Lorikeet grew quickly through 2026 with virtually no new headcount. Steve tells us how.
Steve Hind is co-founder and CEO of Lorikeet, an Australian AI customer support company that have raised over AU$100 million and expanded to the US and UK. Before that he was a product lead at Stripe and Watershed.
He defines being AI native as looking at every problem as an opportunity to define work and hand it to an agent, so the amount one person can get done stops being bounded by hours in the day.
Measured against that, Lorikeet has rapidly grown in 2026 with virtually no headcount increase. Steve walks through how: why it was easier for engineers than for operations teams, why he believes it's easier to change agents than people, how they built the knowledge layer that feeds their agents, and why he thinks most companies will end up with only engineers, sellers and owners.
What you'll take away:
AI native, defined: "the amount one person can get done or supervise is effectively unbounded" because it's bounded by their ability to package work for agents, not by hours.
Engineers adjusted fast because the job stayed the same; they climbed "a new rung on the abstraction ladder". Operations teams face a bigger jump: the job itself became building systems.
"It is easier to change agents than people." His Stripe-era "Good Updates" doc is now a skill that drafts the update, rather than having to train team members in the process.
Don't ask people to automate their own job. Ask what's valuable that they never get to. "Instead of automating one job, I might be able to automate five jobs."
Grinding as a service: a PM once watched a month of sales calls over a weekend and found a feature coming up on 40% of them. Agents now do heroics like that on demand.
Put the raw terminal in non-engineers' hands. Claude Code beats the weaker Claude.ai and so everyone at Lorikeet has learnt it this year.
Where AI still sucks: AI writing is full of rhetorical flourish, and agents that report ten crises a day when one is real. "It has the energy of a very junior chief of staff."
Only two roles may reaming: engineer and seller. Maybe a third: owner. Hire for builders, and use work trials rather than interviews to find them.
Links
Steve Hind: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shind/
Lorikeet: https://www.lorikeetcx.ai/
Hosted by Alasdair Bell
Alasdair Bell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alasdairbell/
Fractional Head of AI: https://www.alasdairbell.com/
Chapters
00:00 Cold open
02:39 Meet Steve Hind
03:06 What AI native means at Lorikeet
04:34 Two kinds of adjustment pain
06:18 Engineers adapt, ops rethinks
08:03 Easier to change agents than people
10:23 One builder per ops team
11:50 Pair builders with experts
13:06 Blessed patterns for agents
14:57 The knowledge layer: build or buy
17:02 Battle cards built at runtime
18:12 Don't automate your own job
19:59 Grinding as a service
22:59 What AI still gets wrong
25:23 Why AI can't write
26:22 Claude Code for non-engineers
28:48 Noncompliance is a system problem
29:56 The last 20% of adopters
31:57 Can versus should
33:59 Engineer, seller, owner
34:54 Hiring for builders
36:30 Work trials over interviews
37:41 Work in ten years
