How We Use 20+ AI Agents for Marketing & Go-to-Market with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer

SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer share how they deploy 20+ AI agents across marketing, sales, and support. They use Claude, Gamma, Descript, and other tools to build personalized decks from five bullet points, turn webinars into clips and articles, and capture leads in support chats. The key: AI amplifies human work, not replaces it.
Chapters
Welcome to the official Saastr podcast, where you can hear some of the best Saastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saastr podcast. All these agents are getting better. We have 20 in production. Here's the thing. This includes Replit. This includes Opus. This includes AgentForce and Artisan and Qualified, all the tools we love to death. They automate a lot of stuff. Like they might even automate 95% of what you used to need a team to do. They don't automate everything. Here's the problem. As great as these tools are, they do not enable lazy marketing. What they enable is better marketing and much more of it. Everyone wants an autopilot. Everyone wants to buy a tool and disappear. It does not work that way. You know, you can have crappy output, you can have crappy LinkedIn posts, Hey everybody, it's Saster. Connect data, automate busywork, and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com/smb. That's salesforce.com/smb.
Hey Saster, imagine having agents for every support task, one that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risk. That'd be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as 2 cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel AI-first support stack. Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at happyfox.com/aster. So thanks all for joining us here. We thought we would do a part 2 to what we started last week. If you didn't see it last week, that's okay. We'll cover some of it here and do a refresher. We primarily focused on sales and specifically outbound, all of our AI SDR agents. So what I thought we would do today is start with marketing and then we'll kind of circle back to a few things we didn't get to in broader go-to-market. Adjusting what's working now for us, at least as our AI is running our go-to-market teams and we have more agents than people here at SaaStr. So I thought we would go through that start there. One thing I'll preface for everyone, if you haven't seen this yet or you missed this last time, if you do go on saaStr.ai/agents, this will reference a lot of the things we talked about last week and this week. In the two parts for go-to-market. So this is our agent arsenal, as it says. A lot of these tools are, you know, third-party tools. Some of them have a little bit of proprietary stuff in them. There's the proprietary apps we've vibe-coded, but this has the whole guide there. So if you're looking for like certain tools we message or drop in or show screenshots of and you want to refer back to them, they're all there just to make it easy for you. So with that, Let's dive into marketing a bit just because we didn't get to it. And I feel like it's a, it's an important topic. And before we get more tactical with it, since we have a little bit of time, Jason, want to get your thoughts on what you're seeing here as well. I think this is a study I referenced last week as well. This is from Rory and Scale Venture Partners' State of AI Go-to-Market. Study that just came out. It's a pretty good one. I wanted to call out a few things in marketing I think that are interesting to me/us, because I feel like for marketing in particular, folks seem to be more behind than they are in sales or support. I actually anecdotally don't know why that is. I don't think it's because there's a lack of tools, which a lot of folks will point to. I don't think it's that, as you'll see in our next few slides. There's plenty of tools we're using in marketing. And that are working well. So I think it's just a little bit interesting here to see in the data that, you know, most folks are just using AI in marketing for things like messaging. Okay, fine. But that's— everyone's done that now, right? ChatGPT. Doing research, I feel like, yep, that's a little bit more in the weeds, maybe a little bit more specialized. But most people have not done these phase— what they're calling phase 2 use cases, which is actually analyzing, you know, marketing campaign data and spend. Whether it's in-house or with third-party agencies, actually using it to be creative. I think— I don't know where this stigma has come from, but that the AI is not that creative or that all the AI content comes out the same. I feel like those are also two schools of thought that we've kind of myth-busted on. And then for things like enriching and scoring. So as we talked about a lot last week in just how we're running some of our go-to-market through these agents with sales in particular, a lot of that is still relevant to marketing. So I think that's maybe a conversation we can have at the end of, you know, what does this all mean for the two separately and then together? But I think it's something where so many of these platforms and AI, maybe they were built for sales, but you can actually use for marketing, which I'll show. All right. So let me, let me show you guys a few things of what we mean. And then, yeah, we can dive into it a bit more on what this might mean for you all. I would say right now in marketing, we have the most specialized stack. And what I mean by that is like we have the most amount of tools in marketing, maybe that we have for sales. A lot of our agents that we've deployed in sales, I'm able to deploy multiple agents on single platforms. And so that's helped a lot in terms of like how we train into all the agents has been different in each of those platforms and in each of those single instances, but I'd say for marketing, we probably have the most specialized stack right now. We have hyper-focused tools that do one thing really well. And so in this, it's been a little bit of trial and error of us trying to find, you know, what are the very best ones out there? And then not only which ones are the very best ones out there, but which ones will we actually stick with using? And also, use for our actual go-to-market, right? Which ones are just, okay, we kind of had fun, played around for the weekend on and then never used again. Which ones do we actually need now in our day-to-day? So there's two, I think, that have become core for us. It's both from a— this one's both a sales and marketing perspective, but I've used it for both these cases. This is a really great one at making collateral. So just go-to-market collateral, whether that's sales collateral, marketing collateral. The two apps we use the most right now are going to be Gamma and Reeve. I think the next slide is Higgsfield. We use those a lot, heavily. I put these, this slide here. This is an actual slide. I sent it over. But this is a custom, you'll see that I picked this slide because it has a few custom photos on it. The photos were made by Reeve. So where you see these guys like vibe coding outside, I told Reed, you know, hey, I'm thinking about doing like a vibe coding camp or summit or something, vibe coding lab. It also came up with that name for me, a vibe coding lab at SaaStr Annual next year. This is basically a pitch I wanted to do with our marketing team. I gave it actual photos of SaaStr Annual. I was like, here's what our setup looks like. Here's what the tents look like outside. Here's what people, you know, kind of look like in SaaStr. So just so you have the grounding, I would say, for the agent to know what to output on, that also will help it not be as generic. I feel like where Rive kind of kicks butt over Nano Banana or some of the other, or you know, ChatGPT or Sora is you can upload an image to those and I feel like most people just Ghibli themselves or maybe like a picture version of themselves. Rive is really good at doing mockups. Like it, I didn't think it was intended to be its superpower. It's really good at doing stuff like this where like, I used to have to ask our designer, okay, can you do a quick mockup of, you know, the Replet logo in a tent, kind of make it look real like people are sitting in it. One, that takes really long when a manual designer does it. Two, because I gave it reference images, Reeve was pretty— like, this was a first shot image. I was like, that one's pretty good. I was like, I like that one. It looks like our tent that we have outside. There's people, but they're vibecoding on the screens. I told it, make sure they're vibecoding on the screens. And so that's pretty cool. And so I had it do a couple more. I was like, okay, what are other things I want to conceptualize for this potential space that Replit's going to do? And it's faster. Um, I said, okay, I want it to be an exclusive footprint. So it came up with this, you know, here's the rest of the outdoor tent with the Replit logo. It did orange umbrellas because it pitched that from their brand colors that's prevalent in the logo. And I said, okay, now the last one I want is I want to include some sort of like outdoor stage and space. I gave it photos of past outdoor stages we had. With speakers on it and it came up with this and I was like, cool. I actually think it kind of crushed it on these mocks that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. And it's just such a way in which like when I started presenting this to the Replit team, they were like, that's cool. Like they can visualize it, they can see it. Yeah.
Yeah. Just to add the inside tip for guys that might not, you know, for reeve.art, it is a team that built their own image LLMs. It's not the same stuff everyone else uses. You know, there's a variety that they might use. So when, you know, when you build, when you build a lot of images and they all look like cartoons or they look silly or they look goofy, it's not your only asset for B2B. Try Rive, upload something that's similar to what you want and in plain English, tell it what you want. I think for B2B use cases, for real business stuff, the 95% chance it's going to be much better than what you get out of ChatGPT. I started using this. I told Amelia to use it. She didn't. And then it's just, this is the kind of real stuff that you want, not goofy cartoon looking stuff, or I mean, that has its place if you want to be fun, but for B2B, use this and it's going to crush. Like this looks real. It looks great. There's no excuse for those, for that goofy cartoon stuff, unless that's what you want. And I don't think, you know, the world has moved past that for B2B. You don't have to settle for crappy text, which we'll talk to, and you don't have to settle for cartoony images. You in fact should create great pitches for your prospects. Yeah.
Yeah. So how this one came about in this use case was I, yeah, we've obviously had this journey with Replit, but then I started to get to know their marketing team. They wanted more marketing. And so they're a sponsor of Berliner already, but we wanted, they were like, we want to do something bigger, probably something custom at Staffster Annual. And so we started thinking through this live coding lab thing. I would say Reave also is best at— you can— this logo, I gave it that logo, right? Like sometimes when you put it in the other generators or LLMs, it will come up with a logo or it will change their logo. Reave, I think, kind of quietly crushes it at the text being good. And if you upload logos, it keeps the logos. So that's one where I, to Jason's point, I really like the professionalism of it. It looks polished, right? So this is something that I think is extendable to folks. I like it for that use case. Another one is just related to marketing. You know, we're doing all these assets for Saastr London in 10 days or whatever this is. And I put into Reave like my original concepts of, okay, here's what I'm kind of thinking for all the stages. You know, we need like some backdrops, we need a bunch of signage. And I had Reave give me, you know, all these different outputs. I was like, nah, that one looks too dry. That one is too overdone, that one's too boring. It's really good for storyboarding, which I feel like is a good superpower of it too, because it's going to generate all these really realistic images. I give it images of past London events, like I gave it the venue, I give photos of the venue, like it can actually help you picture and visualize and storyboard what you want. And so when I started going through that process, it made this really cool like portal looking thing. I was like, oh, I like that. I like that plus the stats for AI. Would look pretty sick. And so then we actually, we ended up, I upscaled it in Adobe Photoshop, has a little bit of AI, so you can take it out of Rive if it's, you know, it's fine enough digital quality, but if you're doing anything print, you do need to have usually higher quality, higher DPI. And so I put it into Photoshop, upscaled it, gave it to our designer as a 4K asset, all generated in Rive. And I was like, this is the portal, you know, clean it up, add sounds through AI. And we got a pretty sick looking brand. That is also another great use case, more specifically for marketing, not related to events, but you guys might, even if you have a small event, this is a good way to kind of quietly, you know, uplevel it as well and make it look more polished and better. You can use it. I've used it in emails, right? Obviously image generation for emails that we're sending out, but just in go-to-market, if you want it to be more, you know, tactical, we're using it here for both sales and marketing collateral that we're using to drive revenue. So it is something that works really well. I then plugged the 3 images into Gamma. Gamma, if you don't know it, is a, it's a, I want to say newer-ish tool that does content creation, specifically presentations. So like you might say, oh, I could do a presentation in Canva. Yeah, you can. And like I've done both and I've run tests on both side by side. Usually the Gammas are just a bit better, especially for B2C. Yeah. Sorry, for B2B rather than B2C like Canva is. The decks come out a little bit better. You can give it things like, again, like Replit. I gave it Replit's orange. I gave it their, I was like, check their website for fonts that you should use. Also look up how they talk about themselves. Because you can give it the content you want, but you can also prompt it, usually the output is pretty good. And so I like Gamma a lot because We use it now to send all of our like sales collateral, sales decks, support decks. We've Gamma'd. It's easy. They're also easily shareable. So between the two tools together, you know, you'll have to still customize the two. Like I don't use all the image creations out of Gamma. I prefer like Gamma has built-in image creation and I obviously still prefer like the Reeve images or ones that we have. That are actual like real images. Like, so like we still pick and choose which ones work better. So that's what I mean, like our marketing stack is probably the most specialized, but it does help eliminate a lot of bottleneck and deal cycles, right? You're getting them something polished. You're not waiting, you know, a week for your designer to come in and do this. Personalized decks, I feel like just elicit a much better conversation or response from folks. Like this also, not only can this kind of uplevel your decks, you can also send them to more people is what I found. Like We've started sending these to pretty much everyone. We're like, we used to not do that. We used to be like, here's one set deck we have for SaaStr. If you're interested in sponsoring, here's the one deck. Sometimes, you know, that's not the best thing for teams to pass around when they're like, okay, we're considering opting into this. Or if you're trying to go to market with something more so on the marketing side, it's again, it's not clean, it's not as polished to share like one asset that's more generalized obviously versus something that's hyper-personalized to them. You've obviously sat, you've listened to their needs, but using the AI, you can kind of scale that up a bit more so that you can have this sent across. It looks a lot better. You don't need an agency to do this, and then they can share it internally. I'll, I, if you use it directly in Gamma versus exporting it to like a PDF or Google Slides, it'll tell you whatever people view it. So I'll get pings all the time of, you know, random XYZ person at XYZ company, did this deck. I'm like, yeah, I didn't send it to them, but They're at the company and they're always like sharing this around. So I think that's what you want is you want to use this to not only improve your current processes of how you're doing these things, but also just to unlock new ones so that you can do it at a more hyper-personalized scale.
And for folks that, I mean, Gamma got a lot of, we've been using it for a long time, but got a lot of press recently. They just said they crossed $100 million AR this year and raised around $2 billion. So a lot of press, but I've actually found, we've been promoting Gamma for a long time because we use it. A lot of folks They might even talk about it. They've never used it. Literally, I was at the other day at an event with the CEO of a public SaaS company saying, ah, Gamma, that's just PowerPoint and no one will ever use that. I'm like, you know, they're going to, they already got to $100 million, my friend. There's something there. But here's the tip. Okay. Most of you haven't used reev.art for images. It's all on SaaS or diet agents. Go upload something that you use and just ask it to make it better. I bet you're going to find this is your best tool for Gamma. If you haven't used it, Don't overcomplicate this. Literally go into a Google Doc, write 5 bullets of what you want a deck to be. Okay? Take those 5 bullets, put it in the free version of Gamma, and watch it build a deck for you. I bet it's the best thing you've seen. Okay? You can use it, you can make a template you use again and again, which Amelia does, and then upload it dynamically with data, become an AI agent expert. But that could be intimidating for folks. If you haven't used it, don't overcomplicate it. Take 5 bullets on Anything that you're doing, give it to Gamma and watch the agent build a deck for you. It's pretty awesome. And then if you get excited about that, go deeper like we have. And then you can make dynamic decks for everybody for real, not the same crappy static decks everyone else is getting. But you can start really simple with these tools. They don't have to be intimidating. And I think your jaw will drop for both if you invest like 5 minutes in each. Keep it simple. Invest 5 minutes.
Yep.
Okay.
Let me go to the next one. In terms of content automation, so we have a lot of specialized tools in this bucket. You saw on one of the previous slides, this is where most folks are using AI in their marketing stack. I would say, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that these are all specialized. Again, like the way that I use Gamma and Reave together. It's like, it only takes, I would say, 60 extra seconds to generate an image in Reave versus doing a native brain gamma. It comes out a lot better in my opinion. It comes out a bit more customized. And then I port it over. So I don't, I don't think you should be scared by the amount of tools on this one slide. We do pick and choose like the very best things and outputs. And also a lot of these are off the shelf. So I would say for, particularly in marketing and how we're using this so far. I think the next one is one of our more like enterprise tools and solutions is, you know, these are all off the shelf. So like Claude, Replit, Reeve, Higgsville, Recall, which we use a lot for content, Opus, we're adding Mosaic for video. Like these are all ones where they're like, you know, user subscriptions. Like anybody on your team slash yourself could just go set up, you know, whatever, $20 to $30 a month. Or $10 to $30 a month and try these tools and see which ones work for you. So I think what's working well for us now is yes, obviously we do use it for some of our content. We have a lot of content at Savster. And prior to this, that was a lot of Jason and my day was writing content. It's still a lot of Jason's day. It's still a lot of our time. But now the agents are— I don't mean to speak for you, Jason, but I do feel like with this agent mix you have specifically in content creation, you get there a lot faster. So you're able to post like more advice to folks.
Yeah, I would say what we've been able to do is triple our content output with AI. I think that, and I think the mistake a lot of folks make is they use a lot of crappy social media tools that regurgitate content again. So they, they want thought leadership. So they spool up a tool, it examines someone else's feed. It often examines my feed. I see folks rewriting my content. And it sort of works because LLMs are good at copying and regurgitating. So if you just want views, I guess if you think that's going to move the needle for your business, then generic AI tools are fine. Okay. But what we do, which is the real powerful thing, is, is you architect the content, you create the content, our videos, our sessions, our posts, our ideas, and use AI to turbocharge it, to do more research for you, to go deep dive. You know, we used to— that's what you really want to do is to— is for AI to be your steroids for content creation, not to create the core nucleus. That becomes trite and boring, but that's how we've tripled it. I, I write all the— if you've read SaaS for a long time, I've written most of the content for more than a decade. Okay. But if you compare an article today, this year versus 2 years ago, you'll see that it's pretty similar, but there's a lot more data. I can do a lot more research. I can— and it's not just asking Claude to do the research. I can You can take multiple articles, 3 or 4 articles off the internet. For example, today, just before this, I wrote an article on how venture capital has changed for funds. I took 2 different data sources, one from Crunchbase and one from an LP, an investor in top funds called Venrock, that analyzed 1,900 funds. And I added that data to my post. Okay. I added that data with AI and it makes it so much better. You've got to check the work. It does take a few minutes, but AI can let you take great ideas and make them 10 times better. That's where you get, get the leverage.
Yep. I would say too, just on this, we do use a few different tools here. They all work fairly well, but yeah, to that point, right, we are using it to amplify existing content that we have or, or even build up on that content. Like one thing I did for this webinar, actually for last week's and this week, is I gave it the last 3 or 4 sessions that we had done on this topic of AI, our agents. I put it into Claude because I like Claude better. I was like, hey, given what we've already covered, I don't want to keep regurgitating things. Like, I want to show data. And Claude did not have my data. And I would— like, these are screenshots I took. I put these slides together, but it gave me a pretty good outline. It was like, okay, based on the last few talks you guys have done, based on what you have coming up, based on where you're at the 6-month mark. Here's what I think you should cover that is like SaaSer-style actionable content. So give me a really good outline. It like gave me this outline, like this format of like, okay, you should go into each of the different segments of go-to-market. We should talk about what's working and what's not on each slide. You should call out the tools. And it gave me ideas. I'm like, okay, here are maybe some answer, like it would ask me like, hey, is this what's working? Is this not what's working? Okay. Like then maybe show this as like the next slide. And so it gave me a really good, it was like a really good copilot for me on like just putting my thoughts together. 'Cause obviously now that we're doing a part 2, I was like, I have a lot we could cover and go off on about AI and go-to-market, but I wanna try and make it super tactical for folks so that it's helpful and useful. And it was really good for honing that. And it was like, okay, I, I was like, what about this topic? It was like, no, like that could be its own topic. Don't go too much off the engine. And so yeah, it's gotten, I would say, really good at that. So it helped me with this outline. And then I obviously did, I, you know, I still wrote all the slides and did all the— I did use Canva a bit. And then I pulled all of our screenshots in of our data. And, but now I'm also using it for the, some of the stuff we're going to do in London. Just to, again, I'm going to give it this one after today. I gave it last week. So I'm like, okay, now build on it again, knowing that, you know, some people in my audience would have seen these two FasterAI Lives and some people wouldn't have, but also make it shorter because now we're together, this'll be like the 2-hour mark and I think the opener at London's only 45 minutes. So what are the most relevant points I should hit on? And it's gotten pretty good at that. So I do, I think it's great for that too, because that saved me a lot of time. Like it still took me a while to obviously make the deck and put all the points together for you guys and put all the screenshots and the data like that, that, that still takes work. But it did help me organize my thoughts a lot more.
Yep. On the content repurposing, not to spe— I know you hit it. A lot of folks, especially founders and marketers that are watching or will watch later, I find we're all generating so much more content these days, especially video. There's so much more pods. There's so much more everything going on. And people are not using AI to extend the life of that content. There's a lot discussed on it, but I see a lot of lazy approaches. And let me tell you what we do. It's pretty simple. Amelia has it on this bullet point: Opus Pro, Get Recall, and Descript. I don't think we touched on the first two, did we, Amelia?
No.
But okay, so you just did, you just did a great interview, and then you stick it on your YouTube and it disappears. Okay, great. I hope it performs. Just a few— the first one's a little You probably know, or you might not. The second one's a little more subtle, but let me tell you what we can do with this content. The first one is stick your— if you haven't used Opus Pro, it's on our list on SaaS Dry Agents. There's a lot of tools, but it's the leading tool for turning your video into clips. And listen, it can't take boring content and make it great, but what Opus Pro is really good at is take the YouTube URL, stick— give it to Opus Clip, and it will force rank the most compelling content out of that and find you some clips. And then it will just actually automatically schedule it for you on your social media accounts, on LinkedIn, on X, on Facebook, whatever you want. It's pretty good. It will take the— if you just did a 40-minute webinar, it will take the best 60 seconds, 120 seconds, clip it and let you put it right on LinkedIn where your customers are. You should be doing this and you can queue up 5, 6, 8, 10 of those over the course of the month. You should be doing that with your best content or you're kind of wasting it. How does it grade it? It uses AI. It's pretty amazing. And there's a free version, like try— this is another one you can literally try in 5 minutes. Take your YouTube URL and stick it in Opus Pro and see it. It extracts the text, which is actually very easy to do. Actually, YouTube gives you the text through the API. It's not that complicated. And then it just runs that text through some LLM. I don't even know what it is and says, find me the best parts. When Opus first launched pre— I don't know. We were using it in SaaS for LinkedIn a year and a half ago. It was like magical. I'm like, how does it do this? How does it find the best clips? This seemed like the most magical. And I actually invested in the company. It was so magical. It still is magical. But it's now that I understand how AI works better today with our agents, it's less magical than I thought. Extract text. It's not much text. Like these videos, even if it's 2 hours, it's not a lot of text. It's not much for the LLMs to process. Give it to the LLM and say, break it up into the best 2-minute chunks. It works really well. And then just, and then it just says, hook in your LinkedIn account, hook in your Twitter account, and it just does it all for you. It's magical. So you're way wasting your content if you don't do this. You can also ask it to make 3-minute clips, which we do too. If you have a little more energy, you can put those 3-minute clips on X and LinkedIn, like the best ones for deeper dives. You'll see Saster do that all the time. You'll see these 3 and 4-minute clips. I don't have time to make it. Opus makes it for us. Like, it's really good. Okay, so what's the next? So that's how you turn your video into clips in Shortform. Just do it. Opus is like, there's a free version or it's $20 a month or $5 a month for the paid, but you can try it free. Then we use an app very few people use called Get Recall. There's actually two apps called Recall. One does like transcription. I don't know what one is. An API tons of folks use. The founder is at Saastr and you'll get a ton of customers out of it. It's an API. Get Recall actually just transcribes your whole internet world with AI. Like everyone should be using this. It's just a niche app. It'll do everything. I use it for one thing. I give it that URL for the YouTube and it instantly gives me Great summarized text. And then instead of Opus doing its own thing, I take that text and I put it into Claude and I tell it the type of article I want to write out of the content. This is really powerful. Okay. So literally we're doing this hour-long webinar right now. Okay. When it's done, I will grab the YouTube URL and I'll go to Get Recall and give it to it and I'll get the text and I'll put it in Claude. And let's say I only want to write a SaaStr post on content repurposing. I will take the transcript of this session and say, Claude, write me a SaaS or post just on what Amelia and I said on content repurposing. And then it can write an article just on that. Now, of course, you've got to edit it a little bit, but it's going to be pretty good. This is, and literally if we wanted to, we could take this session and turn it into 5 or 6 articles by getting the text from it, from Get Recall and YouTube, and then just asking Claude to write 5 or 6 great articles out of it. This will be better. Than the crummy agency you asked to write a bunch of crappy articles. Take your own content. We watch that. If you have something great from your own events, digital events, real events, find the 3 or 4 great things from it and write articles just about those 3 or 4 things with the extracted text and Claude. It'll be great. Like, it will be great. And this will turn— you can get 10 great clips out of your content, but actually you can get 5 or 6 great articles if it's a really good piece of content. Don't waste that great interview. Don't waste that— the best keynote you had. Don't waste the best session from, from an event you just had. It's just a waste, right? I mean, no light criticism, no criticism. I just did this great digital day with G2. We did it, Goddard and I did it with the CEO of Zendesk. Okay. It was so good. Now they've decided to hide it behind some Wistia, and we do love Wistia at SaaStr. We use it ourselves, but to hide it behind a link wall to capture email addresses, I guess maybe that's the right thing to do, but Because I know so much about AI for support, I asked the CEO of Zendesk so many great things. I could write 5 articles out of that piece of content. We talked about pricing for AI for support. We talked about how difficult it is to train AI agents, and so how to simplify that. That could be like 4 different articles that G2 and I, if anyone from G2 wants to help, we'll do the work. We could create 5 great pieces out of that interview instead of it like just disappearing into the ether.
The other thing I was gonna say, as you were chatting through all this was that the, a few folks were asking questions related to if there's a way to do this more programmatically in the chat. I think what you guys mean, if we're using, you know, all like Jason M. Lemkin for this, let's just use this content example you just gave. Is there a way you can do that automatically or are you doing that manually now?
Do which department.
You know, like, are you— is there— there's no way right now to automate like Opus grabbing or Recall grabbing YouTube automatically?
It's a great question. All these agents are getting better. We have 20 in production. Here's the thing. This includes Replit. This includes Opus. This includes AgentForce and Artisan and Qualified, all the tools we love to death. They automate a lot of stuff. Like, they might even automate 95% of what you used to need a team to do. They don't automate everything. Here's the problem. As great as these tools are, they do not enable lazy marketing. What they enable is better marketing and much more of it. Everyone wants an autopilot. Everyone wants to buy a tool and disappear. It does not work that way. You know, listen, You can have crappy output. You can have crappy LinkedIn posts. Again, where I started, none of this is full automation. You can automate 95%, but even me, listen, I'm not like, you know, I'm no— I didn't found a Lovable or, or Cursor, but I'm a somewhat successful founder. I'm still doing this myself at this point in my career. I'm not— I, but I'm getting lots of help, so I'm much more productive, but I still have, you know, this term maybe is overused. I'm still orchestrating these agents and Amelia is still orchestrating her agents. So. If you can't put in 20 or 30 minutes a day to do this, don't start the project. Okay? If you want to do nothing, we can't help you. If you want to invest 20 or 30 minutes of actually kind of fun stuff, I mean, this stuff is fun. These tools are magical. If you want to invest 20, 30 minutes a day so that you could have massive output, use this playbook, but there's nothing you can just click and forget. There is, but it's not going to be good enough. If you're not going to read the text, if you're not going to decide how to take that interview with the CEO of Zendesk and turn it into 5 posts, it's not going to be great. It's going to be generic.
Yeah, there's a few questions in the audience on how we're using it, maybe more so for things like marketing automation style emails. So I'll go to this next slide. When it comes to email marketing, I am full disclosure using Sales Tools to do the folks' email marketing. At RTTM now in November of 2025, or whenever you're listening to this. Once there is a truly great all-in-one AI marketing platform, I will try it. I will use it. But it doesn't exist yet. So I have hacked some of the existing sales tools to use them for marketing, but with fairly good results. Now, what we're not able to automate yet, but we actually are starting to get there and starting to kind of like lightly prototype things in Replit is I haven't solved for automating our newsletters. Like, we do these 4 to 5 newsletters a week on, you know, it aggregates all this Astro content. It's all this really great original content that you're seeing us outputting here. We put it in the newsletters, all of Jason's articles, everything we're writing up on AI, you know, our agents page, everything in there goes into those newsletters. We're still doing that manually for all intents and purposes. So even in today, 6 months down our AI journey, I haven't found something truly great to automate that process. I don't think it exists yet, but if you know of one we should try, drop it in the chat.
There's still a gap.
Yeah, there's a gap.
Fully automating, making those emails that are newsletters great isn't yet AI-able completely. We can come back to that. It's not— we can go back to this the next time we do this.
Yeah.
So we— It's like early. We on Saastr.ai, our new platform, you can actually sign up for a different newsletter, an automated newsletter that shows you stock quotes and news all across AI and the web and everything. That one is fully automated and custom. So I can see into the future, like it can do things our tools can't. For example, it extracts the latest Saastr video, like the minute we're off this one, it will go into that automated newsletter with no work. That's so cool. And it will figure out what the best articles are on SaaS today, which AI is good at, and customize it to the newsletter. But the full voice that Amelia does in the newsletter where we exert it and we talk about those learnings and we make it personal, AI is not there yet today. But I wouldn't be surprised. We, I think we'll find a tool sometime in the next 3 or 4 months that is somewhere in the middle, that it can extract enough stuff that if you're not doing good newsletters, it's much better than nothing, right? Because we do have these automated ones on the side, but it's not there yet. It is— what is interesting on marketing as you dig in is you'll find, you know, so much of the energy in AI is that we see is in coding tools, obviously sales tools, and like social media tools. But a lot of marketing, it's still early. You'd think there would be replacements for a lot of things. I think there will be next year and there's a lot of startups, but as soon as we find something great, we'll do the next, we'll do the next one with even more tools. But right now we're using, in many cases, these are point tools, right? And they don't do as much as we'd love them to do. And we'll, we'll check in 90 days.
Yep. Specifically when it comes to email, what I'm doing right now is kind of hacking existing sales tools. Well, we haven't found a way yet to automate the newsletters, but where I have found, you know, some success is actually just hacking the existing AI. I'll call them go-to-market tools, even though they're labeled a sales tool to send marketing emails. And so that's what I started, you know, the webinar with the practice of, you know, I think some of this is starting to converge and maybe we'll see more of that, but also I think we may start to see change in how people interact with emails altogether. So it may not matter in the end. That it's all kind of under go-to-market versus sales emails and marketing emails. I'm already starting to see that. I don't actually care anymore that some of these emails that I'm sending for marketing are in sales tools. I don't care. I just think of them as go-to-market tools now. And this is where actually this, these go-to-market tools have, are pretty good at this because they were built for sales and because they're built to reengage people. Because sequences is basically a marketing drip campaign. So just think about that first. If you're doing sequences on an AI tool, you can probably do a marketing drip campaign. Those are the same fundamentals in like how the AI is set up and how you want to set up. But instead of you giving it just, you know, sales prospects that you want it to keep sequencing, you give it a subset of your marketing contacts and say, hey, okay, these are specific folks, maybe I've narrowed them down to, you know, you can't do everybody in your database now. It doesn't really work well and it can't output that quickly depending on how big your database is. So ours is really big. I can't email on the day that everybody in the database, even with our 20 agents today, but what I can do is I can whittle down some of the folks. So what I'll do now is like this one that's here. This is a screenshot, I think, from Qualified, which again, Qualified is for all intents and purposes a sales tool. But I've been using it for marketing. So I'll see in Marketo, because it's also hooked up, it's hooked up to our Marketo and it's hooked up to our Salesforce. It will see when people are opening emails and if they reach a certain threshold right now for they've opened a bunch of London emails but haven't bought a ticket, it will send them this one-to-one email. Now I'm also still sending them like, you know, the email blast of, hey, Sashra London's about to sell out. I'm still doing that. but I'm using the agent to actually do one-to-one personalized marketing emails to this person. I don't know where Matthew works. I think it says here actually, but this was, you know, this kind of called some of that up of, okay, I noticed you've been exploring content. It actually pulled up content that they were reading on saster.com. I didn't tell it to do that. It just did that. Like it contextualized it based on his current interactions, saw what he was reading on saster.com, related it back to his company. Knew that he was in this campaign where he was opening our London emails but hadn't taken an action and offered him a discount code to faster. This is where I feel like there is a somewhat of an evolution in marketing and a convergence in go-to-market that why can't you have more specialized emails in marketing like this? Not to replace newsletters, not to replace email blasts necessarily, but to be an added layer because you can get leverage out of AI. To have a more customized email to this person once they meet a certain criteria. And basically I treat these marketing emails again as drip campaigns. And so far they've been working really well. This is fairly early days. I put a screenshot here. This was like 3,000 emails I've sent in this one campaign just on qualified. That's not counting any of the, you know, that's not counting on the inbound conversations that had or inbound people it's following up with. This is just for this specific campaign of people who met this criteria. You'll see here, open rates fairly high, right? This is on par with what we've seen in like our agent force. Some of these people also go into agent force. I'm doing like an A/B test, right? I'm split testing them just to see which one works better right now. About the same, which is great. Like it's high, so they're about the same, but we're getting fairly good open rates and then The click-through rates will be, you know, obviously a little bit lower. That's fine. It's— I don't expect that many replies also on this email. It's giving them a link. They don't really need to reply. If they buy a ticket, they exit the campaign. Cool. I don't— if they don't talk to me in this interaction, they only talk to my agent, that is a-okay. You know, bounce rate fairly low. So early days on this one, because we've just started to add this into the mix, but This is just such an interesting thing, just for all the background things of, you know, it being, this is technically a sales tool, but you know, sales tools can do really good sequences. So why, I was like, why couldn't it do a really good drip campaign if it has all the right inputs? And so this is where I found kind of a way to fill that gap that Jason was talking about in the meantime, in the interim, this is what I'm doing right now to still get good output in marketing and kind of fill that gap for now.
Yeah, this is— I want to keep getting through the content before we run out of time, but the— you're—
and you—
we hear a lot of folks when we talk about our AI stories saying, oh no, that's— those are marketing tools, right? They're— AI is leading to convergence between sales and marketing. And in fact, it is even leading at some level to convergence between sales, marketing, and support as the agents can do more, they— the lines get blurry. So today that means Amelia is hacking what is nominally a sales tool, I guess, right, to do marketing emails, to do personalized marketing emails instead of a marketing tool that we— instead of Marketo or HubSpot, right? That's a hack today. It feels like a hack, but it won't be a hack next year. These will converge. And like, I do know I've done a lot of investments in the SaaS side of e-commerce. Where there's high volume and already tons of AI and already there, there is no difference between sales, marketing, and support for a variety of reasons. We're going to see the same thing because imagine you want to go buy a necklace and you go to a website, you don't want to talk to support versus sales and you, and marketing might need to market to you instantly. So you get a discount so you don't leave. And so these are all blending. Your skills are going to need to blend and your tools are going to blend. So That's a— for right now, hack the tools that you buy. Don't— and if it's a sales tool and you think it's marketing, or it's marketing, you think it's sales, that's a new world. These lines are kind of get blurry.
I'll say the interesting thing is too, is because it's blurry, it's almost better for the output of it. It's actually better for me that some of this is in a quote unquote sales tool. Now I just call it a go-to-market tool. Because it already knows all these things, right? I'm like, okay, are qualified. If they're on the website, it already knows that. Like, I don't have to be like, okay, I have to, you know, back in the day, you had to put the Marketo Munchkins on everything to see if they went to your website. I'm like, Qualify already knows that. Artisan does that too. Like, Salesforce knows, you know, and Agentforce knows everything your Salesforce knows. Like, you already have all this really great data. And you're kind of using these go-to-market tools that already have— again, they are built for sales, but really can be easily hacked and applied to go-to-market. I actually think it's better. I don't mind that it's merging and converging. I think it's leading us to send better marketing emails. Again, because we're sending so many hyper-personalized ones, we all have like higher quality conversations with folks too. Like even when they do reply, This one's low, obviously Artisan's higher, Asian Boarding's higher on replies, but this one also has a link, right? So I'm not comparing apples to apples directly because those two are more where we've programmed them where we want them to reply. This one gives them a link so they don't necessarily need to reply, but the replies I do get just across the board are just so more hyper-personalized, hyper-custom. The thing I run into actually is an issue is I sometimes can't reply to everyone like directly. Like sometimes it'll be like, hey, I already bought my ticket, but hey, what do you think about X, Y, V tool you guys mentioned on the webinar or this or that? And then like, I'll answer once and then they ask a bunch of follow-up questions. I'm like, oh no, real Amelia cannot keep up with all of Amelia's agents. And so that's where actually my biggest pitfall is, is not being able to keep up with all of our agents. It's not, you know, again, finding the right tools aside and maybe hacking tools for now, not the biggest problem we have. So that's an interesting nuance too, but I don't, I actually don't mind that these are converging. I think it's for the best. I think we'll see it. Lead to maybe good changes within marketing where, you know, you mentioned newsletters. I would love a really great tool for that, but I also see where, you know, I'd love a tool actually that in a, you know, in a 6-month state, I could see this happening of it's a newsletter, but it's hyper-customized, right? Like, why can't a newsletter be one-to-one in the same way that this email is one-to-one? It should be. Yeah, it should be, right? Like the way Jason was asking you.
Millions of emails, but we should, they should be customized.
They should be. Yeah. Okay. If you're reading sash.com and I see you already read that article, I'm not gonna put it in your next newsletter. Like you already saw it. I'm gonna put something else related to it that's like a follow-up one. Like that's where I see this all kind of converging and going. It doesn't quite exist there yet, but I'm actually excited for it to get there cuz I feel like actually it will be better too if you're truly adding value. I feel like this is a good thing.
Yeah. I mean, when, when we have AI for both newsletters and drip marketing, That's what we need is for drip marketing. So if we know whatever types of content you've interacted with, it's not very difficult for AI to customize the further content or the further campaigns you get. But they, there may be tools out there that do it or claim it, but the capabilities are limited, but it's not hard. This should be there soon is your every journey should be customized by AI. There's no reason for it not to be. And every newsletter should be. I mean, we forget about your drip. No one should be sending the same drips, even a segmented drip. No one should be sending like 2 or 3 segments of drips. There should be a million drips that draw from all of your content, like, dynamically. And our newsletters, we should be sending a million different newsletters, not a mil— not, not 3 different newsletters. We know what you like. If you're a sales professional, maybe you don't want to read about Jason's vibe coding anymore. Maybe it's driving you nuts. If you're really into our AI content, maybe you don't want to hear about all the headaches hiring a VP of sales. You just don't care. But everyone's getting this mix of content of go-to-market, AI, VC funding, and We, AI should be smart enough to change all that. And then we're all going to see our response rates go way up. We're all going to see it go way up. We're looking for that one. We're looking, we're in the hunt. We're in the hunt for that. We're in the hunt for that.
I'll do a quick closing thought and then Jason M. Lemkin, let's hit anything you miss and then we can do some Q&A for a few minutes over. This is interesting. I was at like a Salesforce event yesterday. Out in Oakland and just with folks that I was talking to is, you know, one, because folks know we have multiple agents now and I kind of talked about the story, they're like, are you ever worried that like your agents don't talk to each other? And I was like, no, because even though our staff is hyper-personalized and specialized, like you just saw, like I use Qualified for some things, Artisan for others, our marketing staff we just showed is so disparate, you know, 10 different tools across the stack. We have a Jason AI that's still fine. We have an Amelia AI that's qualified. I'm literally doing a voice and video test with them later. I have a London agent I'm rolling out on AgentForce where you can call it and ask it what sessions to go to. That's freaking cool. And someone was like, aren't you worried that these agents won't talk to each other? I'm like, okay, let me give you an example of a huge example where I had a worse interaction. Than talking to maybe 1 to 3 agents. Like, I had to call Verizon the other day because the Wi-Fi at the office was down and the experience was so horrible. Like, I had one, I had a call with someone, there was no chat, there was no like AI troubleshooting of, hey, I saw your, you know, internet's down and I'm logged into my account. You should know my internet is already down by the time I get there. And so I got routed to 5 different people 'cause we had a Verizon for Business account and it was specialized and it was, I don't know if they help Fios or whatever. And it was, you know, whatever. It was specialized. And so I kept getting bounced to all these different departments. And finally, I think the screenshot on my phone was like 45 minutes later, the guy who eventually came on said, oh yeah, there's just an outage in your area, so your internet's down. I go, You could have used AI to tell me this when I logged in. You could have maybe emailed me that there was an outage in my area. I wouldn't have wasted 45 minutes on the phone. But my point in all this is I talked to 5 different humans and it was a much worse experience than somebody who has bounced between maybe 1 or 2 of our agents or at the max, maybe 3 or 4 of our agents. And I will, I'll say I know that because in our agents, they do point to each other. If you ask our Amelia AI right now for SaaS advice or like how to hire a VP of sales, it will kick you back over to the Jason agent. Then if you come back and you're like, hey, I actually had a question about London, she'll remember, like Amelia AI will remember that she kicked you off to the Jason agent and like just pick up on that conversation. You know, equated to at least I wasn't transferred to a new customer service rep. If you go back to, if you're kicked back to any of our agents, they remember everything. Like, they remember your whole conversation context, they can see what you were doing and actually get you to the right answer versus, you know, being bounced around by humans. That's still worse, right? It's just an interesting nuance there. Something I hadn't really thought of until somebody asked me. I was like, but this experience is so better than the crappy experience I just had with a bunch of random human beings who actually could not solve my problem. Tell me the internet's down.
You know, the Verizon story is a great one. Let me just tie it together. You know, the— if we're talking about GTM, right, we don't talk a lot about support, but if support is pretty good, it can be a great lead capture and opportunity capture tool. Qualified, you said, for example, I mean, it does a limited amount of support. When you're using that agent, it captures leads when it does the same thing, right? It does the whole thing. And so these agents, you know, I had two bumps myself. I had one with Mercury, which I love, which is a banking product. And I did it the other day and it said it would take them a day to respond to my issue. Now, you could criticize that. You could say, why the hell can't you just have an AI agent do the support? But when you have that experience, you're missing a chance to capture that lead and get someone into your journey. If Mercury or Brex, which we both use and appreciate and love, if they all take— don't really have AI support or can't get back to you, add a basic agent like we started with Delphi. Add something that adds value to your customers today. Put it on your site today. Like some of these tools take a long time to deploy. Delphi you can do in a day. You'll instantly start at least improving experience and capturing some leads and potential prospects. Support as these things converge. Marketers and sales folks, don't think about support. It will become a lead generation tool for you. And it already is with our agents. It already is. They're blurring. So make your— if you don't make your support great too, and your marketing sales will be better. Thanks everybody. We'll see everybody in London. We'll do this live. We'll do this Q&A live. You can come with all your questions and, uh, talk to you guys soon.
See you there.
You didn't create a startup to run a small business. Let Salesforce help you connect data, automate busywork, and empower employees on the only platform you will ever need, no matter how big you get. With smarter AI and built-in collaboration tools like Slack, which we use and you use, the sky is the limit. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com/smb. That's salesforce.com/smb.
Hey, SaaSer! Imagine having agents for every support task. One that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risk. That'd be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as $0.02 per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel, AI-first support stack. Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at happyfox.com/daster.
More from Jason

Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an AI, Tragedy Apps, and Too Many AI SDRs? | The Agents #004

Our Agents Drove Our Salesforce Bill Up 80%, Marketo Hates Agents, and We Stealth-Churned Off Notion

Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Our $500K AI Bill, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions







