AI can do this, AI can do that—supposedly, AI can do everything. Yet, it still requires someone to guide, direct and orchestrate its actions to ensure it actually accomplishes the right outcomes.
That’s the view of Adam D’Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora—one of the world’s largest internet forums—who recently announced that he is hiring an AI automation engineer in his company to do exactly that.
His post on X elicited reactions from hundreds of founders, engineers, and developers across the platform. D’Angelo is looking for a single engineer who will use AI to automate manual tasks across the company, thereby increasing employee productivity.
The person in this role will be responsible for developing and maintaining internal tools to enable this automation, while working closely with teams to understand pain points and identify ‘high-impact’ automation opportunities.
Reactions and Opinions Galore
D’Angelo shared more information about the role in his social media post. Within minutes of posting it, several experts, developers, and founders in the ecosystem emphasised the importance of this new role. Sandeep Shah, regional vice president of sales at Windsurf, said on X, “We hired multiple people across the company for this role at Windsurf, and it is game-changing.”
Shane Gu, a researcher at Google DeepMind, deemed this as the “most important hire at any company”.
One user also said that given that the role will focus on automating specific pain points, it is the “single greatest opportunity to figure out what SaaS needs to be built”.
Along the same lines, Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare, said that this might also be a better approach for an AI-native, instead of purchasing tools to achieve it. “The alternative is you will end up with a 100s of SaaS subscriptions across the company and you will lose control of your data and costs will get out of control,” Knecht wrote on X.
Having said that, not everyone agrees with D’Angelo’s approach. David West, CEO of Proscia, shared a different view on X, calling it a “hot take” but suggesting that hiring a single person for this task is a bad idea. “At AI companies, this is everybody,” he said. Some also believe that AI literacy efforts should be company-wide, so that employees can self-identify pain points and even make the first prototype.
But can everybody do it? Or, more importantly, will everybody do it? Alfred Lua, co-founder of Pebblely, had an interesting argument. “In the ideal world, everyone will try to automate their manual work. But most people are afraid of automating themselves out of their jobs (even if that isn’t what the company plans to do).”
“So, resistance is more likely,” he added, wondering if Quora’s approach might work in the company’s favour.
In another instance, Thomas Karatzas, a former staff engineer at Apple, highlighted a possible downside of this role. He questioned the difficulty in maintaining over 50 workflows with changing APIs, and the changes in how people work.
“What happens when this person leaves the company?” he asked.
While both opportunities and challenges exist, several companies have already abandoned the AI automation engineer role.
Everyone Wants an AI Automation Engineer
While D’Angelo’s social media post drove numerous conversations about the role he was hiring for at Quora, several companies have already hired an AI automation engineer, or are in the process of doing so.
David Gan, who works on user operations at Anysphere, the parent company of the AI coding platform Cursor, said his role essentially involves what D’Angelo mentions.
Enterprise search software provider Glean has also hired someone who leads a similar effort, and has added three interns to the program.
“They work with every function within the company to identify manual processes that people don’t like to spend time on, and then build a roadmap to agentify those processes,” Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, said. “The results have been unbelievable. With fresh perspectives and no attachment to old processes, they move fast with AI.”
Meanwhile, Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, said that 100% of the company’s job openings are “up for grabs” to an AI automation engineer. Notably, the company itself provides no-code automation solutions to automate repetitive tasks between applications.
AIM came across multiple similar job postings across new-age AI startups like Fireflies and legacy, large-scale companies like Wells Fargo and Lockheed Martin.
This reveals that an AI automation engineer is not just for software-heavy companies.
Notably, Lockheed Martin is hiring an AI engineer to design and build cutting-edge tools for the company’s aeronautics domain. The person is responsible for designing, developing and deploying agentic AI apps to automate various data engineering practices using AI tools.
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