Jason M. Lemkin recommends starting AI adoption with "layups": customer support, engineering, and sales qualification, where trustworthy tools exist but the work isn't being done. Avoid replacing what already works, and don't expect a single purchase to solve AI adoption.
Where should people start?
I think the layup, maybe it's Captain Obvious. The layup are the things where there is a tool that exists that is trustworthy, where it's just not getting done in your org, right? And there are a lot of reasons that might not get done in your org. It might be an area that's tough to hire in. You might be in a geography that's tough to hire. It might just be your DNA. Right? There are companies that are very sales centric organizations. There's companies that are very product centric. If you like hate salespeople and you like product, maybe you should start with agentic sales, right? If you love sales and that's your superpower, maybe get an AI to help you as an SE or to help you to support you as sales is a superpower. So don't try to replace the stuff that's sort of working. Look at where there's literally no one doing the work. Right? So there's a lot of them. But at a basic level, the two areas that took off the most quickly were support and programming. Engineering, right? A lot of us have terrible support. Terrible support, right? So that's still the easiest layup of all. Like, go try your own. Support yourself as a founder and executive. I bet nine times out of ten you're gonna cry how bad your support is. Not all of you, but people are often in tears when they do it.
100%.
Yeah. How was I treated this way? Pretend quality. You just had a huge issue with qualified. I know qualified never goes down and has any problems, but go to your go to say, listen, I have a P1 issue. This is broken. And it'll say we get back to you in a week. Or I don't understand the problem. Right? Or you just want to start there, right?
And that's where we've seen the adoption of agents, like customer support, even internal IT help, desk coding. And then you get like go to market in sales and marketing.
But I would say for us, so our order is ours. So the generalist was easy outbound. We couldn't get our SDRs to do outbound, so that was the lowest hanging fruit. But our qualification was terrible. That process of going to a website, clicking on something and hoping over the next week a human would get back to you. That was like when we deployed, qualified didn't have to be that good. Now listen, it's great, but it's not like we had a great team of qualifying of 10 people where we had an SLA where if every prospect got back to in five minutes with 100% time by a product expert. We might have waited a year. Right. But that was, it wasn't. It was close to broken. But none of our SDRs being willing to send an email was more broken.
Well, of course, I mean you guys are a unique company, but I think every single go to market organization has some flavor of what you just said, which is you got high turnover of the people. You got people that are three months on the job. How could they know your products, how could they know your competitors, how could they know your market? Like how could they know all this stuff? And then they'll only work a certain number of hours a day and some don't like the job and they don't put in the effort. And like everybody has some like flavor of this with these types of roles.
Yeah.
And that's when you look at AI and you're like, oh my gosh, like I could just do so much better.
It is. But I think the failure that I see, especially CMOs make, is they're looking for a hero purchase. They want to go to their boss, to the CEO or whoever and say I bought AI.
Yeah, I think everybody right now wants that hero.
And listen, I'm not saying you shouldn't save your job, but I guarantee it's probably going to fail because that hero purchase is probably going to be aligned with something you're decent at. The bar is so high and you're not going to know how to train it because it's your first agent. So you're looking for, you're solving medium high hanging fruit because it's already working and you've never done it before and you don't know how to train and onboard it. Like I know you're going to get that. There are a bunch of apps we know that have done really well is the hero apps and maybe buy it. It's just a little bit of money. But I would not deploy it first. I would leave it on the shelf and, and deploy something where your org just isn't doing it. It's not happening. Right. And then you get a win. Right. But some of these hero apps, we just watch them fail again and again.
