Exyde co-founder Michael Economou explains how a bootstrapped Cypriot startup turned its own operational challenges into an AI-powered business model with international ambitions.

We started Exyde as a marketplace for activities and experiences. It taught us how operators work, but it was a crowded market where building a real edge would be hard. We moved into building AI tools for those operators. Our first product, Lucy, was an assistant for their daily work, but still far from an AI employee.

The turning point came from inside our company. We were bootstrapped and close to hiring an operations specialist when I realised the technology was mature enough to build that role with AI instead.

We built Kira, always on and proactive, and I found myself chatting with her from my phone as I would with any teammate. It worked, so we built Alex for our catalogue, Aria for finance and Max for business development.

When we told friends and partners how we run the company, they asked us to build the same for them. They wanted the same method. That is when I realised the product was the way we work.

Roles and human oversight

ChatGPT and Claude are fantastic tools, but they depend on the person using them. In a team, everyone uses them in their own way, and quickly nobody is managing the result.

AI employees work the other way around. Each has a defined role, a place in the team and someone managing it, whether a human or an AI chief of staff.

Our core philosophy is to treat AI as we would people: we give them names, onboard and train them, provide feedback and correct mistakes.

Human supervision has to stay wherever someone is accountable for the outcome. How much depends on the risk and what the technology can do today.

But there is one difference I keep coming back to. A person avoids mistakes because a mistake can cost them their job, which is a kind of survival instinct. AI doesn’t have that.

Building differently

In the past, every new service and market meant hiring and managing more people. When I started Exyde, I wanted to build differently.

I had more work than time, and we had a limited hiring budget. We started with ChatGPT, Claude and automations. They made our lives easier, but only worked while I was prompting and coordinating. The question became how work continues when I am in a sales meeting or asleep.

That is what AI employees changed for me. For most of history, leverage came from people, capital and assets. Now AI is a source of leverage, too. It keeps working while you sleep. That idea is what Exyde is built on.

The opportunity for Cyprus

The frontier labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and DeepSeek, are building models that are extremely hard to beat. I don’t think competing with them is where the opportunity lies for Cyprus.

The opportunity is working with businesses, understanding how they operate and putting those models to work in daily operations.

That needs people who know the local market and how companies make decisions, in Cyprus, Greece, the rest of Europe and the Middle East. This is where a small team supported by AI can operate at a level that used to need a larger firm.

What AI will not solve is distance and density. A startup still needs to be close to its customers, capital and talent. Build here, where it is a fantastic place to test, but you need to go outside faster.

About Exyde

Exyde builds and manages AI teams for businesses. It is led by co-founders Michael Economou, Dakis Andreou and Marios Constantinou, who have worked together for more than ten years, including at Foody, which was acquired by Delivery Hero.

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