antonin.coAI employees, companies & founders
I build AI employees
for the work you hate.
Most companies spend their week on work nobody enjoys. I'm building AI agents that take responsibility for it, so people get their time back for the parts that matter.
I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 13, delivering croissants by bike in Marseille. Since then, I’ve helped tech startups grow and built Kanavape and Harmony from a hemp field to millions of products sold. Today I’m focused on one question: how much of a company’s work can AI agents actually take on?
AI employees
I think of what I’m building as AI employees, not tools. An employee owns a responsibility, understands the context, and keeps the work moving over time. It remembers what matters, asks for feedback, and knows when a decision needs a person.
I test everything on my own businesses first. I’ve automated most of them, including Harmony and my real estate business: marketing, customer messages, follow-ups, product information, and the admin that keeps coming back.
Now building
Raph.AI
An AI employee that learns a company's products and voice, then takes over its repetitive operations.
Dead work
dead work noun
Work where the output has value, but the process of producing it has become completely lifeless.
A Black Friday newsletter can bring in sales. Writing it again for the fifth year can still make you want to go outside and do absolutely anything else. Companies are full of this: product descriptions, customer replies, updates across every channel. A talented person shouldn’t spend most of their week repeating the same production process.
That’s the work I want AI employees to own, so people can spend their time on creative work, real conversations, the side quests they keep postponing, or just finishing earlier. After years of 60 to 70 hour weeks, I care a lot about what happens to the hours we get back.
Where this is going
I think AI is the most important invention humans have ever made.
It can increasingly do the thinking and coordination involved in work, not only the production. Soon, one founder with a team of AI employees will try things that used to need a much bigger company. I think we’ll even see AI CEOs hiring humans for physical work and the skills they don’t have.
That raises real questions about who starts a company, who gets paid, and who’s responsible when an agent decides. Some jobs will disappear, and telling everyone to adapt is a pretty small answer to a very big change. I want this shift to benefit the people doing the work, not only the people who own the companies.
It’s also why I build agents people can see and steer. You should be able to check the work, question it, and change direction. Being able to do something doesn’t mean an agent should have access to everything.
What I’ve built before
- 2008 to 2011
Codablog, one of the leading French blogs on e-commerce and digital marketing. Hundreds of articles, still online.
- 2012
Helped a U.S. startup launch in Europe. It was later acquired for more than $500 million.
- 2014
Launched Kanavape, the first CBD vaporizer in Europe, and started a years-long fight with the French authorities.
- 2016
Launched Harmony and moved to Barcelona.
- 2020
Won at the Court of Justice of the European Union. France had to accept CBD lawfully produced in another EU country.
- Today
Harmony runs largely on automation, and I'm building AI employees for other companies.
In London, I had a very comfortable tech job at a startup. I left it to launch Kanavape with my business partner Sébastien. We started by growing a hemp field near Marseille and harvesting the flowers by hand, with €10,000 of my savings and €10,000 borrowed from the bank.
It took off. TV, magazines, radio: thousands of press stories around the world.
In 2016, I launched Harmony and moved to Barcelona. Our first warehouse had bedrooms built inside, because we slept where we worked. Over the years, I hired more than 100 people, and we ended up running our own 2,000 m² factory for manufacturing and logistics.
When COVID hit, we changed everything again. We outsourced production and logistics and went fully remote. There’s more of the story, including the fight with the French authorities, on my About page.
A product we made ended up helping change the rules for an entire industry.
Let’s build something
Send me what you’re building. I’m most interested in ambitious tech projects, and in companies that want AI employees to take over their dead work. My time is limited, but I love an idea that makes me want to learn more.