A sales leader who built systems at Ramp argues that AI can't replace entire sales teams yet. Companies trying to automate SDR roles have failed. Hybrid teams of humans plus AI tools consistently outperform fully automated approaches in prospecting.
We are seeing everything changing and we're seeing folks on LinkedIn post that they've replaced their entire go-to-market team with AI agents. And you've actually built these systems at scale. So is it real?
Oh, it's not real. So I'm yet to see any scale-up successfully operate without a GTM, call it GTM, growth team, whatever you want, right? Without a team that's in charge of like generating leads and pipeline. And that story is not over yet, but it is not real yet either. All right. And in some ways it reminds me of these startups, not going to name them, that, you know, do like, you know, the AI SDR, AI BDR agents from like maybe just like 18 months, 24 months ago, they were going to replace entire SDR teams. SDR teams are still here, like shocker, right? You still have BDRs. And I just reviewed a BDR job description for a new, you know, portfolio company of mine today. And so right now it's hype. Absolutely. An interesting hype though, but it's hype. Could you run Ramp's GTM organization with a bunch of AI agents and no humans? No way. No, I don't believe it, but I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I don't believe it.
Humans still have the wheel for now.
In a scale-up, absolutely. You look at Rampart organization and many other organizations, and you look at outbound to go back to this AI SDR, BDR, like software example, they have BDRs, they've got 100 BDRs, right? And we tested and we invested in trying to replace them and very rigorous analysis proving that A hybrid model of humans plus AI outperforms a full AI for now in the context of outbound. And believe me, I tried, I tried beating that hybrid setup with a full auto and I failed. And other people have come to me and says, oh gee, like there must be a way to like, there must, we could like improve the prompt and they have failed.
Well, that's a robust finding across industries. You know, my friends in the medical community finding the same thing. With AI reading x-rays and MRIs. The hybrid model of having both the doctor and the AI in combination beats out one or the other alone.
Roll Claude out from one laptop to the whole GTM org | Sam Gong & Zach Vidibor
