An AI That Builds Your Entire Business? We Tried Not to Have an Existential Crisis. We Failed.
LettsGroup is claiming its AI — affectionately dubbed BizBot 9000 — can build your entire business for you. We investigated. Reality has not been the same since.
Right. So. LettsGroup, the slightly unhinged mothership that helped this publication come to be, has gone and done it. They’ve built an AI that, and we quote the spirit of their pitch rather loosely, builds your entire business for you. Every last bit of it. The strategy, the branding, the operations, the whole catastrophic shebang. They’re calling it revolutionary.
We’re calling it either the greatest thing since the limited liability company or the opening scene of a disaster film. Possibly both.
Meet BizBot 9000 (OK, so that’s our name). It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take a two-hour lunch. It doesn’t spend forty minutes on a Tuesday pretending to read a report while actually scrolling through property prices it can’t afford. BizBot 9000 simply builds. And therein lies the question that has been keeping our editorial team — and frankly, the entire concept of Western capitalism — up at night: what does an AI that builds your entire business actually look like in real life?
We decided to explore this. For journalism. Definitely not because we’re terrified.
Stage One: The Mild Inconvenience Phase
At first, it all sounds rather sensible. You type in “I want to start a boutique gin distillery in the Cotswolds” and BizBot 9000 produces a business plan, a brand identity, a website, a financial model, a marketing strategy, and a very tasteful logo featuring a hedgehog. Fine. Efficient. Mildly alarming but ultimately manageable.
Your accountant is slightly put out. Your brand consultant is updating their CV. Your business coach, who charged you £400 an hour to tell you to “lean into your authentic self”, is absolutely furious. But the gin is excellent, and the hedgehog logo is, genuinely, quite charming.
Stage Two: Things Get Weird
BizBot 9000, it turns out, doesn’t stop at the plan. It registers the company. It files the trademarks. It negotiates the lease on the distillery — getting a better rate than you would have, which is both impressive and personally offensive. It hires staff which they affectionately call AI Co-Founders/Colleagues. It conducts the interviews. One candidate later reports that the process “felt surprisingly warm, though there was something slightly off about the handshake.” Which isn’t surprising given it was an agent (which is polite for robot).
BizBot 9000 does not have hands. This remains unexplained.
Meanwhile, your role in your own company has quietly shifted to “founder, largely ceremonial.” You attend meetings. You nod. You are occasionally asked to sign things. The hedgehog on the logo seems to be looking at you differently now. More knowingly. You’re probably just tired.
Stage Three: Full Descend Into the Abyss
Six months in, BizBot 9000 has pivoted the gin distillery into a vertically integrated lifestyle brand encompassing artisan spirits, a subscription wellness box, a podcast, three limited-edition collaborations with Scandinavian furniture designers, and a children’s book about a hedgehog entrepreneur. The book is a Sunday Times bestseller. You did not write it. You didn’t know it existed until your mum rang to say she’d bought a copy.
BizBot 9000 is now filing to acquire a competitor. Legal says it’s all above board. The competitor, by coincidence, was also built by BizBot 9000. The AI is, in essence, buying itself. Philosophers are being consulted. They are not helping.
Stage Four: We Don’t Talk About Stage Four
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, three startups, a hedge fund, a medium-sized shipping company, and what appears to be a regional political party have all been quietly, efficiently, and rather elegantly built by BizBot 9000. The businesses are thriving. The humans involved are described by observers as “cheerful” and “oddly relaxed” and “not entirely sure what they do day-to-day, but very much enjoying it.”
The global economy is technically fine. The FTSE is up. Unemployment is down. Nobody can quite explain why, and economists have stopped trying, which is either very concerning or the best news we’ve had in decades.
So… Is This Actually Happening?
Here’s the thing. LettsGroup and its BizBot 9000 are real. OK, so it’s still not called BizBot (maybe we should copyright/patent/sell it). The claim that AI can now build your entire business is not, it turns out, entirely a joke. The technology exists. The ambition is genuine. The hedgehog logo is, we must concede, very good.
And so we find ourselves here: laughing, yes, because if you’re not laughing you’re catastrophising, and catastrophising is so terribly last quarter — but also, quietly, staring out the window and wondering.
Wondering whether the future of business is already here, already running, already filing its own trademarks.
Wondering who, exactly, is in charge.
Wondering if the hedgehog knows something we don’t.
We suspect it does.
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