One Man. A Hundred Hands. Ferhat Kacmaz unveils his AI agent venture HUNDREDHANDS.
Mr. Kacmaz, what led you to build a technology company in the first place? And how did you come up with its name?
It started with me solving the same problem for myself. I built this agent for my own companies first – it runs my emails, my campaigns and my reporting. At some point, every entrepreneur I met asked the same question: »Can I have that?« At that moment, you either sell it or watch someone else sell it.
The name »Hundredhands« comes from the Hekatoncheires, the hundred-handed giants of Greek mythology. One head, a hundred hands. That is exactly what a founder needs – not more opinions, but more hands.
Most AI applications operate in the cloud. Why did you choose to place your system on a physical device instead?
If the machine sits in your office, your contracts, customer data and invoices data stay in your office. »It’s somewhere in the cloud« is not an answer that builds trust.
Also, that is what ownership is about: People see a device on their desk as something that belongs to them. They give it a name. That changes how they interact with it – it stops being software they subscribe to and becomes someone they work with.
Why did you choose WhatsApp as the primary interface?
Because the best interface is the one nobody has to learn. Our customers are business owners in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They are not going to log into yet another dashboard – they already have eleven. But they use WhatsApp all day long. So they can send a voice note from the car: »Write the offer for Miller, same as last time, but add ten percent. By the time they arrive, it’s done: No training, no onboarding, no manual.
What kind of tasks can the AI employee handle in a typical business?
The unglamorous work that eats the day: offers and invoices, dunning, customer enquiries, social media, research, appointments, translations, recurring reports. Nothing there is intellectually hard – it goes on endlessly. That is precisely the work that keeps a founder from doing the thing only the founder can do.
How does your tool differ from a conventional AI chatbot?
A chatbot gives answers. This one acts. It has real access to the tools a business actually runs on: mail, calendar, accounting, the browser, the file system. It doesn't tell you how to write the invoice; it writes it, sends it, and follows up when nobody pays. That difference – advice instead of hands – is what our company is all about. Consultants give advice. We deliver hands.
How do you ensure that the system remains reliable? Especially when your company is based in Dubai?
That was the hardest engineering question, and it is where most of our work went. Every customer device has a watchdog that checks itself around the clock and repairs the standard failures on its own. Behind it sits a second AI agent - we call it the guardian - that runs on our own hardware and looks after the customer's machine remotely. If something goes wrong, the guardian usually notices and fixes it before the customer opens his laptop. Above that sits a supervisor that measures the guardians, and above that a central brain. Nobody in that chain is unchecked.
You refer to a central brain within the system. What role does it play?
It is the part I am most proud of, and the part that is hardest to copy. Every problem one agent solves is checked, cleaned of any customer data, and shared with all the others overnight. So a mistake is only ever made once. Every customer effectively gets the same experience as the next one. Additionally, the service does not get more expensive as we grow – it gets better and cheaper. That is not a feature you can bolt on; it has to be built into the architecture from day one.
Is your start-up part of the solution to the skilled labour shortage?
No, and I would not want it to. The jobs nobody can fill are not being taken by anyone - they are simply not being done. What we take away is the work no human wanted in the first place. In the companies we work with, nobody was let go; people just finally got back to the work they were hired for in the first place.
What role will AI employees play in our working lives in the near future?
Within the next three years, it will feel unusual for a company of twenty people not to have a digital colleague. We want to be among the first to get there, with hardware you can actually touch and an interface people already know.
About our interview partner:
Ferhat Kacmaz is a German serial entrepreneur, investor, and SPIEGEL bestselling author based in Dubai. He is the CEO of MiningFarmDubai and His book »Designing Wealth« was published in August 2025. The German edition, »Vermögen ist kein Zufall«, became a SPIEGEL bestseller in 2026.
