UpTrajectory Review
This article discusses how empowering employees to create their own tools can lead to significant cost savings and efficiency improvements. The author shares a compelling example from Remote, where an HR team member developed a critical tool in just over three hours, replacing an expensive third-party solution. This shift highlights a broader trend where non-engineers are leveraging AI to solve problems directly, bypassing traditional development processes.
For small business owners, this approach is particularly relevant as it emphasizes the importance of agility and resourcefulness in operations. By fostering a culture where employees feel empowered to innovate, businesses can adapt quickly to challenges without the delays associated with external vendors. However, while this democratization of tool-building is promising, it's crucial to ensure that employees have the right training and support to maximize these capabilities effectively.
“Anyone who understands a problem can now take a real shot at solving it.” — Fast Company
Takeaway: Encourage your team to innovate and build their own solutions to enhance efficiency and reduce costs.
From the original item — Fast Company:
When a natural disaster hits or a political crisis breaks out, you need to know where your employees are and reach them fast. We were paying $60,000 a year for a third-party tool to handle that. It didn’t fully work.
So someone on our people team built a replacement. Using Claude Code connected to Remote’s employment data, she put it together in three hours and 17 minutes for $216. That kind of tool used to require a specialist vendor, a procurement process, and months of setup. She’s not an engineer. She just knew the problem better than anyone and had the tools to act on it.
I didn’t ask her to do that. Nobody assigned it. She just built it.
She’s not an exception. Over the last year I’ve watched our HR and finance teams handle significantly more volume and complexity than before, with the same number of people. That’s only possible because they work differently now. They’re not waiting for someone else to build the tools they need. They’re building the tools themselves.
For most of history, “builder” was a specific job title. You were an engineer or a developer. Everyone else was a user. AI has changed that. Anyone who understands a problem can now take a real shot at solving it.
To be clear: Engineers are still as valuable as they’ve always been. What’s changed is that they’re no longer the only ones who can build. That’s actually pretty new.
According to Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI report, worker access to AI tools grew 50% in 2025 alone. The org chart that’s been standard in tech for decades, where product writes specs, design mocks it up, and engineering builds it, is changing.
We’ve watched the same thing happen at Remote. We built an internal platform where anyone can build and deploy tools, and people have run with it. A localization specialist built a pipeline tool to manage content workflows across 24 languages. A product manager built something that automatically checks incoming feature requests against the existing roadmap.
I do the same thing. I built an agent that runs in Slack, monitors customer channels, summarizes discussions, and logs what we’re learning over time. My chief people officer is doing similar things. So is our finance team. And sales. And marketing. And legal. It’s not a program or an initiative. People just see what’s possible and start building.
The same shift is changing how new companies form.
When you can go from idea to working product with far less help than before, starting something becomes more realistic. A single person with a clear point of view and the right tools can now build what would have taken way more resources a few years ago.
My expectation is that more people will start companies earlier. Not because everyone wants to be a founder, but because the cost of trying has come down a lot. What you need at the start has changed too. A strong technical team still matters enormously as you scale, but the initial barrier, the one that stopped lots of good ideas before they started, is much lower now.
We’re already seeing the early signs. The share of new startups launched by a single founder jumped from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025, and that acceleration tracks almost exactly with AI tools going mainstream. More people are freelancing with AI, launching side projects, and building income from multiple directions. The companies that form around these efforts look different too. When you can build from anywhere, you hire for the right person, not the nearest one. Teams are distributed across countries not by design, but because that’s just where the work takes you.
For a long time, execution was the hard part. You needed to know how to build, or find someone who did. That kept a lot of good ideas from going anywhere.
That’s mostly not true anymore. What’s left is the harder part: figuring out what’s actually worth building. The judgment, the taste, the willingness to be accountable for whether it works. Those things don’t get automated. They get more important.
The first step into a career used to look the same for almost everyone: Join the right organization, learn the ropes, earn the right to contribute. That path still exists and still matters. But now there’s another one: Find a real problem and go build something. That’s available to more people, in more places, than it’s ever been.
Job van der Voort is CEO and cofounder of Remote.