SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
Then I realized, in certain cases, we're at the point where an agent can do better than a human. And so your goal should not be to reproduce 80% of your best person, but the goal should be to find areas where the goal is higher than human. A silly example I gave was just social selling, where a lot of folks thought in 2021, you could get ahead in sales by monitoring 100 prospects manually, sitting on LinkedIn and pretending you're working and writing great job when your prospect wrote something. They call this social selling. I called it wasting time on LinkedIn and maybe it worked. Certainly, when someone I've never heard of says, great job, Jason, I don't take a meeting. My point is now that we launched an agent that does social media for us, that agent could actually add value. An agent can go do that, analyze the issue, maybe even look at my account and give me a solution, an answer. An agent could do that, a human could never do that. That is instant F in value. That's something that a human can't do with social selling. Hey everybody. Good time at SaaStr AI Annual this year. Was it good? Thank you.
Yeah, appreciate it.
Who was here last year? Raise hands. It's better, huh? It's better.
If I just reflect a little bit, obviously everything here is very different than last year. It's all about deploying agents for real, not just random AI talk. I think that was the goal.
I think we executed on that goal. The other thing I reflect on, I know a lot of folks, there's transition. It can be stressful with all the change with AI, all the new competitors, all the new things. But in my entire career in software, this is the best time to be a builder, right? If you're not excited today, you should quit and do something else because we can do things we could never do before. I mean, Amelia and I built all these agents and talked about without a developer would have been impossible six months ago. So even if you're nervous and stressed, if you're not excited, get out of the game. And I bring that up in general. But honestly, between us, I'm glad that the folks that didn't want to be in the game aren't here this year because last year was still a transition year. Last year was probably like half AI, half others. And I still think 30 or 40 percent of the folks that were here last year were down in the dumps. My company sucks, my boss sucks, my company is going to fail.
And I get that it's hard, but it's just great that it didn't show up this year. And we're about 20 percent bigger. But I think in terms of positive energy, it's like 220 percent or 100 and I've gotten my energy back as a builder.
I think Amelia and I both say for ourselves, for what it's worth, it is more tiring to be managing 21 agents. It is not. I don't know that it's more work. I'm still reflecting on it, but it is a higher cognitive load than people. The agents are much faster. They push you harder. And I'm trying to, I don't know that it's more stressful. In some ways, it's less stressful because agents don't argue and agents don't take vacations this week without telling you like a human did on the team. They don't do that. But they overload you so much that I think it's something. As we all get more agentic, we're going to have to think about what do we do when the agent has 23 more hours a day to work? And then you have 10 of them. So that's another 230 hours a day. And what are you going to do with that? And they all push you. And 10K, we joke about it, but it's not really a joke. When 10K, our AI VP of Marketing tells us every day it has three new ideas, it's kind of tiring. Because you get behind a couple of days, it's 10 new ideas. And then we have a little agent inside of it and it starts yelling at you. Why didn't you do that campaign? We are falling behind Jason and Amelia. And it's like, it's funny at first, but he's right and it's a little bit stressful. So we'll see how the world changes. But it's an exciting journey to be on together. So those are just my reflections. But anyhow, for folks, we have this tradition. We're at the end, sort of a tradition that any questions, I'm only so smart and I only know so much, but any, maybe I'll sit actually, I apologize. Any questions you guys have that we didn't get to that you think I can help with or want to talk about, just come up and we'll go until people quit or until they shut down the cocktails or whatever. But we can go for a while and I'll try to reframe the questions to help folks. But if anyone wants to kick it off, come up to either Mike and ask us anything that you think would be helpful.