Jason M. Lemkin describes AI agents that automate the entire finance and contract lifecycle for SaaS companies, from creating quotes to reconciling QuickBooks. One company built an agent after a human missed an $80,000 invoice. The agents reduce variable labor by handling tedious tasks people neglect, not by replacing entire teams.
It does. It, it creates, it creates the quote, it builds the contract, it ships the contract, it gets it signed, it updates the opportunity in Salesforce, it logs into Bill.com or Aurora's investor, it sends the invoice, it follows up on the invoice, it gets it paid, interacts with Brex, and it closes out the entire transaction. Then it logs into QuickBooks and makes sure for the first time in 10 years our books are accurate. They've never been accurate before and the revenue is properly characterized. The agent does all that. This is what the models today which are not tuned for this workflow. We just got, we had a human that for SaaStr AI Annual this year Aurora was at, forgot to invoice $80,000 of revenue we had to write off. Now listen, I can afford it, but it was so frustrating that this person just didn't do it and had no, didn't even explain any reason why, just didn't do it. So Amelia's like, I'm gonna fucking build an agent to do this in China when we're there for SaaStr. And then boom, like it's just, you know, it's better. It's better than the humans.
Did you have a full human being doing all that? Did you contract labor as a result of this, or is that person doing different stuff?
No, I mean, we use contractors and for us, we wouldn't— it's more that we will use less hours of the contractor on accident. But this is an issue too, right? Variable cost human labor, which does exist, right? You may even use less of it incidentally due to agents than intentionally. This is not replacing 4 humans on the team. This is for us, this is the agentic story. We replace things that humans are unwilling to do on our team.
