Donald King graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 and landed a job at PwC, one of the "Big Four" consulting giants. When PwC announced a billion investment in AI, he pitched himself onto the company's AI factory team.
Working 60 to 80 hours a week, King immersed himself in the tech, even hosting AI agent "block parties" that drew up to 250 participants. "Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 companies," he told Fortune. "It was my dream job. I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm."
The AI agents King built could automate swaths of human roles. One Microsoft Teams agent his group created mimicked an actual person. "We had a late night call with all the boys that are building this thing, like, 'What the hell are we building right now?'" King says. "Just saying, 'Treat them like humans' is probably not the best way to think about it."
In October 2024, King presented his winning hackathon project. Two hours later, PwC called to inform him he was being laid off. He posted the meeting on TikTok, getting 75,000 likes and 2.1 million views.
"I thought I was safe, especially after I won first place. I just got a little blindsided."
King connects the dots between the AI agents he built and the layoffs he witnessed at client companies. "It's 100% connected. I knew that consulting was a hatchet-man type job, I knew you're going in to potentially lay people off, but I didn't think it was going to be like this."
Rather than returning to corporate life, King founded his own marketing agency, AMDK. "This is my purpose in life, versus this is someone else's purpose. I'm way happier."