We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You used to have about 10 people full time, now you have 1.2 humans, 20 agents.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:04)
We have 10 desks that used to be go-to-market people, they're all just labeled with our agents. Reply for Replet, Quality for Qualified, Artie for Artisan, Agent Force needs a nickname. The agents work all night, and they work weekends, and they work on Christmas. We're done with hiring humans and sales, we're done.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:18)
The business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:22)
If I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't get me wrong, I would hire them tomorrow. But I'm not gonna hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what SaaStr does, I just can't do that. AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the mid-pack and the mediocre.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
How do you see the future of the sales profession?

**Jason Lemkin** (0:39)
We should have $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Vercel, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people. The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of college to send emails, we don't need them. Folks that qualify leads coming in, the contact me's that we see, we have no need for them today, they should be extinct next year.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Someone's listening to this like, oh man, my job is in trouble.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:59)
If you can go do this, you're hyper employable.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:03)
Today, my guest is Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of SaaStr, the world's largest community for B2B founders, and one of my absolute favorite sales and go-to-market minds on the planet. Jason is not only deeply knowledgeable about everything sales, he's also extremely articulate and direct, and is also now personally going super deep on what AI can do for a sales org. He's transformed his own SaaStr sales team from around 10 SDRs and AEs to one full-time AE, a part-time chief of AI named Amelia, and 20 AI agents. He is seeing the same performance from his AI team as he saw with his former human team, and he's just getting started. These are my favorite kinds of conversations because the guest is living in the future and comes here to show us what the future is like, where we're headed, and how we can get there ourselves, and also just how to avoid all the pitfalls that he had to deal with along the way. We cover all of the things that he has learned about where sales and go to market is going in the AI age. He gives a bunch of advice for salespeople and the future of their careers, the future of the go to market org, how to win as an AI startup right now, what tools he's finding most useful, what it took to shift his sales team, and so much more. This episode is going to get your mind spinning in the best way possible. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 19 premium products for free for an entire year, including a year free of Lovable, Replet, Bolt, N8N, Gamma, Linear, Devon, Post Talk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chat BRD, Mobbin and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Jason Lemkin. After a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, booking.com, Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.
This episode is brought to you by V0 from Vercel. V0 is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds. Whether you're a product manager, designer or developer, transform how you bring products to life. With V0, everybody can cook. Don't just show up to reviews with docs and ideas. Arrive with working prototypes that demonstrate real functionality. V0 drafts project plans, generates interactive interfaces and builds full stack applications without writing a single line of code. And with features like AI and database integrations, screenshot import and sync with GitHub, V0 helps reduce development bottlenecks and enhance collaboration between technical and non-technical team members. The result? Faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation. Vercel built V0 for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit vercel.com/lenny to get started. That's vercel.com/lenny.