AI Just Closed 40% of Your Tickets Without You

Your IT team is drowning. Every "how do I get access to..." Slack message you fire off is making it worse. And while everyone in 2026 is busy debating whether AI is coming for the C-suite, Tom Bachant has spent the last four years quietly automating the layer of work that actually keeps companies running. The help desk. The ticket queue. The Jira dashboard you've been ignoring for three weeks hoping it disappears.Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Unthread, an AI-powered helpdesk built natively into Slack and Microsoft Teams. He's also a two-time founder who sold his first company, Dashride, to Cruise in 2018, lived through the Cruise unraveling, then went back into the trenches with Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. His new company has raised $3.5M, landed Intuit, Lemonade, and Automattic as customers, and finished as a TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist.In this episode, Tom walks Ryan through the inception of Unthread, the YC playbook that got him to his first 10 customers without spending a dollar on ads, and the philosophical bet that code is now free so distribution is the only moat left. He also explains, with a straight face, why he runs abolishcars.org as a side project despite his first company being a ridesharing platform.The conversation kicks off with cars (Tom hates them, Ryan rides fixed gear, they both agree on flipping people off responsibly), and ends with downhill mountain biking in Crested Butte. In between, you get one of the cleanest tactical breakdowns of agentic service management you'll hear all year.https://unthread.iohttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://abolishcars.orghttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tombachant/https://inboxalchemy.co⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://trynina.co/