Former Microsoft Team Plans to Buy a Company and Hand It to AI

Three former Microsoft researchers have announced a plan that pushes the boundaries of corporate automation: buying a real, operating business and handing its management entirely to artificial intelligence, with no human in the CEO's chair. The startup Skyfall AI emerged from stealth on July 20, 2026, revealing that it had spent nearly a year building technology meant to replace not individual tasks, but the entire management function of a company.

From Chatbot to Boardroom

The project is led by Sam Pasupalak, Kaheer Suleman, and Sumit Pasupalak. Pasupalak and Suleman met nearly two decades ago at the University of Waterloo and together founded Maluuba, a natural language processing lab that Microsoft acquired in 2017 for about $160 million. After the acquisition, the team continued AI research at the company's Canadian division before deciding, almost a decade later, to pursue their own, far more ambitious project.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco and keeps a research hub in Toronto. Rather than relying on standard large language models, Skyfall is building what it calls "Enterprise World Models," systems designed to simulate thousands of possible decisions and predict how an entire organization evolves over time, balancing competing priorities across hiring, pricing, operations, and cash flow.

Tested on a Video Game First

Before the team decided to hand a real company over to AI, the technology was tested in a simulated environment, starting with a video game. Only once those tests succeeded did the team feel confident the model could handle managing a real business, where bad decisions cost actual money rather than just virtual currency.

Last year we started with the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon - Kaheer Suleman, co-founder and CTO of Skyfall AI

How the Experiment Will Work

Skyfall intends to buy a small B2B SaaS or e-commerce company for up to a million dollars, then hand the AI control over pricing, marketing, customer service, finance, and operations. Humans will retain only legal and regulatory duties, such as signing documents, opening bank accounts, or handling tax filings. The goal is to double the acquired company's revenue within six months while gradually reducing human involvement in day-to-day decisions.

The founders say they will publicly document the experiment's progress, including its failures. That sets their approach apart from the typical AI startup narrative, which usually only touts successful deployments.

Why a CEO Could Be Replaced by AI

The founders' reasoning rests on the belief that running a company is largely about coordination, not uniquely human creativity. Pasupalak admits that he himself spends most of his time not on strategy but on the operational upkeep of the organization, and it's precisely that layer of management work he wants to automate.

More than half of my time goes into operations - meetings, budgeting, coordinating teams, campaigns - Sam Pasupalak, co-founder and CEO of Skyfall AI

We want to democratize the power of a CEO to all the small businesses around the world - Sam Pasupalak, co-founder and CEO of Skyfall AI

Not the First Such Experiment, But the Boldest

Skyfall is not the first company to test AI as a business decision-maker. Anthropic has been running its Project Vend for some time, in which Claude manages a vending machine, learning from its own mistakes in ordering stock and setting prices. Skyfall's plan, however, is on a far larger scale: instead of a single device, the AI is meant to take the helm of an entire company, complete with employees, customers, and financial obligations. Suleman stresses that the key technical challenge is the gap between simulation and economic reality, where market conditions shift in ways that are hard to predict even for today's best language models.

For Polish companies and investors following the AI market, the Skyfall experiment signals where automation of small and medium-sized business management could be headed. If AI genuinely proves capable of running a profitable business on its own, it could accelerate the debate over the role of boards and management teams at smaller companies, where the cost of a full leadership team is relatively the heaviest burden.

Skyfall has not yet disclosed which company it plans to buy or when the deal will be finalized. The success or failure of this experiment, which the founders have promised to document publicly as it unfolds, will be one of the first tangible tests of the claim that artificial intelligence can replace not just workers, but company leadership itself. Sources: Former Microsoft AI Leaders Are Spending $1M To Prove AI Can Replace CEOs (forbes.com), Skyfall AI, founded by ex-Microsoft researchers, emerges from stealth to build the world's first autonomous enterprise (techstartups.com), An AI Is About to Become a First-Time CEO (pymnts.com), AI Is Coming for CEOs' Jobs Next: Ex-Microsoft Leaders Bet $1M It Can Replace the Boss (ibtimes.co.uk)