In this short conversational video, Jason M. Lemkin and a colleague discuss practical pitfalls and best‑practice steps for rolling out AI‑powered sales agents (BDRs/SDRs). They warn against handing an AI tool to brand‑new reps without a clear process, noting that the old model of simply buying a sales engagement platform (e.g., Outreach, Salesloft, Mixmax) and letting reps use it freely does not work with AI. The speakers recommend a phased rollout: pick a single AI tool, start with a pool of leads that no one is currently contacting, define who feeds contacts into the AI (sales, marketing, CS), decide who handles responses, and create a single source of truth that tracks ownership, follow‑up cadence, CTAs, commissions, and renewal responsibilities. By mapping these responsibilities and iterating for about six weeks, organizations can safely tune the AI before expanding its use.
I don't think you should just unleash an AI you do not know how to use. They were literally calling me to ask me how we do all this. I was like, okay, so let me get this straight. You don't know how to use it? No, no, you know, we're learning, we're like figuring this out. I was like, valid, but also, if you don't know how to use it, why do you expect that your brand new BDRs and SDRs that you literally just hired in the last 0 to 3 months will know how to use The AI version.
In all fairness, it sounds silly to us. Okay. But if we think pre-AI, in the old days, you might buy Outreach or Salesloft and you should, and you should put processes in place and you should build templates for your team. But a lot of smaller orgs would just hand it to their SDR teams. Pick your, pick the tool. In fact, a lot of them would even give them budget. Pick the tool you like. Pick Mixmax or Outreach and Salesloft, whichever one you like. Write your own kind of crummy cadences and set them loose. It doesn't work in AI.
It doesn't work.
And so their idea— this was a very strong, well-respected billion-dollar AI B2B company. They wanted to do the same here. They want to just hand the tool to their brand new SDRs, let them train it and figure it out, do all that segmentation and sequencing and mailing ad and figured it would just magically work.
It's not silly at all. And I actually, I talk like when I walked them through why they shouldn't do that, they were like, Oh, you're totally right. Like, they're like, okay, we like— now we're almost a little embarrassed. We thought we wouldn't just unleash it on all of our A, like, BDRs and SDRs that were humans, because now it makes sense. So like, we need to feed it. Like, we need to figure out, pick who's going to feed it contacts. Is it sales, marketing, CS? Okay, which contacts? Okay, once it gets a response, who does that go to? And they were like, oh, we haven't thought about these things yet. I was like, okay, think about those things first, maybe do like a little map of how you're going to use the contacts and then roll it out. Like, roll it out with contacts right now that no one's touching. I'm like, whatever AI agent, SDR thing you're looking at and just buy one. Like, you're looking at 3, just pick one. You literally have this set of— everyone has this set of leads no one is touching. I was like, all right, do that first. And then when that works and you've got it figured out and you've got it tuned in, like, you know, 6 weeks, Then you can start to roll it out to like the leads and then, you know, stair-step it, go from there. Also, why this worked is we have a single source of truth, and that's what I told this company as well. I go, you need to have one single source of truth of which agents get which contacts, what follow-up are they getting, what CTA are they getting, what do we do with them when they close? You know, the AI doesn't really ask for a lot of commissions, so you got to figure that part out. Who handles the renewals if the AI closes the entire thing by itself, right? These are all things you should think about as you're deploying it.
