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

vein. So,

yeah. And I actually I bought the property right next to your home.

Yeah.

And I'm putting a a little data center in.

Perfect. As long as I can uh throw an Ethernet cable over there. Well, we have Edward Kim from Gusto. He's the co-founder and head of technology. Welcome to the show, Edward. How are you doing?

I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for hopping on.

Great to have you on. Great to meet you.

I I think

Yeah, nice to meet you. I think I'm the third and final co-founder.

Final co That's what I was going to say. So, uh

there must be one more you guys have hidden. Yeah. One up your just us three.

No, just three. Okay. Well, uh, anyway, take us through the launch today. Tell us what's happening in Gusto world.

Yeah. So, today I'm really excited. I think it's the most important moment for us as a company since the launch of the company almost 14 15 years ago. Um, and we're launching today Gusto Co-founder. Um, Gusto Co-founder is

really the first uh agent that can automate most of what a small business does in their back office. Mhm.

You guys were just talking about um personal computers and I have a Mac Mini where I set up Open Claw. It took me eight hours to set up.

Yeah.

Pain in the ass. Yep.

Um and as soon as I got through the entire setup, I didn't really know what to do with it, right? I still kind of like use it as a glorified

uh search search engine.

People in the back.

Sorry. Some someone on your someone on your team was

in the office. We're in we're in the office here in Doc Patch.

Um people still using it still as a glorified search engine. Yeah. Um and that's kind of the problem that we set out to solve with Gusto co-founder.

Yeah.

Uh instead of starting from the technology uh and and then giving people a blank canvas on something to do with it, uh what Guso co-founder does is we start with all of the problems that we're already helping our customers with payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling, time, and then we bring on a lot of the um power of AI AI into it. Uh so at the center of Gusto co-founder is a concept called automations and essentially you tell us what your business processes are uh starting with payroll benefits all these things that we're already doing for you and Gusa co-founder will basically run your business process for you uh you communicate with it through SMS and Slack. So you don't really even interface with it through a uh through a website. Um and then of course we'll connect to all of your systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. Uh so notion, Quickbooks, uh Google Workspace, you have a lot of information and data that sits outside of Gusto as well. What Gusto Gusto co-founder does is it brings it all together into one place where it can automate your your your business processes.

Why why SMS and Slack? Why not uh like a chat interface and a gusto app directly? Like what what what does that allow you? I think it just I mean

I'll tell you it just mimics exact I mean uh

I I remember even with how Gusto how easy to use Gusto was in 2018 when I had my first business. I was still relieved when we hired somebody whose job was just to kind of like handle everything on the payroll side. And if I needed something done, I would just text them or I would slack them and say, "Hey, hey, can you do this thing or hey, we're we're onboarding this person or this contractor uh you know uh we needed to like make sure they get paid by this day or whatever it was." Uh and so I I just think like actually actually making it feel like a teammate is is uh getting you much closer to the experience of like people are not waking up every morning. Entrepreneurs are not waking up saying like I want to spend a bunch of time in my payroll platform today, right? Like you want it to be so seamless that it's just it's just happening.

Yeah, that that's exactly right. We want it to feel like your teammate. Um it should be someone that you know you feel comfortable texting um having run processes for you. So you could have it actually text you when it's run your payroll. Uh it'll it'll tell you the like total amount and all you have to do is say I approve it. It'll actually run your payroll. So you never even have to like log into Gusto to run your payroll ever again.

Um if you want to do more one-off things like hey pay this contractor 500 bucks, you could just text it as well. Um one of the things I really loved about OpenClaw is just it just blew my mind. It was such a simple concept that seems so obvious, the ability to text with it through Telegram. Um, and that's kind of I wanted to bring that magical experience into Gus a co-founder. It it just really changes the game and it's hard to understate how important that is.

Yeah. So is the product development for this sort of like indigenous in the sense that your your experience are like informing the product decisions or is it you're noticing customers like you're noticing an uptake or you I don't even know if you can detect if your customers are interfacing with Gusto's core endpoints or UI uh with OpenClaw like are you able to see some sort of data to show that there's demand for this or is it just like you know you've experienced it and you're you're launching this.

Yeah. I mean, if you just um observe some of our customers, like I'll give one example. There was a um massage spa in New York and what they do every week to run payroll is they typically have um work tracked in some other system.

In this case, it was MindBody, right? A lot of like spa, yoga studios, Pilates, they track work of their workers in in MindBody. Then every week what they'll do is they'll export data from there. They'll put it into Google spreadsheets. Um they'll run some crazy calculation in there. They'll say, you know, if you worked this many um if you did this many massages and you'll get paid this much. If you upsold CBD oil or hot stone massage, you get 15 bucks for each one of those. That goes in as a bonus and and commission. And then here's how we do tips. We'll split it across all of our therapists. They do all that calculation and then and only then they go into Gusto put in all that information to run payroll.

That part we see obviously, right? And so if you only look at that part, we're like great, we did a great job. It takes like seconds to run payroll. But if you look at the entire process that they're running, there's this whole what I call the work before the work that happens. And you really only like understand that when you observe a customer like end to end, not just using your systems, but all the systems that they're using to run their business. And that's why kind of having these connectors and Gusto co-founder was so important to us. We recognize that these businesses are not doing everything within Gusto, at least not yet. And um they have multiple systems that they're connecting and and these entrepreneurs are really creative in stringing them together, but that's still a lot of work at the end of the day. and they can just really kind of have those business processes just tell Gustoa co-founder once that like hey go export it from this system um do these calculations on it then put it into Gusto run payroll and then text me the the final amount so that I can approve it before you actually run payroll

that's last question for me I'm I'm very interested in how uh like I don't know like like a company of gusto scale thinks about launching new products within Gusto like because you sort There are a lot of people that are just like, "Oh, Gusto works perfectly. I'm not going to think about it." And you have to like you have to market this new feature, this new product to your existing customers. Obviously, it's a draw for new customers because new capability, better product, but also just you have to tell people obviously you can email them, but I'm interested to know like because every payroll admin probably has a phone number already like like authenticated for two factor like is there some sort of like internal go to market strategy that's more mature than just throw it in the newsletter, tell everyone that this thing exists? like how are you thinking about actually onboarding, measuring churn, making sure there's satisfaction of for sort of like a new product within the Gusto ecosystem?

Yeah, I mean I think it's really just talking to your customers all the time. I think um really understanding what their needs are. There's always going to be more problems that we can solve for them. Yeah. Um, and then when we solve those problems, um, you know, we're pretty good at tracking, um, either through, um, you know, customers we've talked to or through our data, like how do we reach out to those folks that would specifically benefit from what we just built.

Um, that way we're not, you know, kind of spamming every single one of our 500 plus thousand uh, employers on Gusto for every little thing that we launch. We want to kind of just kind of communicate to them um, only the most relevant things. And so with Custoer, we're we've reached out to 500 customers to give early access to this starting today. Um and they're naturally a little bit more on the tech forward ones or the ones that we've talked to that, you know, are already using um AI to automate parts of their business, but can do a lot more.

Yeah. Cost. How much does it cost you? How much does it cost the customer? Is inference a problem? Like are you able to use a series of models? like how are you thinking about uh is it is it like

yeah I think you got to worry about people being like hey I'm trying to ship this new feature you think

hey co-founder like can you actually just do product development for me too and it's like no problem boss

I mean I think the philosophy we took with Gusto co-founder is we wanted to unconstrain it as much as possible uh because I I really want to just learn to see how people use it right if you have it um say hey text me the weather

every morning especially if it's going to rain today because my business is a tour business.

Yeah, that might actually relevant even though it sounds like a wild like just random openclaw task like that actually does make sense in that business context.

Yeah. And then and then look at my customer list and send them an email uh saying to bring an umbrella for today's tour

to build this automation.

You can do that on gusto co-founder and we had some conversations do we really want to let people do this? And I think our bias has always been

why not right? That's the problem of why people aren't getting the most out of AI is because I think a lot of folks are putting unnecessary constraints um on those systems. And obviously like at some point there's certain things that we won't want Gusto co-founder to do. We're not going to have it like you know

serve as your cloud code or anything like that.

Um but I think for now we're we're more in a learning mode. We want to kind of see how people use it. We want to encourage

people to get as creative as possible with it.

Okay. Jordan, you think what I'm thinking? Automatic swear jar. Anytime you swear docks your gusto payroll automatically.

I like it

agentically. This is

You can do that. Probably probably

I like that you guys didn't uh just pick some quirky like humanlike name.

Oh yeah.

Co-founder.

It is just like an just like a very

Yeah. I mean that's kind of how we think about it. It should be literally the person that you are on a texting basis you feel comfortable reaching out to.

Yeah. um day or night to take care of something to help you with running your business.

That's great.

Would you one day allow it to make uh calls on behalf of customers? Like let's say there's some, you know, you you have a

um

I9 verification. Uh yeah, I was thinking more like you know let's say you have an employee in another state and like you know the the the tax board there or some type of employment agency like

call them and explain this to them.

You know I feel like every every startup uh founder is used to getting like

some type of letter in the mail from some random state that you pay to come and you have to call and you have to call. I feel like there's probably some stuff there down the line.

Yeah. I mean I I don't see why not. We don't do that today, but you can just certainly tell it to um email

on your behalf, right? And so if we're willing to do email

um then why not call us?

That'd be amazing. Well, uh thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations on the launch.

Congrats to the team.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Okay, sectional. We got to pull up the Ferrari Luche. I think this is the third mention of the Ferrari Luche of the show. this show,

but uh people have been talking about different specs and uh this Instagram account showed the uh Ferrari Luche 1.9 JTD base spec and I think it looks fantastic. What do you think? Scroll through some of these. So, this is uh this is when you get it with a 1.9 L turbo diesel. It's like a base model Civic uh specked like this. It looks fantastic. Just just minimal minimal. Scroll through all of them. Here we go. Look at H. Yeah. The the the central console delete and then the stake shift there. Just

I actually love the way this looks.

You don't?

I do.

This looks like a 1995 Honda Civic.

I think this looks

the Okay. The rear end looks a little bit rough, but

just ultra ultra discounted. Uh

let's compare it to the Spectre EV from Rolls-Royce.

Yeah. Uh coming out starting price up

around half a mil.

Okay.

307 milei range

20% cheaper than a luch.

Uh 0 to 64.1 seconds.

Good. Very slow. Very big. Very heavy. But that's

6,600 lb. It's the same as a Cybert truck.

Same as a Cybert truck. That is wild.

Uh but it looks incredible.

Okay. Well, would you get one of these? one Rolls-Royce Spectre series 2 or 10 Model S Plaids used. Model S Plaid goes 0 to 60 in two seconds. You can get 10 of them. So, you can just be launching them off some cliff, dive out, get in the next one because you got 10 of these things. 0 to 60 in two seconds.

It's a tough call. It's a tough call when you put it like that.

At 50k, the uh the the used Tesla Model Plat is hard to beat. Uh what do you think? I mean, the alternative with the lucha, you could get 15 Tesla Model S Plaids

or one Lucha.

You and the crew just 0 to 60 in two seconds. The drag racing would be very, very good. You have your whole whole bachelor party doing drag races. Uh, what do you think of the GMC Hummer X SUV pickup truck concept?

I thought this would be good for you.

I like this. And you know where they launched it? The Pasadena Design Studio. Can you believe that? They brought it to my hometown. It's a sign, John.

It's a sign. I think it looks good. The the the the truck also looks good. Um I It's interesting because it looks It still looks huge, but uh in a world of uh 20 uh 1,250 horsepower Corvettes, ultra luxury Cadillacs, the GMC Hummer SUV, and pickup trucks are no longer the mo most outrageous new cars in the General Motors family. That does not mean they've been forgotten, though. GM is celebrating the opening of a new design studio in Pasadena, California. Let's go. By reimagining its enormous electric SUV with a pair of outdoorsy concepts, one size smaller than we've seen recently. Uh I think I I think it looks cool. Looks very like uh ready to crawl over some rocks. I think it's a fun fun time. Anyway, uh let me tell you about

let's have Whistland Diesel put it to the test cuz he tried to test a Cybert truck and I think it it stopped. It basically bricked before he could really make a video.

100%. We got to we got to see the the what what does he call it? Durability test. Whistland diesel dur durability test. Uh let's see it. Uh let me tell