How Did Deel AI Agents Add $140 Million in ARR?
Aaron Goldsmid says the figure Carlos cites, over $140 million in ARR from AI optimizations, the equivalent of the work of 600 people now done by agents, came from picking up change off the floor. Writing automation used to be the last artisanal craft, so a long list of manual steps never got automated: moving data from one system to another, reformatting a spreadsheet every month, or logging into a tool with no API and clicking one button.
The second unlock was taking that list out of engineering's hands. Deel's product Akai follows how a person would train an intern. Come shadow the task, watch it done, try it, then have the result checked. Someone who is not an engineer can capture the workflow and trust the output. One fix can be as small as renaming a button so the person most likely to finish the task actually finishes it. Any single item was too small to automate when code was expensive, and if it had been a big deal Deel would already have built a system. The pennies compound into large numbers. Scaling also looks more linear, because compute keeps complexity from rising the way it used to.
