AI companies are pushing agents as the next Great Workplace Disruptor, but experts say they’re still not ready for primetime. They often struggle with autonomous decision-making, can’t cooperate with other agents, fail at confidentiality awareness, and integrate poorly into existing systems. 

Industry pioneers like Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi have said that, like the deployment of autonomous vehicles, humans need to be in the loop in order for agents to succeed. 

Startup Mixus understands that and has built an AI agent platform that not only keeps humans in the workflow, but also allows those humans to interact with agents directly from their email or Slack. 

“We’re meeting customers where they are today,” Elliot Katz, Mixus co-founder, told techCrunch. “Where is every person in the workforce today? For the most part, they’re on email. And so because we can do this through email, we believe that’s a way we can democratize access [to agents].”

Mixus only beta-launched out of Stanford in late 2024, but it has already raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding and brought on some customers, including clothing store chain Rainbow Shops, and others across finance and tech. 

Ease of use is Mixus’s biggest selling point, from how it helps create agents to how users can interact with them. Users can create an agent or multiple agents from simple text prompts. For someone in sales, that prompt might look like: 

“Create an agent that finds all open tasks in Jira in project mixus-dummy, and send me a report with information on all tasks that are overdue. Draft emails to all the assignees who have overdue tasks, and have me review them in the chat and with simple clear formatting for email (no attachments/docs). Once I verify, send the emails. Run it now. And moving forward, run it every Monday at 7am PST.”

If Mixus works reliably, this is a huge unlock for the AI agent space. Most agentic AI tools today either give you a pre-built assistant, a la ChatGPT or Gemini, or require developers to build custom against using frameworks like LangChain, AutoGen, or crewAI. 

With Mixus, users can set up their agents within Mixus’s platform via a chat function – through written or vocal prompts – or by simply emailing instructions to agent@mixus.com. Then Mixus will build, run, and manage single- or multi-step agents directly from the inbox. 

“Most of the world, most of America, doesn’t even know what an AI agent is or why it’s helpful for them, and they’ve definitely never used one,” Katz said, noting that older workers might have an especially hard time learning how to use agents. “We’re trying to reach all these people that have never used [agents], but could very much benefit from an AI.”

Katz and his co-founder Shai Magzimof demoed the technology for me, showing how easy it is to add human verifiers for your agents by simply instructing at which step they should come to you for oversight. For example, they ran an agent to do research on TechCrunch reporters before pitching them. The agent would identify and gather the latest technology news and trends, analyze the information to identify potential story angles for a TechCrunch reporter, and compile a research report summarizing the findings. At the last stage, the agent was directed to send the information to Katz for verification. Once approved, the agent would send the completed research report to his Magzimof. 

The founders stressed that humans can be in the loop as much or as little as a business or enterprise dictates – Magzimof said organizations can set up company-wide rules, like ensuring an email gets checked by a human if it’s being sent externally. Mixus doesn’t always require human oversight. So, for example, if an agent has already run a Jira integration hundreds of times and hasn’t messed it up yet, a human may trust it to continue that task autonomously. 

Or as Katz put it: “We enable colleague oversight. We don’t mandate colleague oversight.”

Bringing other colleagues into the workflow is as easy as tagging them in the chat with an agent or even copying them on the email to the agent. That’s another standout compared to agents on the markets today. Most models are single-user, and while Notion AI and Slack GPT allow users to collaborate in shared spaces, they don’t take it that step further of letting the AI manage conversations and tasks between teammates in real time. 

Another core feature of Mixus is its ability to store memory. 

“We created Spaces so that every team, every person, every group of people can have a shared memory,” Magzimof said. “Then all my agents, all my files, all the people can be in that very specific Space’s memory.”

While ChatGPT and Claude both support memory, their enterprise plans don’t yet support shared agent memory across users.  

The founders ran me through roughly an hour-long demo showing a range of use cases and abilities. Its agents do seem miraculous, reflecting a high degree of autonomy and memory that put Mixus on the high end of the AI agent spectrum. That is, if the product works as reliably as it did in the demo.

Like other agents, Mixus can integrate with other tools, from Gmail to Jira, and users can trigger agents to run immediately or on a schedule. 

Agents in Mixus can run and edit documents or spreadsheets inline, which is similar to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, but those are often limited to sandboxed environments. Mixus also enables agents to autonomously navigate organizational context – like figuring out who in an organization owns a particular task by looking through Jira tickets. That kind of cross-tool, org-aware reasoning is still rare among today’s agent platforms. 

Built on a combination of Anthropic’s Claude 4 and OpenAI’s o3, Mixus agents also have access to the web, which Magzimof says can be used for tasks like live research or monitoring. He described it as “Google Alerts on steroids.” 

Taken together, Mixus appears to be less of a productivity tool and more like a tireless digital colleague – one of the most ambitious attempts yet to reimagine AI as a true collaborator. If it works as advertised, your next “coworker” might not be human, but it might get through your inbox faster than you do.

Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff at maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.