SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
We were talking about it earlier, and I talked about it on the last show, and a lot of people in the industry kind of got let up, right? It was really good for bill.com, but this guy that builds an AI VP of Finance wrote this LinkedIn post today. It's like Jason Lemkin and Amelia rolled out this VP of Finance. It seems really great, but here are the limitations. Some of it was right, some of it was wrong, right? But it's a good analysis. We have budget. Amelia and I have budget to work two weeks into our VP. We don't want to be running this agent, okay? At the very end, he says, Jason, when you're ready, hit me up.
I mean, it's an F, isn't it? From a sales perspective.

**Sam Blond** (0:34)
The way that we described Monaco is that this gives you, whether you're a founder, whether you're a salesperson, just an employee at a company, it gives you leverage to spend time on what we would describe as higher ROI activities, but really the activities that agents actually can't do. Agents are not hosting the agents podcast right now. Like the two of you are spending your time doing this. Certainly how we describe the leverage that Monaco provides to customers, it's not that we're a silver bullet for go-to-market.
It's that you can spend more of your time customer facing, you can spend more of your time doing the creative campaigns that an agent isn't going to do for you.

**Jason Lemkin** (1:13)
Welcome everybody. We are back with the agents and the latest. An exciting show we have and are first with a very special guest. Our AI VP of Finance went live this week, its first iteration.
And the part that surprised even us is where it lives. It didn't get its own app but actually lives inside 10K, our AI VP of Marketing. You're going to hear more about that. It's less than VP today, don't get triggered, folks. It's more like a scrappy director of financing that's learning, but it's already running real finance work in production. And that's the theme of today's show. Everyone keeps telling you the future's 100 specialized agents. Maybe so, but what's happening in our stack is the opposite. The agents are collapsing into each other.
We may well have fewer agents doing more, going deeper. In essence, mono repos, all sharing a body of knowledge. We'll see. So I'm Jason. I'm here with Amelia. We're three humans, more than 20 AI agents in production at SaaStr AI. And halfway through today, we're bringing in Sam Blond, founder and CEO of Monaco, which happens to be one of the agents we run. So we'll get to grill the guy whose product is on our own team.
And with that, I want to tee it up about our AI VP of Finance. I want Amelia to do a deep dive, show us what we can. But before we get there, because a lot of folks will be wondering what it is, before we even describe what a VP of Finance is, or maybe you should, talk about what we integrated to get there so we'll understand how it works. Like it is not just an application, it's not just an agent, right? It is, it leverages all the APIs of all of our staff, doesn't it?

**Amelia** (2:43)
It does. So there's a few core components that, and I'll talk through the feasibility and ease of use of integrating each of these tools into our AIVP of Finance, things that 10K, traditionally our AIVP of Marketing, did not have previously when it came to adding the finance component. So the first one was bill.com.
Super easy. Took less than 10 minutes, I will say. It's interesting because bill.com, which many of you probably use well, you know, for accounts receivables, accounts payables, has a lot of, we've been using it for many years now, so it has a bunch of historic data in it. And the agent actually thought you still had to ask support to get an API key. So it's like, hey, maybe do bill.com first out of your whole finance stack, because you're going to have to reach out to support to get an API key and get access. And that could take a couple of days. So it said, hey, do this one first, not because it was going to be the easiest, but because it thought it was going to take a couple of days for us to get access. Lo and behold, like go into bill.com, you could just make an API key yourself if you're an admin, which I was. So it actually took less time than the Replet agent thought it was going to take to integrate with bill.com. Now it is read only, so do with that knowledge what you will. It can change things in bill.com if you explicitly ask it to, but not everything.