Your competitors are not adding AI. They’re built on it.

Ramp shipped 500+ features in 2025 and hit $1B in revenue. With 25 product managers.

That is not a typo.

They did it by treating AI proficiency like a job requirement, not a training initiative. Every function — engineering, sales, legal, finance — is expected to work with AI agents. They even grade employees on a 4-level scale. Level 0 (casual ChatGPT user) means you probably won’t last.

Peter Yang’s latest deep dive profiles three companies — Linear, Ramp, and Factory — that operate this way. Not as a pilot. Not as an experiment. As the default.

Here’s why incumbent boards should care.

These companies are not competing on headcount. They’re competing on leverage. A 55-person startup (Factory) is valued at $300M because every employee manages AI agents the way a senior leader manages a team. Their “hiring” is encoding expert knowledge into reusable AI skills that any employee can invoke.

If you’re in the C-suite or the boardroom, this changes the questions you should be asking. Not “do we have an AI strategy?” but “what percentage of our workforce is at Level 2 or above?” Not “are we experimenting?” but “is our codebase even ready for agents to work in?”

The companies that move slowest on this won’t lose to better technology. They’ll lose to better operating models.

Link to Peter Yang’s full piece. (a good read)

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