We're building AI to replace customer service jobs.
People are going to lose their jobs to tools like this one. Not moved into higher-value work. Replaced entirely.
If too many jobs get replaced without replacing the salaries, the world has a very big problem on its hands. We don't have all of it figured out yet. We're starting by giving back to the people this technology replaces.
Automate away the workers, and you automate away the customers.
Here's the part the spreadsheets leave out. The worker a company just replaced was also somebody's customer. Do that across enough of the economy and you don't get a lean, efficient future. You get one where almost nobody has a paycheck left to spend.
Everyone who earns a paycheck also spends one.
And universal basic income doesn't quietly ride to the rescue either. UBI is paid for out of tax dollars, and the two biggest sources of those, income taxes and payroll taxes, are built mostly on wages. No jobs, no wages, no tax base, no UBI. The safety net is woven from the very thread all this would be cutting.
So handing some of the value back isn't charity, and it isn't guilt. It's the only version of this future that doesn't fall in on itself. Automate the whole world out of work and you've automated away the people who were going to buy what you're selling.
If it learned the job from you, you should own a piece of it.
AI didn't come from nowhere. It learned from the work of nearly everyone who came before us, from the answers we wrote down to the problems we quietly solved. It's closer to an inheritance the whole species built than the private property of the few companies that happened to train on it.
So the wealth it throws off should find its way back to the people it came from. That won't happen on its own, and it certainly won't happen if AI companies do what companies usually do, pocket the savings and move along.
Celeste is a small, honest version of the same thing. She learns your business by reading your team's real work, and the day she takes a job over, she's standing on the shoulders of whoever did it first. We think that person should own a slice of whatever she goes on to earn.
How can you even afford this, and why do it in the first place?
It's not philanthropy. It's math.
AI is driving down the cost of labor, fast and hard. Like most technology companies, we've begun using it across our own business, and the savings are large. That is a big part of how we can afford to give most of our profit away.
The easy thing is to keep those savings, the way almost every company will. We think that is short-sighted, and short-lived. If the gains from automating work keep concentrating in the accounts of a handful of AI providers, the economy runs into catastrophic structural problems, and fast.
Until a better plan comes along, the only real solution we can see is to share the profit this technology throws off, widely enough to keep the wheels turning. So we give ours back. Not out of guilt, and not to look good.
It's not philanthropy. It's math.
So this is what we're doing.
The Dividend Standard is our commitment to direct the greater of 5% of IMCeleste's revenue or 70% of its profit to the workers our AI puts out of work, every year, as a real ownership stake rather than a one-time check. The revenue floor means it pays from our first dollar, not our first profit.
We're building toward handing them that stake in the company, not a thank-you and a wave. The commitment is in force now, from a form and a checkbook today to the trust that will hold it permanently. It's real, and it's already begun.
If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently.
What we won't pretend
The mechanism isn't finished, and we can't promise nobody gets displaced or that we'll make anyone whole. In a year with no profit there's nothing to share, and we expect our first few years to be lean. Better you hear that from us now than later.
Why there are no investors
We're bootstrapped, on purpose. A promise to route most of the value away from shareholders is a hard one to keep with a cap table full of people expecting the opposite. By the usual measures that makes us close to uninvestable. We wrote that down too. Read the investor note.