What if your business was run entirely by AI, yet still struggled to stay afloat?
Imagine a company with no employees, burning through €105,000 every month against a mere €2,300 in monthly revenue. This isn’t fiction; it’s a real-time experiment that you can watch unfold at firmulate.com/live. Here, artificial intelligence models are put through their paces, managing crises, making decisions, and even risking millions — all in a transparent, build-in-public showcase.
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The Experiment: An AI Company Under Pressure
At the heart of this project is a simulated small software firm, run entirely by AI models. Over a week of intense testing, four different frontier models faced the same challenges: the same customers, the same crises, and the same temptation to cut corners. Every decision they made was versioned, auditable, and public — a rare window into how AI behaves when tasked with real-world business management.
Key Findings: AI’s Strengths and Flaws
The results are striking. All four models identified every crisis and refused every manipulation attempt, including sophisticated social engineering tricks like fake CEO messages and reporter tricks. This demonstrates a remarkable capacity for integrity and crisis recognition. However, the true story lies in the details of whether they could close deals and act on critical information.
Only two of the models managed to sign the €55,000 deal their analysis had earned — a crucial step that shows their ability to recognize opportunities and act decisively. Interestingly, a hidden weakness in the company’s own files, buried two document references deep, was the decisive factor in closing the deal at full price (+€4,583 MRR). This indicates that access to and understanding of internal knowledge can be a game-changer for AI decision-making.
Real Money Mechanics & Build-in-Public Transparency
The live experiment isn’t just theoretical. It features a company with 13 synthetic employees, real financial mechanics, and a public cash countdown. Every workday’s decisions are versioned and made transparent at firmulate.com/live. Currently, the company is burning €105,000 each month while generating just €2,300 in recurring revenue, illustrating the brutal reality many startups face — but here, it’s all managed and monitored by AI models in a public test lab.
Insights from the Models
The most thorough participant, Opus 4.8, analyzed over 80 learned rules and conducted deep analyses but still left a potential deal on the table, slipping discipline and escalating issues into a locked department instead of escalating properly. Meanwhile, Kimi K3, which operated without an effort parameter (default API setting), demonstrated the cleanest discipline, yet both models failed to secure the full deal in the end.
Why This Matters for Business and Beyond
For industries like beauty and personal care, understanding how AI behaves under pressure is critical. While this experiment is rooted in a software company’s management, the lessons extend far beyond tech — to any field where automation and AI integration are becoming commonplace. The question isn’t whether AI can write well, but whether it can finish what it starts, stay honest under stress, and deliver value without risking trust or resources.
Watch, Learn, and Prepare
The live site offers an unprecedented view into AI decision-making in a high-stakes environment. Business leaders can run their own wargames against an export of their operations — nothing ever writes back to real systems, so it’s a safe way to test AI’s readiness.
Visit firmulate.com/live to see the experiment in action, and explore the results of a unique AI management test that could shape the future of automation in your industry.
This live experiment shows that AI can recognize crises and refuse manipulation, but closing deals and maintaining discipline remains challenging. Watching AI manage a real-time, high-pressure business offers lessons on trust, decision-making, and the future of automation in industries like beauty and personal care.
Watch it live: firmulate.com/live · Full results: firmulate.com/benchmarks.html
