Artificial intelligence could dramatically reshape how companies are built and run, with the next $1 trillion company potentially employing just five people, said Salim Ismail, founding executive director of Singularity University and founder of OpenExO.
Speaking at the India Today Conclave 2026, Ismail said the rapid acceleration of technologies such as artificial intelligence is changing the economics of innovation and giving small teams unprecedented power to disrupt large corporations.
“The next $1 trillion company will probably have five employees,” he said, adding that the number of people required to build billion dollar companies has been steadily shrinking over time.
A century ago, it typically took around 100,000 employees to build a billion dollar enterprise. That number fell to about 10,000 employees in later decades, he said. Technology companies have since pushed it down further, with Google reaching the milestone with around 1,000 employees and OpenAI with only a few hundred.
The shift, Ismail argued, is being driven by the rapid development of artificial intelligence and other technologies that allow small teams to build powerful products with far fewer resources.
He said artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool but is increasingly becoming the operating framework of organisations. Companies are beginning to redesign workflows so that AI systems interact directly with other AI systems, reducing the need for human intervention in many tasks.
“In the future, we will automate most workflows with AI, with humans mainly overseeing dashboards, monitoring systems and handling exceptions,” he said.
Ismail also warned that large, established organisations often struggle to innovate because they are designed to resist change. He described this resistance as an “immune system” within companies that protects existing processes and structures but makes disruptive innovation difficult.
“If you try anything disruptive in a legacy environment, the antibodies attack you,” he said.
As a result, major breakthroughs increasingly come from small, nimble teams rather than large corporations. This dynamic explains why established technology firms frequently acquire disruptive startups instead of building those technologies themselves, he added.
At the same time, the falling cost of advanced technologies is enabling what Ismail described as “permissionless disruptive innovation”. Tools such as artificial intelligence, sensors and open source software have become so accessible that individuals and small teams can now build technologies that once required large research labs or corporate funding.
The result, he said, will be an explosion of innovation from unexpected places.
“The most dangerous company is a startup you have never heard of,” Ismail said, warning that disruption can now emerge from small teams anywhere in the world.
