Firing the Department Isn’t the Same as Fixing the Work

Bolt’s CEO, Ryan Breslow, eliminated his company’s entire HR department. He replaced it with a smaller team he calls “people ops,” and he has been saying ever since — first in a post last year, then on stage at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit in May — that the problems the HR team was “creating” simply disappeared when the team did.

It is a satisfying story. It also leaves out most of the story.

What the celebration laps skip

Bolt was valued at $11 billion in 2022. By 2025, that figure was about $300 million. Breslow returned as CEO in March 2025, in the middle of that collapse, and the HR elimination was part of a broader cut of roughly 30% of the company. He describes the result as a leaner team giving customers more attention than they have had in four years. It is also, by his own telling, a team a quarter of its former size, at a company a fraction of its former size.

None of that makes him wrong about the work. It does mean his experiment ran under conditions almost no small business will ever face: a company that had already shrunk so much that whole departments no longer matched the business underneath them.

Cutting a department is easy to applaud when the company has already shrunk around it.

The small-business version has no department to cut

A 15-person business does not have an HR department. It has an owner answering payroll questions at 9 PM. It has a lead chasing onboarding paperwork between actual jobs. It has one person who simply knows how everything works — where the forms live, which carrier contact answers the phone, what the last three hires were told.

In a company that size, “HR” is not a department. It is a pile of necessary work that has landed, by default, on whoever would carry it.

Fire that person — or burn them out until they quit — and the work does not disappear. The questions still get asked. The paperwork still comes due. It just lands on whoever is left, which in a small business usually means the owner, at a worse hour, with less context than the person who left.

This is the coordination problem every small team already knows. The work between the work — the chasing, sorting, reminding, drafting, and re-sending — grows quietly until it is sitting on your strongest people, and those people are the ones you can least afford to spend that way.

The third option

Breslow’s diagnosis is half right. A great deal of what filled his HR team’s week was repetitive, process-shaped work — scheduling, form-chasing, routine questions with routine answers, documents that follow a template. He was right that it did not need a department. In a small business, it should never have needed the owner’s evening, either.

That category of work is exactly what AI agents are built to carry:

• Drafting the routine reply, the offer letter, the policy acknowledgment — for a person to approve, not to write from a blank page
• Chasing the missing form and the unsigned document, on a schedule, without being asked twice
• Sorting and flagging what came in, so the human reads the three things that matter instead of the thirty that don’t
• Watching the deadlines — renewals, reviews, compliance dates — and raising a hand before one slips

What agents should not carry is the judgment. The hard conversation, the judgment call about a person, the decision that needs a human who knows the team. That part was never the fluff. It is the job.

Breslow fired the team he had and called it efficiency. There is another option, and it is the one available to businesses that were never big enough to have a department in the first place: keep the team, and take the busywork off it.

Equip the team you have with AI agents — not more hires.

First shared on LinkedIn. If the work between the work is sitting on your strongest people, start with a free evaluation — we’ll map where agents can carry it before you change anything else.

Related reading: The Coordination Tax Is Real. Small Businesses Pay It Differently. · What “Preparing for AI” Should Mean in a Business With 26 People