Companies must redesign their entire organization around AI agents rather than simply adopting AI tools into existing structures to achieve real efficiency gains.
Massa argues that simply giving teams ChatGPT or Claude without restructuring leads to no real efficiencies; companies must rebuild APIs and systems specifically for agent use. ✦ AI generated
Ali Massa · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-10 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 5:07
“You guys took the just rip like we had to make this work. You had to downsize dramatically. It didn't work for a year. So, do you want to talk through obviously you had to tune a lot of things to make that work. Like describe the harness at that time and like what models you were using and sort of specifically.”
So so there there were like three main decisions that that we had to make. The first and this is what where I think many companies are stuck right now is the first instinct is, 'Okay, let's adopt AI.' And you you basically leave your structure as it is and just give ChatGPT or Claude to to your team and then there's no efficiencies. Your customers have the same problems and and nothing happens, right? And and so so you need to redesign your whole company around the agents and around the future capabilities. And this means really like rebuilding most of your APIs, rebuilding your system so the agents can use them to to perform.
verbatim transcript · starts at 5:07
5:07Like describe the harness at that time and like what models you were using and sort of specifically. Yeah. >> So so there there were like three main decisions that that we had to make. The first and this is what where I think many companies are stuck right now is the first instinct is, "Okay, let's adopt AI." And you you basically leave your structure as it is and just give
5:28ChatGPT or Claude to to your team and then there's no efficiencies. Your customers have the same problems and and nothing happens, right? And so so you need to redesign your whole company around the agents and around the future capabilities. And this means really like rebuilding most of your APIs, rebuilding your system so the agents can use them to to perform. Then, you need to start generating the
5:55data and the feedback loops to fine-tune these agents. The only way to really make them work is if you teach them. Like, how do you teach them? You you put them out in the open, you you put them in front of customers, you get that data, you get those evals, and then you train your your your agents. And this is the second bet that we made that that we could build
6:16superhuman agents. This means that by every dimension that matters, like conversion, lifetime value, uh customer experience, our agents would outperform the best human we had we had ever hired. And we put them in front of the hardest problems. And and finally, you you start to change how you measure the success of the company. Cazoo was uh transactional company. We used to measure how many cars we bought, how many cars we sold,
- ·First instinct: add AI tools to existing structure
- ·Teams get ChatGPT or Claude with no redesign
- ·Result: no efficiencies, same customer problems
- ·Structure stays the same—nothing actually changes
- ·Must rebuild company around agent capabilities
- ·Rebuild APIs so agents can use them
- ·Rebuild systems for agent-native workflows
- ·True efficiency requires structural transformation