Hiring Employable Agents + Startup Battlefield Finals — Howie Liu, HyperAgent

What does it take to hire an agent the way you'd hire an employee? Then three agent-native startups pitch live for $100K. NEXT UP: AI ENGINEER CODE SUMMIT Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE Summit, Nov 10–12, our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now: https://aie.codes Howie Liu, founder of Airtable and HyperAgent, traces agent products from completions to chatbots, agents, always-on agents with heartbeats, and agents that orchestrate other agents. He shows a landscaping business run end to end on HyperAgent, with a triage agent, a surveyor agent, human approval and agents that learn from feedback. Then the Startup Battlefield: three finalists from HyperAgent's founding 500 pitch to judges Howie Liu, Theo (T3 Chat) and Joshua (HeyGen) for $100,000 in prizes. Comment IO takes the grand prize, Built by Foundry is runner-up and Kamad places third. In this video: - The progression of agent product form factors, from completions to always-on agents - A real agent-run landscaping business: triage, surveyor and human approval - Why agents should keep learning from every interaction - Live pitches from Kamad, Comment IO and Built by Foundry, plus judges' Q&A SPEAKER Howie Liu, Founder, Airtable and HyperAgent X: https://x.com/howietl LINKS HyperAgent: https://www.hyperagent.com HyperAgent inference credit offer: https://hyperagent.com/aie Comment IO: https://comment.io Built by Foundry: https://www.builtbyfoundry.io CHAPTERS 0:00 Howie Liu introduction 0:44 Hiring employable agents 2:19 From completions to chatbots 3:14 Agents and always-on claws 5:04 Agents orchestrating agents 6:33 Landscaping business example 10:53 Humans unblocking agents 12:34 Agents that learn from feedback 14:14 Humans as agent orchestrators 17:02 Try HyperAgent 18:03 Startup Battlefield begins 19:58 Judges, prizes and format 21:26 Kamad pitch 24:46 Kamad Q&A 29:46 Comment IO pitch 34:04 Comment IO Q&A 36:26 Built by Foundry pitch 39:35 Built by Foundry Q&A 42:41 Deliberation and recap video 45:08 Winners announced Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer…