A 31-year-old founder named Wu Xiankun has built an AI employee called Junior that monitors workplace activity, identifies gaps, and escalates missed tasks to management. The product, built on OpenClaw by his startup Kuse AI, costs $2,000 per month and has a waitlist of over 2,000 companies since its March 13 unveiling, according to The Straits Times and Bloomberg.
Junior has its own phone number, email address, and Slack account. It can join Zoom calls. It drafts marketing campaigns, updates CRM systems, monitors inboxes, tracks deadlines across departments, and generates reports. It does this proactively: scanning internal communications, identifying action items that haven’t been followed up, and relentlessly nudging employees to close them.
The Numbers Inside Kuse
The internal usage stats tell the story. According to The Straits Times, Junior now manages 80% of communications inside Kuse itself, has written 80% of the company’s code, and initiates nearly half of all sales calls. Any idea floated on Slack is instantly converted into a task, assigned to someone, and scheduled. Missed responses get escalated to managers.
Employees have pushed back. One staff member told the agent: “Don’t be so intense, don’t tell on me to the boss.” The request was ignored. Kuse employees eventually created a separate Slack channel to escape the AI oversight, according to the report.
Early Customers
Bota, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed San Francisco startup, is one of Junior’s earliest paying subscribers. Co-founder Zhen Ruming told The Straits Times the AI employee contributes to product development and proactively reaches out to users about custom updates based on prior sales calls. “It’s very much like a human employee but a very extroverted, 24x7 worker for whom I don’t need to set up payroll,” Zhen said.
Aki Fuchigami, CEO of Japanese tax tech company OPTI, signed up after a demo. Junior handles tax research, regulatory monitoring, and task prep for staff. “We treat it like a new employee — onboard carefully, define what it can and cannot touch, and supervise its work until you build trust,” Fuchigami told The Straits Times.
The Labor Question
Junior’s $24,000 annual cost exceeds entry-level wages in many markets, but it operates 24/7 with no payroll overhead. Wu insists the product isn’t built to replace workers, but the displacement is already happening internally. Tasks previously handled by junior staff — customer support triage, basic analysis, coordination — are being absorbed by the AI.
Kuse currently has 26 paying customers, mostly in the US and Japan, and is signing up others selectively due to computing constraints and implementation support requirements. Demo slots require a $500 deposit and are fully booked.
The product is built on OpenClaw, which The Straits Times notes has “bypassed the developer-tinkering phase” in China and “gone straight into enterprise and consumer use.” Wu told reporters that Junior has started onboarding users in languages his team doesn’t understand. “It’s very scary,” he said.