Coala Pay connects donors with local aid organizations using smart contracts and stablecoins.

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur.But what about scaling that one-person business into something meatier — an enterprise of unicorn proportions?Historically, this would have been an unfathomably tough task, due to the skills and resources required, not only to scale a product but also to grow and maintain a sufficiently bountiful customer base. But AI agents could unshackle the would-be solo-preneurs of the world.AI agents are all about embedding human workflows into software, freeing the human to do more in less time. Agents can be assigned tasks, and they can make decisions with varying degrees of autonomy. Multiple AI agents could even collaborate on complementary tasks, paving the way for getting some real work done entirely autonomously.In an interview last year with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicted this exact scenario.“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,” Altman said. “Which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now [it] will happen.”In a discussion at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos last week, a panel of entrepreneurs and investors also discussed the prospect of the single-person billion-dollar enterprise — and, more importantly, what this might mean for the future of employment.In humans we trustRecent history reveals a slew of svelte billion-dollar companies