SaaStr 828: The AI Revolution in B2B: Insights from SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and SaaStr Chief AI Officer Amelia Lerutte, and Qualified's CEO and Founder Kraig Swensrud

**Jason Lemkin** (0:01)
Welcome to The Official SaaStr Podcast, where you can hear some of the best SaaStr speakers. This is where the Cloud meets. Up today on the SaaStr Podcast. I recently had a CRO I've worked with for years. The deepest respect, reach out to me, and an almost panicked email, I need to learn AI, right? I'll do anything, I'll intern for you, I'll hang out with Amelia's office, I'll do whatever. And I hear this all the time, I need to learn AI. We hear all, I need to learn AI, Craig, it's part of my job. It's the simplest advice, time to all this. Like, no, you need to do AI. Don't learn it. Buying a subscription to Claude does not count as learning AI. The way you're going to do it is pick an agent, an agentic product, pick the simplest possible one, use case, and I know it can be scary for some people. Deploy it yourself, buy it, set it up. If you need a little bit of help connecting it to your CRM or your marketing, okay, that's okay. You don't have to like do the connectors, own the deployment, you don't know what training is, it's okay. Take your time, do something simple. If you deploy an agent yourself, train it, QA it, test it, you will be ahead of 90% of the world, hands on. Yeah, yourself. Hey everybody, it's SaaStr. Connect data, automate busy work and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com/smb. That's salesforce.com/smb.
Hey, everybody, it's SaaStr. Finn is the number one AI agent for resolving complex queries like refunds, transaction disputes, and technical troubleshooting, all with speed and reliability. See how Finn can deliver the highest resolution rates and highest quality customer experience at finn.ai/saastr. That's fin.ai/saastr. Hey, everybody, get excited. SaaStr AI London is this December, December 1st and 2nd, and we're on track to completely sell out with the playbooks for AI and B2B. Join 2,000 plus BI and AI leaders for two days, two days of practical advice on scaling in the new year. We'll have speakers flying in from OpenAI, Wiz, Clay, Intercom, Finn, and all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly with Harry Stebbings and we're doing our live 20 VC podcast. It'll be fun all in the heart of London. Don't miss out. Get your tickets. You can still go, go to podcast.saastrlondon.com. That's podcast.saastrlondon.com for special discount just for you.
All right.

**Kraig Swensrud** (2:42)
Welcome everybody. My name is Kraig Swensrud, the founder and CEO of Qualified and I'm joined today in Qualified Studios by two very special guests. Of course, we have Jason Lemkin, who's originally the founder and CEO of EchoSign, sold to Adobe in 2011 And of course, everybody knows him today as the founder and CEO of SaaStr and also Amelia Lerutte, who is the chief AI officer of SaaStr, which is totally awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:11)
Thanks so much.

**Kraig Swensrud** (3:12)
All right. So what does everybody want to know about in today's day and age? Agents. What's going on out there in the real world with agents? And Jason, something I read that you post on LinkedIn was people are wondering, there's a ton of agent platforms, agentic solutions, AI this, AI that, that are on the market right now. Like, where do I actually start? And then I think somebody wrote, you know, what's better, Replit or Lovable? Which AISDR platform is the best? What AI tool is the best for RevOps? And you had a killer answer to that.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:43)
Can you share that with us? Yeah, it was learning because, you know, we started, we started 2025 behind. We had a lot of AI speakers at SaaStr, but we were pretty AI lean here. We started with one general tool, and now we've expanded it to 20 agents. And we use Qualified and 20 tools that are sort of, maybe 12 are part of our core architecture, which Amelia can talk about. But it took me a while to know the answer to that question, or to know the answer between Replit and Lovable. They're related. We could talk about it. But listen, today, the world's going to keep changing. This stuff is new, right? And in fact, most of these products, I don't know about Qualified, but certainly Replit and Lovable didn't even work before like Claude 4, okay? Didn't even work before the start of 2025 The Replit, Lovable didn't even exist. Replit existed for a decade, but the AI just wasn't good enough. So everything's changed.