Howie Liu on Hiring Agents Like Employees, Plus a $100K Startup Battlefield at AI Engineer World's Fair
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-12
At AI Engineer World's Fair 2026, Airtable and HyperAgent founder Howie Liu laid out the evolution of agent product forms—from completions and chatbots to agents, always-on agents with heartbeats, and agents orchestrating other agents.
He demoed a landscaping business run end-to-end on HyperAgent: a triage agent, a surveyor agent, human approval checkpoints, and agents that keep learning from feedback, with humans shifting to an orchestration and unblocking role.
The session closed with a Startup Battlefield: three finalists from HyperAgent's founding 500 pitched judges Howie Liu, Theo (T3 Chat), and Joshua (HeyGen) for $100K in prizes. Comment IO took the grand prize, Built by Foundry was runner-up, and Kamad placed third.
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