Forget the small talk. If you’re looking for a new job, you may be invited to interview with a recruiter who doesn’t blink.
In recent years, some employers have begun inviting job applicants to participate in job interviews led by AI agents — sometimes called bots — rather than human recruiters. A 2025 survey of 1,084 hiring decision-makers in the US and the UK found that 20% now do this. The research was commissioned by TestGorilla, a talent-assessment platform.
Employers using AI agents to conduct job interviews are often large organizations with high-volume hiring needs, as well as mature startups looking to scale quickly. Those, and others, are often overwhelmed by applications because job seekers can use AI tools to apply to openings en masse, and due to the tight job market.
If you’ve been interviewed for a job by AI, let us know what your experience was like:
Joaquin Garcia spent 24 years as an undercover agent for the FBI. During that time, his weight fluctuated by hundreds of pounds, topping out at about 500 pounds during one of his most dangerous assignments.
Garcia infiltrated everyone from the Italian Mafia and Mexican cartels to Asian and Russian organized crime groups.
“The fatter I got, the better an undercover agent I became,” Garcia told Business Insider.
When he met with criminals, he said he didn’t try to hide his stomach or shrink himself in a chair. He “let it all out.”
He knew that in criminal circles, where paranoia ran high, a heavy-set man did not fit their image of a federal agent. His weight “became like my disguise,” he said, adding that criminals, particularly drug dealers, “felt really comfortable around me.”
His weight also protected him.
“My size gave me a good excuse that I had a bad heart and therefore did not have to partake in drugs or killing or anything like that,” he said. For example, if the mob asked him to kill someone, he planned to fake a heart attack to get out of it. He was never asked, “but it was always in the back of my mind.”
The only issue was that, “unlike a disguise that you can remove, you can’t remove overweightness overnight,” he said.
See Garcia’s interview with Business Insider in the video below, and keep reading to learn about how gaining weight became a key part of his undercover identity while infiltrating the Italian Mafia.
Garcia gained 90 pounds during one of his most dangerous missions
From 2002 to 2005, Garcia infiltrated the Gambino Italian Mafia family in New York. He was the driver for Gambino captain Greg DePalma, which gave him key access to insider information, since DePalma liked to talk, Garcia recalled.
He became DePalma’s close confidant. There was even a time when DePalma pulled a practical joke on him.
Garcia had recently been diagnosed with AFib and had to wear an EKG around his chest. DePalma knew this, and one day at a diner with a bunch of mobsters, he stood up and said to the group that they had a traitor in their midst who was reporting to the feds. DePalma walked over and stood behind Garcia and ripped his shirt off, revealing the EKG. Everyone laughed it off, including Garcia, who recalls feeling very afraid in that moment.
Little did the mobsters in the diner know that some of the markings on Garcia’s skin were also from wires he had been wearing for the FBI.
Garcia said he recorded thousands of hours of conversations, many of which involved food. “Everything’s surrounded around eating,” he said of mob culture. Meetings, disputes, and everyday conversations often unfolded over coffee with biscotti or over long meals at restaurants.
Garcia (left) weighed about 500 pounds by the end of his time with the mafia.
Courtesy of Joaquin Garcia
That’s one thing “The Sopranos” gets right about the mafia, he said. “If you watch ‘The Sopranos’ with the ‘gabagool’, you know, and all the food. Every time you see them, they’re eating because that’s the culture.”
The food-centric culture reminded him of his Cuban heritage. “I love to eat, so to me it was perfect,” he said. “I didn’t have to act, and I found that the more I ate, the happier it made everyone because they love to feed you.” Chefs would even give him food to take home.
Garcia weighed about 400 pounds before infiltrating the mafia and said he was up to nearly 500 pounds by the time he left.
“Was it healthy? Absolutely not,” he said. “I don’t blame anyone but myself. I eat because I love to eat, and it makes me feel good. So it was not like, I’m going to blame the mob or the FBI for putting me in a situation with all these great foods that I wasn’t going to say no to.”
Garcia is grateful that his only ‘fault’ was gaining weight
Garcia has lost some weight, but he aims to lose more.
Courtesy of Joaquin Garcia
Garcia’s weight struggles began long before he infiltrated the mafia, he said. When he first entered the FBI in the 1980s, he said he weighed about 265 pounds and was told he needed to drop to roughly 240.
Over the years, especially during long undercover assignments centered on restaurants and late-night meetings, the weight crept up. He retired from the FBI in 2006, weighing over 500 pounds.
He’s since lost about 100 pounds, but aims to lose more.
He said he’s tried nearly every diet imaginable, including Atkins and other low-carb plans. It led to short bursts of weight loss but wasn’t sustainable, he said.
He also explored weight-loss medications, including Ozempic, but said his doctor told him he did not qualify because his glucose levels were normal. He said he ultimately decided against trying a different weight loss pill, preferring to lose it another way.
About three years ago, after fainting at home and spending two months in the hospital, Garcia said he began rethinking his approach.
While hospitalized, he said he learned to stick to three meals a day — a structure he has continued since leaving.
He says he typically eats oatmeal and coffee in the morning, a turkey sandwich on whole wheat for lunch, and chicken with vegetables for dinner. He avoids desserts for the most part and walks daily, using a walker to steady himself.
Today, he said his weight fluctuates between about 390 pounds and 410 pounds. His goal is to reach around 285 pounds.
“I’ve come to accept that this is a constant battle. You win some fights or some battles, but you haven’t won the war yet,” he said.
In the grand scheme of things, however, Garcia said he’s grateful that the only downside of his undercover work was gaining weight. He didn’t take up drinking or drugs. The work didn’t lead to divorce.
“My only fault is the fact that I gained weight; I’m grateful for that.”
Macrohard, XAI’s ambitious AI agent project, has stalled following leadership shake-ups and suspension of a data project involving 600 contractors, people familiar with the situation told Business Insider.
At the same time, Musk’s other company, Tesla, has been ramping up its own AI agent project called “Digital Optimus,” according to workers.
CEO Elon Musk announced Macrohard — a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Microsoft” — in August. Since “software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI,” he said on X at the time. The effort has aimed to build an AI white-collar worker.
Macrohard has been considered one of xAI’s core projects, alongside Grok Code and Grok Imagine.
Since its launch, Macrohard has shuffled between a number of leaders and faced difficulty scaling up, according to company insiders.
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Two Macrohard leaders left the company in February, people with knowledge of the departures said.
During an all-hands meeting shortly thereafter, Musk announced that xAI cofounder Toby Pohlen would oversee the project. Pohlen announced his exit 16 days later.
He had faced pressure from Musk regarding the project’s development, although Musk also expressed displeasure with the team’s progress in the months before he took over.
Pohlen declined to comment.
Musk and representatives for xAI and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Nearly two dozen xAI engineers identified themselves as working on Macrohard via X or LinkedIn. Most have left the company or shifted to a different team in recent months, including more than a dozen departures in the past month alone.
It’s unclear how many people remain assigned to the project.
Enter Tesla
In recent weeks, some employees were told some Macrohard work would shift to Tesla’s Autopilot team, along with some of Macrohard’s computing capacity, insiders said.
Tesla has also been working on an AI agent known internally as “Digital Optimus,” a nod to the humanoid robot Tesla has been building since 2021. The digital version is meant to act as an AI agent that can perform tasks on a computer.
In February, Tesla posted a role for an AI engineer to work on a computer use agent — a similar type of agent that xAI’s Macrohard has focused on — that can perform tasks like “autonomous software interaction, code generation, and real-time decision-making.”
Instead of relying primarily on models that analyze screenshots, which is a common approach for computer-use agents, the team is focusing on real-time control methods. In other words, the AI processes a continuous stream of information and responds, rather than analyzing a frozen image and acting step by step.
The approach is similar to how its Full Self-Driving system processes live video. Musk has repeatedly told xAI employees that the project should emulate Tesla’s work with Full Self-Driving, which uses video data to help the AI learn to navigate its environment in real time.
Tesla has also used similar techniques in developing its humanoid robot.
It marks a different strategy from xAI’s Macrohard project, which was trained primarily on static images rather than continuous video.
XAI does not currently have any job openings listed for the Macrohard team, according to a review of the company’s careers page.
A pause on data collection
A data annotation project for Macrohard that involved more than 600 AI tutors was paused last month, according to a memo viewed by Business Insider. xAI employs around a thousand contract workers who help hone Grok and teach it to do everything from maintain a conversational tone to generate realistic images.
The workers on the Macrohard project were told to screen record their work and leisure activities in order to train the AI how to emulate their actions and act as a digital agent.
A project lead told workers in early February that researchers had “discovered many flaws within the model, and would like to make some changes to our model and the way we collect data,” the memo said. Workers were told at the time that data collection would resume in two to four weeks.
As of this week, the project is still on pause.
Separately, xAI had tutors working to hone the agent’s ability to act as an AI sales assistant for SpaceX’s website and a separate project that trained the system on how to use spreadsheets, people with knowledge of the teams said.
Tesla and xAI have collaborated in the past, including on integrating Grok into vehicles.
In January, Tesla announced it had agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI to begin “evaluating potential AI collaborations between the companies.”
In a January podcast appearance, Sulaiman Ghori, an xAI engineer who worked on Macrohard and has since left the company, compared xAI’s work to a digital version of Optimus.
Just as the humanoid robot performs physical human actions, he said, the AI agent would be able to perform human actions in a digital environment.
Ghori also mentioned using unused Teslas to power the system in the future as they continued to scale Macrohard.
Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Joaquin “Jack” Garcia is a retired FBI agent who worked 24 of his 26 years in the bureau undercover. He spent three years infiltrating the Gambino crime family under the alias “Jack Falcone.”
Garcia talks to Business Insider about his unconventional entry into the FBI, including challenges with his weight and Cuban background. He discusses the “mob school” he attended to learn about the mannerisms and foods of New York’s Italian mafia.
Garcia’s close relationship with the Gambino captain Greg DePalma and key events such as a violent assault in a Bloomingdale’s led to the indictment of 32 mobsters.
He recounts being proposed for membership in the family before the FBI prematurely ended the investigation. He contrasts the romanticized Italian mob with the greater brutality of drug cartels and discusses other major cases he worked, including police corruption in Hollywood, Florida, and Boston.
Bryan Johnson, fresh off a 40- and 70-hour social media fast, says he’s ready to put an AI buffer between him and his social feed.
In a post on X, the 48-year-old entrepreneur and biohacker compared social media to pollution and water toxins.
“Like other toxins, it accumulates,” he wrote. “You can’t unsee or unfeel what you’ve consumed. It settles into mental tissue like heavy metals, producing chronic low-grade inflammation.”
Eliminating social media entirely isn’t realistic, he wrote.
“‘Just put the phone down’ is as practical as telling someone in 19th-century London to stop breathing coal smoke,” he wrote.
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Johnson said time away from the apps is the “only remedy,” but he also suggested that AI agents could serve as an antidote to social media.
“An AI layer between you and the feed. Filtering rage, removing vanity metrics and translating sensationalism into calm, factual language. Preserving signal and eliminating noise,” he wrote.
“I never want to see the raw feed. I want an AI agent to read it for me, strip the engagement metrics that hijack my judgment, filter the rage, and return only what I actually came for,” he added.
In a world where AI agents are already proving to be expert hackers, agreeable coworkers, and custom-built board members — as well as potential security risks — Johnson’s push for an AI layer between himself and his feed doesn’t seem all that far off.
Johnson has made it his life’s focus to try to reverse his biological age to avoid death. He spends around $2 million a year to do so, focusing on extreme treatments such as plasma therapy alongside his strict diet and exercise routine.
His wish for an AI social media buffer also ties into his quest for a longer life, he says: “I want social media to become a longevity intervention, not a longevity threat.”
Casey Wasserman is selling his high-profile sports marketing and talent agency after his correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced in the Epstein files.
The entertainment executive informed the Wasserman Group’s 4,000 staffers about the sale in a memo on Friday.
“At this moment, I believe that I have become a distraction to those efforts,” he wrote. “That is why I have begun the process of selling the company, an effort that is already underway.”
In January, the Justice Department began to release more than 3 million pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
The names of numerous prominent people, such as Bill Gates and US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have shown up in the documents. While appearing in the files does not mean a person is associated with Epstein’s crimes, some have nonetheless faced a public fallout by association.
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In Wasserman’s case, the documents revealed that the entertainment mogul flew on Epstein’s jet with several people, including former US President Bill Clinton. He also exchanged emails with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking girls for Epstein. Wasserman’s emails with Maxwell were dated 2003, long before police began to investigate Epstein and over a decade before police arrested Maxwell.
Wasserman issued an apology following the revelations, but a backlash from his roster of top talent had already begun. Singer Chappell Roan, Olympian Abby Wambach, and others said they intended to leave his agency over his association with Epstein.
“It was years before their criminal conduct came to light, and, in its entirety, consisted of one humanitarian trip to Africa and a handful of emails that I deeply regret sending,” Wasserman wrote in the memo to staff on Friday. “And I’m heartbroken that my brief contact with them 23 years ago has caused you, this company, and its clients so much hardship over the past days and weeks.”
Read the full memo Wasserman sent to his employees:
Team:I wanted to write to you all directly to share a few important updates. Over the past couple of weeks, I have spoken to many of you directly — and I wish I could have spoken with every one of you because you all have put your hearts and souls into this incredible organization.First and foremost, I want to apologize to you. I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort. It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to the clients and partners we represent so vigorously and care so deeply about.The pain experienced by the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell is unimaginable – and I’m glad, as I’m sure you all are, that those who helped them commit their crimes are rightly being held accountable.Hopefully by now you know the facts about my limited interactions with those two individuals. It was years before their criminal conduct came to light, and, in its entirety, consisted of one humanitarian trip to Africa and a handful of emails that I deeply regret sending. And I’m heartbroken that my brief contact with them 23 years ago has caused you, this company, and its clients so much hardship over the past days and weeks.Other than my children and my fiancée, there are two things that matter most to me in this world: this company that I founded 24 years ago, and the dream I’ve pursued for more than a decade of bringing the Olympic Games back to the city I love.This organization, its leadership and the entire team mean the world to me. Our 4,000 employees are the absolute best in the business. I see you put it all on the line for your clients every day. Our clients expect — and deserve — world-class representation. And that’s exactly what they get because of all of you.At this moment, I believe that I have become a distraction to those efforts. That is why I have begun the process of selling the company, an effort that is already underway. During this time, Mike Watts will assume day-to-day control of the business while I devote my full attention to delivering Los Angeles an Olympic Games in 2028 that is worthy of this outstanding city.I so appreciate the passion and fight you bring to your jobs. It’s why you succeed.I am beyond proud of what this company has accomplished to date and excited to watch its next chapter.All my best,Casey
