Jason Lemkin built a general-purpose AI agent that users adopted for unexpected tasks like event support. After proving a 20% competence beat zero, his team shifted to training specialized agents for sales, business development, and marketing, deepening expertise beyond the initial broad rollout.
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 JSON. 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 Saster annual. Can I have popcorn? And we didn't expect that. And this is an issue so many will have with AI agencies. If it's good, if it's bad, you'll have no roi. If it's good, people will start using it. I'm sure you hear it all the time. People will use it for things you do not envisioned. 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 a qualified good. But. But here's the thing, and the people get this wrong. 20%'s a lot better than zero. Like, if we never used qualified and only use this general agent, we wouldn't have the 7 appointment because it can't set meetings. 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'd 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 we had time after annual, we're like, okay, let's do better. Let's go from horizontal to vertical as a phase two. And I don't think that's a bad approach for some folks. Like, get one thing working that's horizontal, gets confident and then go, okay, now let's do sdr. BDR Marketing dedicated this, dedicated that. Right. So we went from horizontal to 12 verticalized agents, in a sense.
