AI Agent: From Horizontal to Vertical Growth #shorts

Name: AI Agent: From Horizontal to Vertical Growth #shorts
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T15:34:34+00:00
Duration: 1 min 47 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this short monologue, Jason Lemkin explains the development and evolution of a "digital Jason" AI agent. Initially designed as a horizontal…

4 Nov 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:47

In this short monologue, Jason Lemkin explains the development and evolution of a "digital Jason" AI agent. Initially designed as a horizontal, general‑purpose assistant that could handle a little bit of everything, the agent was unexpectedly used for support tasks, event logistics, and sponsor requests. This unanticipated usage led to hallucinations until the team uploaded their prospectus, providing enough context to improve accuracy. Lemkin notes that the agent achieved roughly 20% of the functionality of the specialized tool Qualified, yet this partial capability still delivered meaningful ROI by answering most customer questions instantly, outperforming their previous Intercom setup. He argues that delivering a modest horizontal solution first builds confidence, after which the product can be expanded into multiple verticalized agents (e.g., SDR, BDR, marketing). The overall message is that a modest horizontal AI can be valuable and serves as a stepping stone toward a suite of specialized agents.

Chapters

There's, there's maybe a couple little triggers. It can't do things that Qualified can, but it can do a little bit of everything. And so it was supposed to just be digital Jason. And what was interesting is, and this is an issue with a lot of agents, people would start using it for support. Okay. Hey, I got a booth at SaaStr Annual. Can I have popcorn? And, and we didn't expect that. And this is an issue so many will have with AI agents is it will— people, if it's any, if it's good, if it's bad, you'll have no ROI. If it's good, people will start using it. We hear this. I'm sure you hear it all the time. People will use it for things you do not envisoned. Yeah. If they trust it. You got it. So instantly people wanted it for, for issues with attending our events and for sponsors. And we're like, oh, well then it started to hallucinate. Okay. It was pretty good on my content. And so we had a magical moment, which is we uploaded our prospectus. Yes. And it only took a certain amount of context and training, but then it started to get good. So then it was pretty good at doing maybe 20% of what Qualified could, but But here's the thing, and the people get this wrong. 20% is a lot better than zero. Like if we never used Qualified and only use this general agent, we wouldn't have the 7 appointments because it can't set meetings. Yeah, but even 20% is better than zero if it's good. Sure. Just the fact that instead of it being ghost— like we used to use Intercom and it would be a weak response time. Okay, so we switched to our agent and it could instantly tell you about 90% right your customer question. And so sometimes 20% is enough. That's as far as we got. And then when we had time after annual, we're like, okay, let's do better. Yeah, let's go from horizontal to vertical as a phase 2. And I don't think that's a bad approach for some folks. Like, get one thing working that's horizontal, get confident, and then go, okay, now let's do SDR, BDR, marketing, dedicated this, dedicated that. Right. So we went from horizontal to, you know, 12 verticalized agents in a sense.