90,000 hours of manual back-office work.
By Joanna Lambadjieva · September 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
90,000 hours of manual back-office work.
Automated in months.
By people who can't code.
This is Akai.
The agent platform Deel built to run its own operations.
Now they're selling it to everyone else.
Here's what makes it different from anything I've seen:
You don't configure it.
You record your screen.
Walk through the process once.
Talk through what you're doing.
And Akai turns it into a full workflow.
(Yes. That's it. That's the setup.)
It captured approval thresholds nobody told it about.
It figured out VAT logic from the order someone did things in.
It detected edge cases across hundreds of employees.
And folded every one of them into the workflow automatically.
What this means for operations teams:
✓ Non-technical people build production-grade automations
✓ The system learns from every run across your entire org
✓ It connects to legacy systems without pre-built APIs
✓ It gets cheaper as it gets smarter (fewer tokens per task over time)
✓ Permissions, security, audit trails, spend limits all built in
Some numbers worth sitting with:
→ Deel is a $17B company and the legal employer in 150 countries
→ 100% remote team of 7,000
→ $500M in revenue last quarter with the same headcount
→ 90,000 hours of copy-paste and follow-up work freed up for higher-value tasks
Claude Code and Codex can automate for one person.
Akai learns from the collective intelligence of your entire team.
Self-improving. Collaborative across thousands. Gets cheaper as it scales.
That's not a productivity hack.
That's a different operating model.
Deel guarantees 1,000 hours saved in your first 30 days or full refund.
If you run a company over 100 people, that bet costs you nothing
I also have a few early access spots with $5,000 of Akai credits each.
Let me know in the comments if you want one and I'll send over.