DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has revealed the business has put a near-blanket hiring freeze in place as bosses encourage departments to use agentic AI to drive efficiencies.
Speaking at the Speaking at the Bank of America Securities 2025 Gaming and Lodging Conference yesterday, 4 September, Robins said the operator was seeing “tremendous momentum with an AI-first mindset”.
Robins first spoke about the AI-first mindset in DraftKings’ Q1 earnings call back in May, when he highlighted customer service as a key efficiency gain.
DraftKings co-founder and president of global product and technology Paul Liberman told EGR that companies that treat AI as “optional or secondary risk falling behind”.
Robins said that outside of AI engineers, an effective hiring freeze was in place unless departments could prove they couldn’t do the same job with an AI agent.
In H1 2025, DraftKings product and tech expenses increased 16.6% to $211.7m (£157m), which bosses said was due to “increased headcount in our product and engineering departments”.
The CEO said the approach was “really changing the mentality of people” and that managers and department heads would be overseeing AI agents, not people.
He remarked: “It’s rare that I feel as excited as I am about the cost outlook right now. And the reason why is I think AI is transforming the way that we are going to potentially need or not need to grow our fixed costs going forward.
“There is some investment. We are going to be hiring more AI engineers. We are deploying some new tools.
“But the amount of efficiency we are going to generate on headcount and being able to basically replace what would have been human hires with AI agents and also reduce in certain areas as well, I think over the next few years is going to be a big thing for us.”
The CEO said the conversion from human-operated to AI-driven processes was occurring across the business, and that this sea change would continue to ramp up as the technology improved.
He added: “It is the whole company. You have processes that are being run manually throughout the entire company that we are rapidly converting to agent-driven processes now.
“And this is just the beginning. From here, it gets better and better, as the technology improves and as we figure out more applications of it.
“We have business development people writing RFPs using AI. It’s work that used to take hours and hours, sometimes days, being done in a fraction of the time with less people needed.”
The post DraftKings CEO cites “tremendous momentum” in agentic AI drive first appeared on EGR Intel.
Jason Robins says mentalities are shifting from managing human employees to AI agents, as he suggests near-company-wide hiring freeze in place due to pace of change
The post DraftKings CEO cites “tremendous momentum” in agentic AI drive first appeared on EGR Intel.