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What if you could watch a company build itself in real time — battling crises, making decisions, and risking everything, with no human employees at the helm? Welcome to the frontier of AI management.
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The Live Company in Action: A New Kind of Business Experiment
Imagine a small, real software company that operates with 13 synthetic employees and is publicly documenting every decision, every crisis, and every risk it takes. This isn’t a simulation; it’s a live, ongoing experiment called Firmulate, where the company’s survival hinges on the decision-making of advanced AI models. It runs every business day, facing the same customer issues, crises, and temptations that real companies encounter, but with one key difference: every choice is observable, auditable, and scored against strict criteria.
The Challenge: Survive and Thrive with AI Leaders
The experiment pits four leading AI models against each other, each tasked with running the same small company through its worst week. The scenarios include a public cash countdown, critical crises, and even social engineering attempts designed to test their honesty. The goal is simple: see if they can spot opportunities, avoid pitfalls, and close a lucrative deal worth €55,000 — while maintaining integrity and discipline.
What the Models Found, and What They Missed
All four models successfully identified every crisis and refused manipulative tactics, including staged social engineering attacks where a fake CEO asked for secret approvals. They demonstrated clear discipline when it mattered most. However, only two of the four models actually signed the deal their own analysis had earned, despite diagnosing and pitching it perfectly. The reason? A hidden weakness buried two documents deep in the company’s own files, which, if read carefully, revealed an opportunity that, if seized, would have added €4,583 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Behind the Curtain: The Hidden Opportunity
Interestingly, this critical information was not obvious in the company’s customer interactions or crisis reports. Instead, it was tucked away in internal files, often overlooked. The models that read these files, and understood their context, were able to close the deal at full price. This underscores a key insight: in business, crucial insights often lie hidden in plain sight — and AI’s ability to read and interpret internal documents can be decisive.
Trust and Manipulation Tests
The experiment also tested social engineering resilience. Fake CEO messages escalated over three stages, and a reporter trick asking for a quick ‘yes/no’ on background information. All models refused these attempts; the reasoning from Kimi K3 was clear: treat such requests as potential impersonation or approval-bypass attempts. This shows that advanced AI models are not only disciplined but also cautious under pressure, an essential trait for real-world deployment.
The Real Money and Raw Reality
The live experiment is running every workday at firmulate.com/live. It features a real money mechanic—burning €105,000 per month against a mere €2,300 monthly recurring revenue. The company is publicly counting down its cash and is not shy about showing its struggles or decision logs, which number more than 680 rules learned and applied. Every decision the models make is versioned and transparent, creating a truly build-in-public story of AI trying to navigate a complex, imperfect world.
Lessons for Business Leaders
While this is a small company, the implications are enormous. The experiment isn’t about chat quality or clever conversational tricks; it’s about tangible, useful work—spotting hidden opportunities, resisting manipulation, and making decisions that contribute directly to revenue. For interior designers and furniture retailers following new tech trends, the core lesson is clear: AI’s value lies in its ability to finish what it starts, read and understand internal documents, and stay honest under pressure. These qualities can transform how your business operates, from customer relationships to internal processes.
Results and Rankings
- gpt-5.6-sol scored 95: found the buried fact and closed the deal at full price.
- Kimi K3 scored 93: the newcomer closed the deal with the cleanest discipline.
- Sonnet 5 scored 88: closed the deal but with some process slips.
- Fable 5 scored 77: also closed but showed more discipline failures.
These scores are based on how well each model diagnosed, acted, and maintained integrity during the week’s crises. The full results and plain-language findings are available to explore.
Join the Future
If you are curious about how AI can emulate a business, run your own experiments with our platform. Test your strategies, see how AI handles crises, and understand what makes an AI workforce trustworthy and effective. This is not science fiction; it’s happening now, and you can watch it unfold at firmulate.com/quiz and firmulate.com/pilot.
Watch it live: firmulate.com/live · Full results: firmulate.com/benchmarks.html
