Hastings outlines a 3-step playbook for AI automation startups
Helen Hastings · #2288 She had people do AI’s work · Dec 17, 2025 · at 35:52
Helen Hastings, founder and CEO of Quanta, describes her framework for building AI startups that replace legacy manual workflows.
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“I would say for anyone looking to use AI to start a company to displace what was traditionally done very manually by humans, first, see what they're doing really understand it then, two, do it yourself. As you bring on your first customers. So do the work yourself. Don't outsource it. Make sure you understand the ins and outs of it. And then three, make sure you are in your data storage, really understanding and building up a clean structured data. Because when you apply AI on top of that, it can be like magic. But if you're taking ChatGPT and putting on messy data, you're, you can only get garbage out if you put garbage in. So make sure the data that you're storing is, is Clean it understood. And then after that, you'll be able to automate something that was manual before.”
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