AI-Led Sales: How 1Mind's Superhumans Drive Exponential Growth, from the Agents of Scale Podcast

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share a special cross post from Agents of Scale, a new podcast from Zapier CEO, Wade Foster, who longtime listeners will remember from his September 2024 appearance on The Cognitive Revolution, when we discussed Zapier's evolution from no code pioneer to an early LLM knowledge worker. Wade's guest for today's episode is Amanda Kahlow, previously founder and CEO of Unicorn Six Sense, and now founder and CEO of 1Mind, a startup that recently announced a $40 million fundraise to support its mission to redefine go-to-market with what Amanda calls AI Superhumans, video avatar digital teammates that engage, qualify, and convert prospects into customers. The company promises AI-led exponential growth, and as you hear from Amanda, the new era of AI-led sales begins at home. Adopting a classic dog fooding strategy, which Amanda refers to as drinking our own champagne, 1Mind leverages its own superhuman, named Mindy, to source 76% of the company's pipeline opportunities. And when 1Mind was working on a deal with HubSpot, instead of personally answering questions from the 20-plus people who needed to sign off on the deal, Amanda directed them to Mindy. Today, HubSpot is a reference customer, reporting a 25% increase in revenue after deploying superhumans in their product-led growth motion. And Amanda argues, with clarity, that only comes from someone who's already lived it, that traditional organizational structures, with marketing, sales, and customer success functions operating as separate organizations, are quickly becoming obsolete. If an AI superhuman can support a buyer from their first website visit through an eventual upsell, businesses don't need to organize around human capacity constraints or other limitations, and can instead build a single cohesive team to support the entire life cycle.
When it comes to the impact on jobs, Amanda is both clear-eyed and visionary. She sees account executives as safest from AI, because the challenges of building relationships and navigating organizational politics remain hard for AIs. But she warns that SDR roles focused on qualifying leads and solutions engineers, who primarily do demos, are likely to be outperformed by systems that can keep a prospect's full history in their context window, speak fluently in any language and about any industry vertical, and instantly retrieve any slide from thousands of decks. To ensure that 1Mind is poised to take advantage of this opportunity, Amanda has a remarkable policy. If a human employee can manage to eliminate their own role with AI, she will reward that individual financially and find them a new role at the company. And if at some point that no longer makes sense, Amanda hopes that society will respond to AI-provided abundance by de-emphasizing the expectation of economic contribution and elevating work that serves human well-being in other ways. This episode is brought to you ad-free thanks to sponsorship by Zapier, and I do sincerely encourage you to subscribe to the Agents of Scale podcast. Another recent episode that I particularly recommend is Wade's conversation with John Nirona of Gamma, which I'm going to take a little credit for identifying as the best AI presentation maker way back in August of 2023, and which recently announced a fundraise, led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation north of $2 billion. If you're anything like me, you'll want to hear how they did it. And Wade and John's conversation about Gamma's approach to both product development and company building is every bit as valuable as this one. With that, I hope you enjoy this master class in First Principles Thinking About AI Transformation with Amanda Kahlow of 1Mind from Wade Foster's new podcast, Agents of Scale.

**Amanda Kahlow** (3:48)
It's a whole new world and a new exciting world. So I feel like I have to reset the playbooks again. Like I thought, oh, now I know the playbook of what SaaS Framework and Go-to-Market is. And I think we're just walking into a whole new world that none of us know how to approach.

**Wade Foster** (4:00)
Well, yeah, I was going to say, is there a playbook? Yeah, maybe there kind of maybe felt like there was in the last decade, but if there was, I never quite cracked it at Zapier. We had to figure it all out on our own. And now, I'm definitely like, there's not a playbook for how to go do this with AI. So how are you doing it?

**Amanda Kahlow** (4:20)
Am I allowed to turn the question back to you?

**Wade Foster** (4:22)
Gosh, that's a good question. We're figuring it out. Hey, folks, welcome to Agents of Scale. I'm Wade Foster. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Zapier. And my guest today is a serial entrepreneur, Amanda Kahlow. She is founder and CEO of 1Mind. Before that, she founded SixSense, grew it into a billion dollar plus company. And at 1Mind, she is building Superhumans, designed to sell, reason, and connect with customers. Kind of like your top salesperson, but smarter. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what Amanda has learned, building, scaling companies, but particularly now that she's doing it in the age of AI. Amanda, welcome to the show.