and teach them.
Recently we set up an AI operating system for a team of five people, mostly aged 50 plus, who had used Excel and PowerPoint all their working lives. Within a few hours they understood how to use it. After three days they said themselves that it saves them at least 20 to 30% of their time, and more once they are really used to it. Age is not the obstacle, mindset is.
The difference between generations is in how they think
The younger generation often comes with suggestions already. In the diagnostic review they map out the processes they would like to automate themselves, because they are used to looking through that lens. Older people often do not know where AI would fit at all. To them it looks like yet another new app. When you explain that they can keep all their systems and email and simply connect them to AI, a new way of thinking slowly opens up.
We would describe that way of thinking like this: stop thinking "who do I need to do this" and start thinking in workflows. Take this podcast. Instead of saying "I have to sit down and make it", you break the work into concrete, linear steps. Once the process is written down at that level of detail, you quickly see which steps can happen automatically. Sometimes all of them, sometimes half. But switching from "what has to happen and who do I need" to "how do I write this down as a workflow" completely changes the picture of the years ahead.
Hiring young people is a double-edged sword
There is a lot of talk about AI making it harder for young people to enter the job market. We mostly hire young people, and we see both sides.
Gen Z brings incredible energy. If you approach them the right way, these are people who are extremely hard-working, proactive and able to get through an amount of work that was unimaginable before. We hear stories of young employees who spend their afternoons exploring new tools and suggest themselves what else could be automated. One person like that makes a huge difference.
On the other hand, it is a particular generation. It lacks focus and is sometimes more superficial. They look for more freedom and a less rigid hierarchy. But what we have learned is this: if you give the right people freedom in the right way, they do not abuse it, they value it. We do not want to be the police in our own company, checking who came in when. Trust instead of control suits us, and young people value that a lot.
Where we use AI and where we do not
To be concrete: if you came into our office, you would see five people using four different cloud agents at the same time for four different tasks.
Where it helps us most: writing more complex emails, briefs for our project manager and developers, and preparing for meetings. Instead of an hour of preparation, we prepare better than before in ten minutes, with concrete examples and sometimes even an interactive demo that would once have taken a week of development. The system has context from emails, meeting notes and the CRM, so we have a summary whenever we need one.
Where we deliberately do not use it: writing content. Here we found that AI is simply not good enough yet, and we are not sure it ever will be. A post you write from the heart will always be better than one a machine writes. People can feel the difference.
What to take away
The future of work is not about letting half the team go and handing everything over to machines. It is about thinking in workflows, being open with people, and using tools where they genuinely help and leaving them out where they do not.