The Economist recently reported on a new Silicon Valley trend: the “solopreneur.” They give the example of Sarah Gwilliam, who started a business offering grief counseling and the management of family affairs after the death of a loved one. (The Economist quipped that the business is “wedding planning for funerals.”) Gwilliam is the only human employee of her company. AI agents provide “product development, sales, marketing and back-office work.” Silicon Valley types are taking bets on which of these will become the first solopreneur “unicorn:” a privately held company valued at $1 billion.

The trend is plain to see: companies, organizations and enterprises are reducing their human workforce, but are nevertheless still able to remain productive and profitable. This is another way of stating the obvious: that AI will unleash a wave of technological unemployment.

One term being used today to describe such automated enterprises is cyber-physical systems. These are organizations where the bulk of the work and–this is a crucial point– the decisions are made by AI agents. There is much talk today in policy circles about a return of manufacturing to the United States, but I think many, or most of these advocates are imagining 1950s-style factories with tens of thousands of employees, each receiving good wages. A factory today is bereft of human workers–robots have been central to manufacturing for the past 40 years–such that there might be three hundred employees, not 30,000, and many of those are probably managers or sales executives, rather than assemblers. In a manufacturing cyber-physical system, many management decisions are made by AI agents, who then command robots to perform work. The factory of the very near future might operate efficiently with only thirty human workers, or even just three.

Depending on your political outlook, this presents either a dystopian nightmare or an exhilarating opportunity. Hiring and managing a workforce of AI agents would allow a single individual to create a business. At the end of the 19th century, most Americans listed their occupation as self-employed. Today, only about 10% of the population so identifies. Agentic AI and the application of cyber-physical systems could create the conditions where a significant plurality of Americans could once again claim to be self-employed, starting their own solo-enterprises.

Epistemological organizations are ripe for this kind of disruption.  It is likely that the first cyber-epistemological system will be a think tank. Inasmuch as they are public policy research centers, a “solo think tank” would consist of myriad AI agents who would conduct the research and analysis and would compose the white papers, all under the guidance of a single human fellow, who also serves as president. The Fellow would establish the research priorities, would frame the leading questions, and would ensure intellectual integrity, while the AI agents would gather data, model scenarios, and draft reports. The Fellow would review, interpret and contextualize findings, and would perform relationship management, engaging policymakers, securing funding, and ensuring outputs align with societal and political needs. Clients would consult our “solo-Institute” less for raw analysis than for the Fellow’s judgment in steering and curating the AIs’ outputs, a nimble, single-person epistemological operation.

Silicon Valley awaits the first solopreneur unicorn. Who will build the first “soloversity” with the reputational heft of the incumbent players? Imagine an entrepreneurial academic who establishes her own school or college or university, aided by agentic AI and other cyber-epistemological systems.

In my book, Alternative Universities, one of the theoretical models I proposed was the proliferation of microcolleges. I imagined these consisting of around 20 students and one professor, not unlike the setup of Deep Springs College in California. If I were starting a Deep Springs College today, I might work by myself, aided by AI agents who assist in instruction and evaluation of students. AI agents would carry out most of the administrative functions like that of the registrar, budgeting, financial aid, grant management, admissions, recruiting, and bursar services. I—the sole professor–would oversee curriculum, conduct tutorials, mentor students and certify learning. Agentic AI could very well enable an enormous cohort of self-employed academics–otherwise unable to secure tenure-track work in a traditional university–each forming their own soloversity.

The idea of an institution of higher learning with only one academic returns us to the very foundations of the modern university. Peter Abelard, Rabindranath Tagore: each founded a school with themselves as the sole teacher. Recall that the first colleges in the American colonies, which usually had a president who was the single professor. Think of Frank Boyden, the long-serving headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. His influence on generations of boys is legendary. Imagine his school staffed with AI agents under his command, the headmaster now equating with “only human employee.”

The question is, how large could a soloversity become? Could such a cyber-epistemological system scale up to have a thousand students? Ten thousand?  One hundred thousand? I suspect that any effort to scale such an institution would require cybernetic Student Affairs personnel and—critically–cybernetic sports coaches. Indeed, it would not surprise me if a soloversity were built where all academics were automated and the human staff consist entirely of coaches, such is the place of athletics in the modern university.

Before he became the first director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Abraham Flexner founded an experimental college prep school in Louisville, Kentucky. At any one time, he would have about a dozen students, and he would tutor them using his innovative teaching methods. His promise was that his students would gain admission to selective universities in the northeast. A modern-day Flexner could use agentic AI to build a soloversity, one that might become an educational “unicorn.”

David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP.  He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.