George Sivulka

George Sivulka's essay You Just Hired a Million Bad Employees rests on a single inversion of the usual framing of automation: "for the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software." If capability has become the cheap input, then the binding constraint inside an AI-heavy company is coordination.¹

Sivulka is the founder and chief executive of Hebbia, an artificial intelligence company built for finance and knowledge work, and the author of one of the more widely circulated essays on how AI is reshaping the structure of a firm.

Sivulka argues evals, the tests that check whether an AI system is behaving as intended, are becoming a firm's most valuable and most idiosyncratic asset, the new equivalent of OKRs. He points to Palantir as proof of the thesis: he calls it the most Claude-disruptible company in existence, yet argues it survives specifically because it never sold software, it sold transformation, meaning the service of making a client's AI actually work reliably rather than the tools themselves.¹ That distinction is the basis for what he calls the next trillion-dollar category, the AI transformation company, on the grounds that almost nobody yet has AI working reliably inside their own organization.

Hebbia's own go-to-market followed a lighthouse strategy rather than a landgrab one: the company signed the largest private equity firms as marquee logos first, then expanded to more than forty percent of the largest asset managers by assets under management, a sequencing cited elsewhere as a model case for selling AI into buyers exposed enough to need social proof before they will commit.²