Gusto Cofounder: An AI agent that runs payroll, HR, and benefits without waiting to be asked

Almost every startup or small business today has a wingperson, a principal working partner, or a co-founder. 

When it comes to the core processes needed to make that business operational, having a dynamic working alliance with another person — where business actions often stem from both parties’ unspoken instincts — is what often leads to success.

Eddie Kim, co-founder and CTO of payroll and HR platform company Gusto, tells The New Stack that this fundamental business reality is exactly why his company’s latest software release is called Gusto Cofounder. He drew inspiration from his mother and father, who worked as co-founders of a mom-and-pop shop in Southern California.

“Gusto is a platform for small businesses,” Kim says. “We focus on the back office aspects of what’s needed to keep things operational every day. So that’s functions such as payroll, benefits, human resources, time scheduling and central accounting tasks.”

“Gusto Cofounder isn’t an AI assistant or copilot, nor is it a glorified search engine that works in a basic reactive way i.e. you ask it something and it returns an answer. This is ‘someone’ that business owners can reach out to at any time and actually proactively help with things that will grow the business.”
—Eddie Kim, Gusto.

The original cofounders: mom-and-pop

Looking back to his childhood, Kim describes coming home from school and being left to hang out in the back office of the family business to do his homework. With his dad at the front of the office, his mom was in the back doing payroll, insurance billing, bookkeeping, and appointment scheduling. 

She was also the receptionist and the office manager, a strong woman, the original co-founder in his eyes.

“Gusto Cofounder isn’t an AI assistant or copilot, nor is it a glorified search engine that works in a basic reactive way, i.e., you ask it something, and it returns an answer,” Kim says. “This is ‘someone’ that business owners can reach out to at any time and actually proactively help with things that will grow the business.”

In terms of functions, users can talk to Gusto Cofounder just as they would talk to a human co-founder. Users primarily interact with the software via text messaging or Slack, and it has access to all data that an organization has already entrusted to Gusto.

“Gusto does a lot of things,” explains Kim. “Not just in payroll, but in areas including health insurance, business insurance, workers’ compensation, time scheduling and HR. So, because that means access to sensitive data (people’s salaries and payroll) we have a robust consent framework to enable our platform to securely move billions of dollars every single day, accurately and safely.”

Explicitly secured permission within defined data scopes

To keep entrusted sensitive information safe, Gusto Cofounder’s consent tooling requires “explicit permission” from human users to perform actions, and this stipulation cannot be circumvented. Permissions are deterministically gated through the Gusto codebase, and organizations can set granular permissions for each of the “data scopes” (a technology that defines the boundaries of a dataset) to govern data access.

Once a small business begins to elevate Gusto Cofounder into its business processes, they can start to allow the software to perform its work with more autonomy. Once actions have been reviewed, users can set thresholds so that the software no longer requires permissions to perform its work.

“It’s the best code I’ve written in my whole entire life. It is a really solid product and we’ve built it much faster than I ever thought would have been possible. I think the future of development is not just engineers writing code, it’s everybody, whether you’re an engineer, a product manager, a designer, or a data professional.” – Eddie Kim.

“Gusto Cofounder doesn’t just do things that you do within Gusto,” clarifies Kim. “It will connect to third-party systems, such as Google Workspace, to read data out of an organization’s Google Sheets and perform the necessary calculations (for payroll, or other tasks) in exactly the way a business owner would do it. It then puts that into Gusto and runs the payroll, runs the calculations, and texts the business owner a text saying ‘here’s the payroll numbers for this week’, all neatly done.” 

Eight weeks’ work, with Claude Code

Kim explains that the software itself was built using Claude Code by five people in just eight weeks. 

“It’s the best code I’ve written in my whole entire life. It is a really solid product, and we’ve built it much faster than I ever thought would have been possible,” pledges Kim. “I think the future of development is not just engineers writing code; it’s everybody, whether you’re an engineer, a product manager, a designer, or a data professional.”

Third-party connections and beyond

Looking ahead, Kim wants to add more connectors to third-party applications. He also wants to encourage customers to use the platform to codify their work processes and offer other business functions common to industry-specific use cases. 

“Automations created in – let’s say – a dental practice on the East Coast might share some similarities with what a dental practice needs in the Midest – for example because of compliance reasons, so we want developers to be able to build on top of our platform in the most modular way possible and be able to choose the parts that work best for them in any given customer use case scenario,” concludes Kim.

Would that one day lead us to a point where we talk about the Google Play App Store and the Gusto Cofounder store? Kim is an upbeat kind of guy; he’s not going to say he doesn’t like that idea.