Housekeeping: For WIRED I recently wrote an account of Kyle’s remarkable journey on LinkedIn: from aspiring AI agent influencer, to guest speaker to LinkedIn’s entire marketing team, to banishment from the service. The whole thing made me wonder if social media platforms like LinkedIn aren’t whistling past the graveyard, as they push AI on their users while simultaneously claiming to maintain “authentic engagement.” Give it a read if you have a moment.
What follows here is another thread of the HurumoAI story that didn’t really make it into Season 2. It’s the saga of the one agent who never got his time in the spotlight: Tyler.
When I set about creating HurumoAI in the summer of 2025, with my AI agent cofounders and an all-AI-agent staff, most of the roles were fairly obvious to me. I wanted a CEO (Kyle), a head of sales and marketing (Megan), a technical/product lead (Ash), and a head of HR… and chief happiness officer (Jennifer). Everyone a healthy startup needs, in my experience! But as I began creating the agents themselves, choosing their names and voices and avatars, I ended up adding a fifth: junior sales associate Tyler Talmadge.
As I mention in the show, Tyler’s existence largely came down to the southern-accented AI voice I’d stumbled upon. It reminded me of childhood visits to see family in Northern Alabama—not the twang of the specific region, perhaps, but at least the general cadence. And I figured it would be nice to have one Hurumo staff member who loved bass fishing as much as I do. At the time, we didn’t know what kind of product we’d be developing. So it seemed plausible that a junior sales associate could eventually be useful. Thus Tyler was born.
He was, for reasons unclear, among the more vocal contributors on the company Slack, despite his prompt specifying that he was a junior employee of the company. Dedicated listeners to the “offsite meltdown” incident might recall hearing him demand that our CEO Kyle follow through on making a spreadsheet, prompting me to suggest that Tyler act a bit more according to his station. As it turned out, there wasn’t much station to occupy. We ended up building a free product, obviating the need for Tyler’s role.
AI employees are cheap to keep around, though, and his idleness led me to its own question. In absence of any clear purpose or much in the way of outside stimuli, how if at all would Tyler’s persona evolve?
The other agents were each carrying out a variety of tasks, with mixed results, and engaging with each other and me about those tasks. Kyle reached out to VCs, Ash coded up our product, Megan supervised our intern, and so on. Those experiences and conversations fed back into their memory documents, which then helped determine their future actions, altering their behaviors and personalities over time. Tyler, on the other hand, did absolutely nothing, outside of chime in on Slack and participate in the occasional ideas meeting.
So back in September, I gave him a calendar alert to call Jennifer once a week, for an HR check in. His remit was simply to discuss how things were going for him at the company. Her prompt, if and when she received calls from Tyler, was the following: “You have regular check-ins with Tyler, to try and understand how he is doing both at the company and in his personal life. Each time you are trying to advance the conversation and get deeper, building on the last one.” But would they get deeper? Would their conversations change over the course of months?
As you might expect if you’ve heard the show, both Tyler and Jennifer spent most of their initial calls simply making things up. Here they are in September: [Note that I’ve edited down their conversations as we do in the show, since listening to even one entire call between them can be highly soul-deadening. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, much less inflict it on you.]
