Gusto launches Co-Founder AI agent that texts small business owners and autonomously runs payroll

Gusto, the payroll and HR platform serving more than 500,000 small business employers, is launching Gusto Co-Founder, an AI agent designed to automate back-office operations without requiring users to log into the platform at all.

The product's core mechanic is SMS and Slack. Gusto Co-Founder texts business owners when payroll is ready, waits for a simple approval reply, and then runs it. One-off tasks — paying a contractor $500, for instance — work the same way. Edward Kim, Gusto's co-founder and head of technology, describes it as wanting the agent to feel like a teammate you're comfortable texting day or night.

“Gusto Co-Founder is really the first agent that can automate most of what a small business does in their back office. You tell us what your business processes are — payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling — and Gusto Co-Founder will basically run your business process for you. You communicate with it through SMS and Slack. You never even have to log in to Gusto to run your payroll ever again.”

The "work before the work" problem

Kim's clearest argument for why this matters comes from watching customers end to end, not just inside Gusto. He describes a massage spa in New York whose weekly payroll process spans Mindbody for time tracking, Google Sheets for commission and tip calculations, and only then Gusto for the actual payroll run. Gusto's own data showed a fast, clean payroll submission — but the hours of manual work upstream were invisible to the platform. Gusto Co-Founder is built to close that gap by connecting to external systems like Mindbody, QuickBooks, Notion, and Google Workspace, and running the full chain of steps autonomously.

Intentionally unconstrained

Kim says Gusto deliberately avoided putting tight guardrails on what Co-Founder will do. A tour operator could tell it to check the weather each morning and email customers to bring an umbrella if rain is expected — that's a supported workflow. The philosophy is to observe how customers actually use it before deciding what to restrict. The agent won't replace a developer environment, but beyond obvious limits, Kim argues unnecessary constraints are exactly why most people aren't getting real value from AI tools.

Rollout

Gusto is starting with 500 early-access customers selected for being tech-forward and already experimenting with AI in their operations. Rather than broadcasting the launch to its full customer base, the company targets outreach based on which customers are most likely to benefit from a specific product — a go-to-market discipline Kim credits with keeping communication relevant at scale.

On whether Co-Founder could eventually make phone calls on behalf of customers — say, to a state tax agency about a compliance letter — Kim says there's no reason it couldn't. Email on behalf of customers is already in scope, and calls would be a natural extension.

Kim calls the launch the most significant moment for Gusto since the company's founding roughly 14 to 15 years ago.