Why AI Agents Will Quietly Replace 80% of Investment Teams

Why are humans, not models, still the biggest bottleneck to AI progress, and what happens when that bottleneck becomes a business?

In this episode, David Weisburd, founder of How I Invest, speaks with Ali Ansari, Founder and CEO of micro1, about the hidden layer powering today’s AI breakthroughs: high-quality human intelligence.

Ali shares how micro1 evolved from an AI recruiting startup into critical data infrastructure for frontier AI labs, why expert-generated post-training data has become the limiting factor in model performance, and what must change for AI agents to work reliably in real-world production environments. The conversation also explores how focus, market timing, and ruthless prioritization enabled micro1 to scale more than 30× in a single year.

Highlights:

• Why AI progress is still overwhelmingly driven by humans
• The shift from pre-training to expert-level post-training data
• Why AI agents fail in production despite strong demos
• Evaluation frameworks as the missing layer for agents
• How micro1 serves frontier labs and Fortune 500 enterprises
• The hardest pivot: firing customers to focus on the right market
• Why market selection matters as much as product quality
• How investors are using AI to gain workflow-level advantage
• Humans as operators of agents, not coworkers
• How focus became micro1’s biggest competitive advantage

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