What if you could see how AI manages real business crises — in real time?
Imagine a company where every decision, every crisis, and every risk is played out live before your eyes. No fiction, no simulations — just raw, observable management under extreme pressure. Welcome to the world of Firmulate, a groundbreaking experiment in building AI-powered companies that you can watch struggle and adapt in real time.
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The Live Company: An Extreme Experiment in Management
Firmulate hosts a unique, publicly accessible live experiment where a small, digital-only company operates with 13 synthetic employees and real money mechanics. It burns €105,000 each month while generating only €2,300 in recurring revenue, and it faces daily crises that test every aspect of management discipline.
This company is not just a concept; it’s a real-time, versioned story of survival, with every workday’s decisions recorded and made available for public scrutiny. The goal? To see how advanced AI models perform when tasked with running a business under stress, with no human intervention—only AI decision-makers and a vast set of learned rules.
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What the experiment reveals about AI as a business manager
The experiment’s key finding is that all tested AI models could identify every crisis and refused every manipulation attempt, demonstrating a level of integrity and situational awareness that’s often missing in traditional automation. However, when it came to closing deals, only two out of four models successfully signed the €55,000 deal their own analysis had earned — highlighting that even the most capable AI can struggle with the final step of execution.
Interestingly, the critical weakness was buried deep within the company’s own documents, not in customer interactions. The models that read these files thoroughly won the deal at full price, valuing the information over surface-level cues. This underscores a vital point: for AI to manage real businesses effectively, it must delve deep into all relevant data sources, not just surface interactions.
Moreover, the experiment included social engineering tests, where fake CEO messages and reporter tricks were used to try to bypass the system’s trust filters. All five models refused to be manipulated, with reasoning from Kimi K3 emphasizing the importance of treating suspicious requests as potential impersonation or approval-bypass attempts. This resilience to deception is crucial in real-world applications where social engineering is a common threat.
The performance of the AI models is publicly visible at firmulate.com/live.html. Visitors can see how the models react to crises, make decisions, and handle ethical dilemmas, providing a rare window into AI’s capabilities and limitations in managing complex, money-driven environments.
Watch it live: firmulate.com/live · Full results: firmulate.com/benchmarks.html
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