I build, operate, and study Zero Employee Organizations: organizations in which one human directs fleets of AI agents, while retaining authority, accountability, and ownership of the outcome.
I'm the founder of Zero Employee and the creator and teacher behind Prof Rod.
I've spent 15 years building production machine-learning systems across Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and Samsung, and I teach AI as a Professor of the Practice at ITAM. Everything I publish begins as operating experience: I build it, use it, document what breaks, and then teach it.
Zero Employee develops the doctrine and ships the infrastructure. Prof Rod teaches it. I build and operate both.
zeroemployee.org is the doctrine, community, and open-source ecosystem for building organizations where agents do the work and humans own the outcomes.
| Project | Role in the ecosystem |
|---|---|
| zero-employee · PyPI | The governance plane: schema-validated Statements of Work, deterministic policy checks, fleet boards, cost accounting, and organizational receipts. |
| sovereign-agent · PyPI | The execution plane: owned agent runtimes with filesystem-backed sessions, append-only audit trails, verifiable manifests, isolation, and runnable teaching chapters. |
| zeocore · PyPI | A typed capability kernel for tool contracts, plugin discovery, and runner-independent production workflows. |
| ffmpeg-zeo · PyPI | Typed FFmpeg filter graphs for Python applications, command-line tools, and coding agents. |
The governing boundary is simple:
Zero Employee governs. Sovereign Agent executes. Runtime capacity never creates organizational authority.
profrod.ai is my educational and media surface for people learning to build and operate with agents.
The central reframe is from chatbot to coworker: stop asking AI for answers that you must implement yourself, and start delegating bounded work to agents that can inspect the environment, perform the task, and return evidence.
Prof Rod brings together:
- Free courses on agent architecture, tools, memory, multi-agent systems, and organizational governance
- Practical essays and field notes about delegation, verification, failure, and what survives contact with production
- A community of more than 2,400 practitioners learning to put agents to work
- An illustrated universe featuring Prof Rod, Mator, Quackster, and Benu
I'm particularly interested in:
- agent runtimes and harness engineering
- governance for multi-agent organizations
- verification, evaluation, and receipt-driven work
- sandboxing, process isolation, and owned infrastructure
- agent-operated media and production systems
- on-premises and air-gapped inference
I work primarily in Python and TypeScript, using tools and runtimes including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, MCP, and local inference systems.
- Personal: rodrivera.com
- Learn: profrod.ai
- Build: zeroemployee.org
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/profrodai
- PyPI: pypi.org/user/profrodai