David Hsu on AI employees
From Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO · · Product School
“I know it sounds kind of crazy to even say aloud, you know, the idea of an AI employee, at least you know today, but it is inevitable. Uh, it's it seems clear as day to me at this point that uh, it is inevitable, not just from a technological perspective, but from a uh, business economics perspective as well. It is inevitable is going to happen. Uh, by that I mean that uh, let's take the business perspective first, which is that today there is so much pressure on businesses from all sides, uh, from Wall Street, from consumers, from the fact that inflation is so high, there's so much pressure on businesses today to be optimizing their costs, and so the competition is rough, it's so obvious to me that businesses are always looking for an edge, more so than ever, I think, especially AI with the technological transformation of an LLM, time to leap ahead, if you will, and just find sort of structural ways to really improve their cost structure, margins, etc. And LLM, I think, represent a major portion of that, because if you look at uh, what most businesses spend money on, most of all, it's people, typically, it's labor, and if you have some way of uh, augmenting or uh, you have some replacement for labor that is much cheaper, it's obvious that that's going to happen.”
On , David Hsu, CEO & Co-Founder at Retool, spoke about AI employees during Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO on Product School.
About David Hsu
David Hsu, CEO and co-founder of Retool, appeared in a session on April 1, 2026, discussing the company's focus on enabling non-engineers to build internal applications and AI agents. He stated that Retool connects to data across various sources without storing it, a capability he said has attracted customers including the US Air Force, US Navy, US Army, and Coinbase. Hsu also described a strategic shift, saying the company is considering "a very high conviction bet to totally rearchitect our product" and move toward letting large language models generate code on the platform rather than using drag-and-drop frameworks. Hsu predicted that autonomous agents replacing human work is a "business economic inevitability" by 2028, citing pressure to optimize labor costs. He contrasted this with what he described as unsustainable growth in some AI companies, giving the example of a live coding firm with over $100 million in revenue but gross retention around 55%, suggesting such companies "will be gone in a few years without sustainable use cases." Hsu emphasized the importance of hands-on building, noting that he personally experiments with tools like Boltbox and that product leaders must iterate to avoid being reinvented by competitors.