Episode 64: When Will AI Replace Sales Teams with Erik van Eekelen

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Right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered sales teams. Today we are in for a treat, not only because we have a super intelligent guest on our show, but we have a super intelligent guest who is very, very good at a topic many of us are still trying to master and that is artificial intelligence. So with that said, I'd like to introduce you to Eric Van Akelen. Eric and I have known each other for a little while now. We would be six to nine months. I've been following his journey at Ikanaai, which is the business he's the founder of and really loved watching how that business is growing, working through proof of concept, and now at a point where it's adding some really nice value to its customers. So Eric himself, as the founder of Arcana AI, he brings over two decades of technological innovation and leadership very much at the forefront of industry, but specifically to the AI industry. So he's got a really rich background spanning energy, same same, but different as me. E commerce, education. Eric's done some work in fintech and a whole lot of other areas, but for me, his expertise in applying AI to solve complex business challenges is the bit that puts him in high demand. There aren't many of those people around, right? So I think we're very lucky to have a guest like Eric on the show today. In terms of qualifications, Eric's got a Masters of Science in AI. I normally wouldn't talk about qualifications, but having one that is specifically targeted to AI is super, super powerful. So he's been at the cutting edge of this stuff of large language models, of crafting solutions that drive those really significant advancements across the AI or the AI sectors. I should say he's been in that for a very long time and now he's his business, Ikana AI has revolutionized. Well, I think it's going to revolutionize the B2C selling market with a product called AI Call Coach. Whole idea here is actionable insights and your plus 25% on your individual improvements. So Eric, I don't think I could have given you a bigger background to pump you up than that. But first of all, it's great to have you on board and thanks for giving us some of your time today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me here today. This is a great welcome. I need to hire you as my hype guy next time I do go on stage somewhere. So that's awesome. Thanks Ben.

I am very good at networking and lead generation. It's one of my great strengths and with that comes the ability to be able to introduce people. So I'm glad you like that one. But before we get into it, you've heard from me or the audience, you've heard from me about Eric. Tell me about the Eric Van Akelen journey. What are you doing? Why are you successful?

So I've been in the AI field I guess for more than 20 years, right. Like when I did my master's in AI at the time it was still very much like more in the scientific area and not so much in the applied AI area. And so one of the people that I work with, he often talks about Eric survived the AI win time. And there's definitely some truth to that because for a very long time obviously AI was there as a factor and some companies were successfully applying it, but most of us weren't able to use in our day to day lives. And that obviously has changed a few years ago. So in that interim period as you were talking about, I've been in a number of technology roles, leadership technology roles. But now, you know, as soon as generative AI basically kicked off, that was for me the real, you know, starting point to say, okay, I want to go back to that because I really truly believe that this can make a massive impact on us on as a humanity, as society. And that's what makes me really excited as well is how can we apply AI to really kind of accelerate innovation, accelerate science, accelerate in everything that we do and that we want to achieve. And with that in mind, I actually started a company. I can AI, I built some products, but I also do a lot of education, you know, work with companies to talk about their journey. And like, what I notice is that a lot of executive leaders, they want to jump on the bandwagon, right? They want to embrace AI and to use it in the company, but they don't know where it starts. So I do love that work and you know, I'm pretty passionate about that too.

That is a really good segue into what we're talking about today about the practical implications of using AI. And, and really for us, I think we're going to focus around how we can leverage where AI is at now and prepare for the future to help us build stronger sales teams and better business practices. So let's start at the start. What's happening in the world of AI today?

Yeah, I think a lot of people see on LinkedIn and other social networks, X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, they see some of the things that people are doing, but those are often experiments and they're not necessarily what businesses are using. Right. So if I talk about applied AI, I really talk about how business are using AI in their business processes. And so what's happening there is obviously in marketing, it's being used to generate content, right? Generate images, generate text, generate videos. I know a few companies that are actually applying AI to basically look at the trending Google search words and then automatically rewriting their content on their website based on those trends. And so instead of someone having to go through that on a daily basis, they now have basically AI doing that. So that's a really good example of how it's being applied. The other things that are now starting to happen and which is a bit slower because it takes some time to really apply that in companies is the logical reasoning, right? The problem solving that AI offers and how it can help you to work through a problem. So we're starting to see that more. I think that's also a very exciting bit of it.

That first piece you spoke about is very powerful when we talk about businesses that are heavily reliant on paid search or organic traffic and you're able to keep up with the latest or the most dynamic changes around what people are searching for in a somewhat real time basis. I mean some of those data there is a lag there. But to be able to do that in a real time basis once you get that data, that's pretty cool. So is there anything happening at the moment that's really surprising you with AI? I mean, you're a veteran in the industry, is there stuff coming out that still makes you wonder? Wow, I didn't see that one coming.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. One of the interesting things I think when I present on AI, a lot of people are surprised about the fact that The AI to a certain extent, is a black box, right? Like, so that we don't actually know how it works, at least on the very detailed level. And that's because I often explain, you know, AI systems or at least neural networks, they are trained, right? They're not programmed, they're trained. It means that a lot of data goes into it, and based on that, you get to an expected behavior by lots of rounds of training. And that also means that similar to when you learn a new skill, you create new pathways basically in your brain, Right? So not exactly the same for AI, but there is enough of an analogy there that, that I think it makes sense to think of it that way. So that also means that sometimes you don't know exactly what happens when you ask a specific question, right? You don't know exactly what's going to be the output when you give it a specific input. And even you might give the same input a number of times and get a slightly different output every time that you ask. And those are the things that a lot of people are surprised by. Those are less surprising for me, for me, what is really the part that I had not expected is the multimodality. So how. Well, the learnings in the large language model, so the text models really transfer to being able to generate images, being able to generate videos. You know, I don't know how many of the people in your audience will have seen the SORA videos, but those are very impressive, fully generated videos just basically based on the prompt. Right. And that I had not seen coming. And that was also not something that I was told like 20 years ago when I was at university. So I think that is only accelerating and that's, you know, very exciting and at times also a little bit scary.

Yeah, that was definitely running through my mind. Wow. It's getting really smart if we can take text and put it into a whole lot of other modalities. Because so far, one of the fallbacks, or roadblocks, if you like, for AI has been its ability to mimic the human's adaptive nature or the agility of the human brain when you're in very complex situations. And it sounds like there might be some rapid closing of the gaps there, but we're actually going to get to. When we speak about closing of the gaps, you have certainly an AI opinion that I think is big. It's big news and we're going to get to it in a minute. And all about closing the gaps between where we're at now as a B2C sales teams in particular, but also for some B2B and where we think we're going to be in 12 months. But before we get to that, can you tell me how do you think AI is going to really impact the future? Let's look at a horizon of about 12 months down the track first.

So I think one way to look at it is look at the sales funnel, right? So if you think about the sales funnel and how AI is currently already being applied and what you can expect in the near future is what you can currently already see is like we talked about those search terms and how that you basically can use AI to generate content. So that's already there. Then the next layer is almost like qualifying your leads, right? So someone finds out about your product, wants to know more about it. Currently you normally have your landing page or you've got your website or maybe you've got some social media campaigns that try to kind of inform that lead that comes in, that person, that prospect that's interested in your products and then you try to get them to call you as quickly as possible or you call them. Right? I can kind of get that lead capturing. But what AI currently allows you to do now is to have like an intelligent chat conversation. And that's today, right? So that's already available. It's one also one of the products that my company offers. But you can, you can basically have a chatgpt like conversation, but about your products, right. With a chat bot, even though I don't like that name, maybe an agent is a better word. Web agent, you can have an intelligent conversation with something that actually knows the pricing, that knows your current promotions, that knows, you know the details about your product that chat GPT obviously wouldn't know, right? So you can give it those details, you can train it on that and then you can like your prospects can have a conversation with that, which really helps you to kind of qualify those leads. And I guess it's a different take than having your 24, 7 offshore chat teams, right? So it's an alternative to that and I would say a step up, right, because it actually allows you to have like those, those chatbots. They will have an intelligent conversation and people will actually get answers instead of just being asked to drop their details. So I think that's step two. And then the third step is obviously, okay, so let's just say for the moment that you're going to be on the phone with them, right? So want your sales team to be on the phone with your prospects. And a lot of my experiences in B2C but maybe we can talk about B2B in a bit. But let's say B2C. We've got a call center, they're on the phone. But we also know that like in those, those call centers there is a lot of people, there's some really outliers. And I think this is true for, you know, a lot more about sales teams. But what I've seen from it in the past is that there's a few very high performance, the rainmakers, right. And there's people that are on different levels below that. Right. And it also takes a lot of time to kind of onboard new people to kind upskill them and get them to the same levels. And so what AI now allows you to do is actually analyze the recordings of those conversations with prospects and give immediate feedback and kind of say, okay, well which of our, what our expectations of a quality call have been ticked off during the conversation. And we know that a lot of sales leaders who would like to, would love to listen to more of those recordings, but they never have the time to do it. And now I actually allows them to do that. Right. Like it's just analyzes the calls and then gives it immediate feedback. I think that's really kind of like a next step up from, from where we are and which is already available today. And that, you know, you mentioned a core culture. That's one of the products that we offer. There's obviously all those out there as well. And then if I look at, if I go one step further, if we go from there and say, okay, well what's going to happen in the next 12 months? Right. And this is where my kind of bold statement comes in. I truly believe, and not everyone's going to be happy about this, but I truly believe within the next 12 months we will have fully autonomous AI agents, sales agents if you want, or service agents on the phone, right. That you are able to have a voice to voice conversation with in real time. We're not there today yet. So even though some people have showed demos, you know, in the most optimal scenarios, if the people on the phone are very patient, they don't talk slowly, they don't interrupt you, then it's already possible. But obviously that's not reality, right? Like that's not how the real life works. But we are now very close to that point where that is possible. Right? So where we do have the possibility both inbound and outbound calls like real time. So an AI basically as a script, right, like knows your products and has an understanding of your company and the person on the phone will just be calling with their questions and AI answering as you would expect from a human as sales or service agents. And I think the only thing that stops us right now is kind of hardware which is currently being developed. So we kind of at a 1 second latency as they call. Right. A kind of a one second delay in how quickly AI can respond to something someone on the phone has said. And I think from research like we need to get that down to third of a second. So, you know, and that gap is narrowing very quickly. So I do expect, you know, for example, if you call an airline that you might get a choice. Instead of waiting for, you know, 60 minutes or half an hour before you get to talk to someone, you actually get a choice. Do you want to speak to an AI agent right now? I think that's how it's going to start and then we'll see that being rolled out very soon.

So that's the mic drop. 12 months time, fully AI driven sales agents. Eric Van Akelen's big hairy, audacious statement made early 2024. May 2024. Okay, wow. Well, that is an impact for sales leaders and salespeople. Do you think that salespeople and sales leaders alike should be concerned about that?

I think everyone right now with AI and the impact of AI on their jobs, almost every job, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, but I think people should have some concern. Right. You should definitely be very aware of what's happening and it's definitely going to change. So for the sales leaders, it's definitely going to change the way your teams are structured, the way that you operate. Right. Your operational model of your business, you, the cost pressure that you're going to get from your executives. Right. Like all of that is, is definitely going to impact now. There is obviously always a difference between the moments from when something is possible technically or scientifically to the moment is being rolled out in companies. And I'm sure that like in 12 months time not every company was switched to fully AI agents. Definitely not. But obviously the higher that impact is, the more costs will be saved by applying it. The higher the pressure will be to go down that path. Right. So yes, so I think yes, they should be concerned, but it also creates a lot of opportunities obviously. And so I think, I think you need to find that balance.

There are a couple of things in there that really interest me. We talk about electric cars for a moment. It's been possible to drive an electric car for a decade. But we are still at least a decade in my opinion, away from having electric cars as the mass market driver. So fundamentally agree with the air. I also think there is a piece around whilst the technology may be ready to run automated sales agents, there will be industries that it will work for, there will be industries that it won't work for, there'll be industries that it is recognized as acceptable within, and there'll be industries that it's recognized that it's not acceptable in. So I think there's a very long journey ahead here. But what you're saying is within 12 months, be ready, you could be replaced by a far cheaper resource that could do close to as good a job in some instances. So if you're a salesperson now, what are you doing to. The instant word that came up for me was to compete against AI. But perhaps we can be a little bit softer here. And what can you be doing now to prepare to still be a very relevant and important resource in the business world in the future?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think it first starts by being educated, being informed, right? Having a good understanding of what is possible for, with using AI, right? So really make AI integrated in your workflow. So for example, if you're, you're kind of working independently or doing B2B sales and you've got your own pipeline that you work on, you might want to start using AI to analyze your own goals, right? Like how could you improve your, your meetings that you have, like record them and have an analyze, have an AI analyze them. And I think that will get you a good understanding or use AI in other parts of your life where you work. So just to get an understanding of what's possible, I think that at least will make sure that you're not as surprised by what is possible. I think that's what I noticed the most, is that people are really taken off guard or just basically by not knowing what is coming. So that's one. The other thing is what is probably the hardest part, I mean, you mentioned this before, you said, you know, not in every industry, AI agents will be acceptable. And I think that's a really good point. So if you think about your career as a salesperson, then I think the logical path would be to go down the road where you really have to focus on the quality of your conversations, right? Really have a good empathetic understanding of your clients. So both in your skills and maybe the type of work that you do, really focus on those areas. Because even though AI might be able to do it. It would not necessarily acceptable for humans in the next few decades to have that conversation with an AI. Like they are emotional or have a specific drive to go for a specific purchase and they might not want to talk to an AI about it because they want a human to understand how important this to them. Right. So I think, I think if you, if you can ensure that you develop those skills or further develop those skills and to, you know, work in industries where that is really important, I think that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, good one. So what we're saying here is be really, really focused on where you add value. Be really focused on learning the technological changes that are coming. This is not the first period of mass disruption to people as sales leaders or sales individuals. In fact, we've just gone through a pretty significant one. That little pandemic, absolutely unheard of changes to how we had to operate during that period. And I led a team of 80 people over that really heavy six month period at the start there. And everyone had to make significant changes. So we're all capable. It's whether or not we put our focus onto it. Okay, so let's go one level higher before we let you go. If you're a sales leader, what are you doing today to prepare for the upcoming or the continued disruption? No, I'm going to stand at the upcoming disruption. I don't think AI is truly disrupting sales teams yet. Not truly, but I think it's not far away. So what are you doing as a sales leader to prepare for the upcoming disruption?

Yeah, I think there's a few things there. One is to really get that basic understanding of AI. And I know this is tough because everyone has got their own personal development agendas. There's so many things already on your list, so many things that you want to learn and study. And obviously it's easy for me to say, okay, you need to get better understanding of AI, but I think once you start actually using like even if you just get chatgpt, I would suggest getting a paid account or anthropic, which is the competitors or anthropic AI, they have another, another AI product called Claude, which is just about the same level as GPT4. And so if you aren't using that already in your life and just, even just for your personal things, then start doing that because that really will give you a better understanding of what is possible and the level of AI. Because if you used it two years ago or a year and a half ago when ChatGPT just came out and you're currently basing your opinion on those first experiences. You're completely off the market, right. So you need to make sure that you get better informed. So I definitely study there and then build up from there. Might get a better understanding of what tools are available for salespeople that use AI. And you have to be a bit selective there because there's many in the market that you might not be interesting for you. But like for in your use case, right. In your funnel, as we were talking about before, what would make sense as a sales leader to kind of optimize your cost, to optimize your conversion rates, right. Like which tools would, would be interesting to try out? And that's, I think that would be my third point. Experiments, Experiment, Experiments, right. Start experimenting some of those tools. What makes a difference for your teams? And I think that one of the key points there, one of the things that I have noticed when people start using AI products and E sales is that there is some people, they are really excited about it. And I'm talking about the people on the phone now, right. So some people are really excited about it and others are really cautious. And then there's people obviously who are very much against it because they don't necessarily want an AI to analyze their calls or tell them what to do. And I get that. I like that's just a very human emotion to feel that, to go through that. So by introducing it slowly, by starting with small experiments and then start building on top of that, I think that's the way to go to not just for yourself to discover what is possible, but also to kind of get your teams used to it, right. To, to get an understanding of what it means to work with AI, right. And not against AI. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I like it. Learn it, embrace it, experiment with it. I think that is very much paraphrasing what you said, but very much, very much should be on the front of sales leaders minds right now. Excellent. Couple of challenging topics in there today, Eric. And one big hairy, audacious kind of bold prediction which no doubt is going to go headline of when we put this one out on social media. But thank you very much for your time today. So Eric van Akelen, he's the founder of Ikana AI. Eric, where else can people find you if they'd like to get in touch either LinkedIn.

Right. So feel free to drop me a line, just mention this podcast and I'll definitely respond. And Alternatively my website, www.icana.AI Excellent.

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much again. Eric, Lovely having you here. For those listening, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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