Robinhood CEO Wants Every Employee Managing AI Agents Around the Clock

By Daniel Okafor

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says his "North Star" is for every worker to run "a team of agents" that stays productive while they sleep. His target is simple to state and hard to execute: turn Robinhood into what he calls a "24/7 company."

Tenev laid out the vision on the latest episode of the Sources podcast. His view of the future job description is blunt.

"So we should be a 24/7 company," he said. "Each person should be a 24/7 agent manager — your job becomes managing your agents."

What are AI agents, exactly?

AI agents are software systems built to pursue a goal without a human approving each step. An agent breaks an assignment into smaller tasks and works out how to tackle them. It can use tools such as web browsers to complete work. Some agents spot their own mistakes and judge their own progress.

The current uses are concrete. Workers deploy agents to:

• gather information from multiple sources and turn it into a research report
• book travel
• build apps and websites
• manage email
• analyze stocks

How does this change trading?

Tenev expects agents to generate "a large portion" of trading volume for individual investors. Each person would supply the context their agents need to carry out tasks.

He argued agents hold structural advantages over human traders. They work around the clock. They buy and sell across different asset classes at the same time. They move through Robinhood's trading options without friction. Agents "don't have a lot of the limitations that we have as human traders," Tenev said.

The comparison is straightforward: a human trader watches one screen and sleeps eight hours; an agent watches every market and never logs off.

Why do agents need to test their own work?

Tenev's vision extends past investing. He said AI coding tools have turned him into an engineer again, and he expects the technology to reshape how companies build products.

But overnight productivity requires more than handing an agent an assignment. The agent needs enough information to understand the job. It also needs a way to check its results.

"They have to be able to test their work," Tenev said. Without that capability, he explained, an agent eventually stops and hands the task back to a person.

That constraint forces companies to rethink the systems behind software development, including how they test code and release updates. Tenev envisions a continuous cycle in which agents build, evaluate and refine their work, with less human intervention at each step.

"You're going to see an end-to-end automation of product development and infrastructure development," he said.

Research may fall sooner than expected. Researchers already run structured experiments and automated evaluations for testing models, Tenev noted, which means the groundwork for agent-driven research exists today.

"People thought that would be the hardest and the last to go because it's just complex work," he said.

What happens to the manager's job?

Tenev's framing shifts the worker's role from producer to supervisor. The person sets the goal, supplies the context and checks the output. The agent handles the hours in between.

For Robinhood, the bet cuts two ways. Agents as customers could drive a large share of retail trading volume. Agents as employees could compress product development into a continuous loop that runs while the office is dark.