Jason M. Lemkin says AI sales agents need training on your best salesperson's work and visitor data to actually outperform humans. Vendor claims about out-of-the-box performance are false. Well-trained AI generates emails that beat mediocre salespeople, and recipients don't care if the message came from AI as long as it's valuable.
The other thing that happened in 2024 is the vendors kind of lied and said, just turn the product on, it'll get you revenue. No, no needing to train it, no need to do anything. We'll just do everything as this magic AI savant. It's not, it's not the way it works this way. What you do is an agent will be successful and go to market and sales today if you take what works for your best person. Train. I know this seems like a scary term, but it's not. Upload that text, okay? Train the agent on it and let it iterate an AB test from that. Okay? And even better, a lot of these products track all the visitors to your website so they can see what's happened and they use other APIs and so they can personalize your emails more. And so what ends up happening is the emails that the AIs write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. Okay? That's what AI can do today. And the magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are worse, so the AI can do better than that. And so you just train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. Do you, do you tell people it's an AI or do you, or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter people. We're in an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they know they're going to get an instant response. What we've learned is now we just send it. We just send it and no one cares. Your point about how human salespeople's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay, but humans, they're not actually that much better. So that's why for people get a little confused, the bar for good enough for AI gtm, it's not as high as we think. It's just like, you know, a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your mid pack person. It's going to beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.
