← The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before
01:17:29
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome everybody. Back to your favorite show, the Agents with Emilia larue, our chief AI officer, and me. This week, our AI VP of marketing, 10K shipped three campaigns on its own. Are we ready to go fully autonomous with no humans in the loop? Why? We pay Salesforce more than we did before. All agents, even with less humans. I signed up for a new product this week, Agent mail, because Cloud told me to. Is this the future? And 54% of CIOs told Redpoint they're switching their vendors out. They're consolidating what that means and what we've learned on it. We'll get into that and we'll get into who's getting cut first. And before we get there, if you have questions on your agents, I know so many of you do drop your questions in the comments, especially on YouTube. And we will try to answer every single question on YouTube. So use that as a way to reach out and talk to us. We'll answer every single one. So, Amelia, thanks for being back and doing this again this week.
- [00:55]
B
It's fun to do this every week.
- [00:56]
A
Fun to do this week. Okay, first couple of things I want to talk about in our shop, in our little family of 20 agents and three humans. First one, at a micro level, our AI VP of marketing, 10K. And to be clear, we don't call it a CMO, do we?
- [01:16]
B
No.
- [01:17]
A
Okay. Someone kind of hazed me on LinkedIn this week. I didn't even know we talk about this saying, oh, Amelia is going to go demo their AI CMO at Saster and it's not going to have the strategic counsel and advice a true CMO has. And we're like, agreed. And we actually didn't know what to call 10k. But I think AI VPN marketing is, is good enough, don't you think? It's not a cmo.
- [01:39]
B
It's not a cmo. It's true to what it does every day for us. So if you guys haven't seen our AI VP of marketing yet, we call it 10K. I originally built it as a dashboard. It started as just a super simple agent. You know, pull in some things from Salesforce, pull in from some systems of records we had just internally, basically pull it all together, help me keep on track as we get busy in the run up disaster annual of where we are year over year. And then we layered in what should we be doing. And that is the piece that's now gotten a lot better the more we've been iterating with it and spending more time with it. And so it's become now a true AI VP of Marketing, not a CMO in that as it's. In its role as a VP of marketing. It has been telling me what to do, but now we've shipped this, which we'll talk about where it's. It's giving us campaigns and now it's starting to run them autonomously.
- [02:33]
A
Okay, good. So, and so what we added this week and it's, it's in the age of AI. It's, it's. It's not amazing, but I do think it changed is it started generating real ideas for campaigns to run. We have not yet let it run them autonomously through resend or otherwise a user salesforce. But now every day it's come up with campaigns to run. How to target more VCs, how to target folks that should be sponsors that aren't. How are we thinking about these campaign ideas compared to humans? And when do you think we let it go autonomously? Like literally run campaigns to hundreds of thousands of folks on its own?
- [03:13]
B
I would let it do it if all the APIs truly worked. Now, some of our APIs we use for SAS Drain will have some limitations. Marketo, which we'll talk about more, has a lot of limitations. It hits its API limits pretty easily, so it really can't do much with actually sending the emails resend. I don't know if I love for our actual emails. Right. It feels a little genericy, but what it did do. So this weekend it gave us, it sent us both an email of its top three ideas. I think the first one was you should get all the single ticket buyers to see if they want to bring a buddy, you know, upgrade to a team pack, basically, which is 3.
- [03:51]
A
So let's step back for a minute. Over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, it works weekends 997. Right. 10 carry. And he sends us his three best ideas of the day based on looking at the very latest data across organization. Three best ideas of the day, right?
- [04:04]
B
Yep. So it's so I think Saturday morning it said, okay, first thing you should do is you've got a lot of your paid tickets year over year is higher. Right. Which is awesome for Sasra AI Annual, but you have a lot more single ticket buyers than you did historically. So you should try and basically do an upsell campaign to them. This was 10k's first idea on a Saturday. And what it did, though, I think the next part, which was pretty awesome, is it laid all the groundwork for us because it can't actually execute this autonomously yet. But it said, okay, here's the list of people that I've already pulled for you from your ticketing data of who's a single ticket buyer who only has maybe one ticket or two tickets and they're bringing their co founder, but they look like they're at a company either size or scale where they could feasibly bring more people. So it already segmented the list for us, which usually that's me doing, right, that's a human going out, segmenting your database, finding these people in the list to then reach out to. Then it drafted the email copy. It said, here's. So it identified who to send the marketing email to. Then next it created the segment for me. It said, here are the exact people to send the emails to. Plus also I've already suppressed anybody who I think you know, will not do this. Maybe from, you know, different signals you guys have in the data. But like I've already, there are current ticket buyers, but I've made sure these are the right people that have the highest propensity to buy. So it already segmented the list for me. I didn't have to do anything there. It gave me a list and then it wrote me the copy. So it basically did everything short of hitting the send button. And so that's the piece I literally just did this morning. And it took me a couple days lag, but that's pretty magical. Where our AI VP of marketing, much like a true, true things I used to do as our VP of marketing, would segment the list, write the copy, identify the right folks. But also he came up with this campaign. This is not something I came up with or Jason came up with. This is something he came up with based on data, based on what we're tracking today, with how many days this after annual and said this is what you should be running.
- [06:05]
A
So it's building the dashboards, it's reviewing the data daily, it's coming up with its three best ideas seven days a week. And then it's giving you all the components, doing the segmentation, analyzing everything from hundreds of thousands of folks and data points to come up with all the campaigns and ideas. It's not doing it autonomously. So for folks that it's pretty incredible. And for folks that say, hey, that's not a VP of marketing. Okay, maybe not some of that stuff is director of Marketing, some of it's AI VP of Marketing, maybe some of its marketing manager, if you could find this person. But it's doing all of these things every Single day. And even if it only does 50% of what a great VP of marketing would do, 50% of a great marketing is pretty good for 99% of people. They don't have 50% of a great VP of marketing. Right.
- [06:49]
B
Yeah. And I think also if, if you're, if you have inconsistencies, this is where I've started to see the AI will start to beat even you and I, because it's consistent. Right. We saw it on the customer success kind of layer for us this week with qb, who's our AI VP of customer success. But I'm starting to see it with 10K where unlike a true human VP of marketing, it's not going to forget these. Right. So it remembers all the campaigns it's coming up with. It's remembering all the email copy. Today it asked me when I logged into replit if I sent these. Yeah. It was like, hey, I came up with all these ideas for you.
- [07:25]
A
Have you done the work yet?
- [07:26]
B
Hit the butt. Yeah. Have you done the work yet? Which I actually like that. I like that it's again acting as our VP of marketing so I don't have to think about these demand gen campaigns. Right. To increase our revenue. It's literally doing that for us. It's just stopping short right now, which is not a failure actually on its part, but more of a failure of the APIs of some of the tools we use that it stopped short of hitting send, but in like a month or two post annual, it probably could hit send on a lot of these things and our.
- [07:53]
A
And then we can move on to the next point. But so we built our AI VP of marketing, our AI sales team are third party tools. We use Artisan Qualified Monaco and Agent Force. Right. Those are our four. Four for the most part those do run autonomously. If we set them up, review the tax, review the guardrails, they have then sent over 100,000 emails on their own. Right. So what would it take for a tool we've built ourselves to get comfortable? We can unleash it in the same autonomous way like third parties with lots of engineers working on them have done.
- [08:29]
B
Yeah. I think we would just have to duplicate the steps. Right. So a lot of our third party tools have additional security layers that our AI 10K, you know, VP of marketing doesn't have yet. It also, I would say the biggest piece of it sending emails would be the warm up period. So a lot of what Artisan Monaco Agent Force do well is they do the warm up for you for the most part. Really? They're going to spool up custom email domains, they're going to warm it up with data, they're going to send a few emails that are not your true emails yet from your aisdr. They do all that warm up for like four to six weeks. So you know, could we do that with hooking up another third party tool to our 10k VP of marketing? I'm sure we could, but it would take time. Right? It would take that time. Plus it would take all that labor to say okay, we've got to warm up all these domains.
- [09:13]
A
Yep.
- [09:14]
B
Enable to get the deliverability because that's the biggest piece right now.
- [09:17]
A
APIs that claim they give you pre warm domains.
- [09:20]
B
I know so. And we will try it post annual like I'm curious to see how it works.
- [09:24]
A
We need a warmed email campaign though to replace what we do on Marketo who are folks who've already received years of emails from us. Do we really need warmed up emails or couldn't we just. Is email really the big issue or is it having confidence that when we that these marketing emails are properly sent and run, is. Is the warmed up email really the big issue?
- [09:47]
B
For me that's part of it. Right. I feel like having a, a a warm domain so that the deliverability feasibly goes through. That's part of why all of our ASVRs are pretty good because they go through once they're warmed up from, you know, a salesforce order. Is it once you put in your first campaign that thing goes through like that. Like our Delivery is like 99.9%. So yep, for me that ties all together of what makes a really good email and one that folks would want to actually receive and click on. Right. And so I feel like that would be kind of the first piece for me now. Yes. I part of what we've done already on QB and now what I'm starting to do on 10k is to use resend as like a backfill because these folks are already in Marketo because they're folks that are already in our salesforce to say okay, can we send kind of one off emails and it would be okay for D to get them to do a specific call to action. But I'm not going to move all my emails there today. Right. I'm not going to move all of our newsletters.
- [10:42]
A
Well, I get it. Yeah, yeah, I was a little bit out of order, but we've talked about building an AI VP of finance right on the last show and we even played around with some AI SDR tool we built ourselves. So I went to Claude and I asked what we should use for if we wanted to build this outbound AI campaigns and it said to use a YC company called Agent Mail that's pre warmed and set up. So it's interesting. First of all, I did what Claude said. I hooked it up. You haven't even played with it yet. It did work in about one minute. And the emails, it says they're warmed. I got the emails instantly to the top of my email. And it was interesting both because I used what Claude told me to do. It was hyper agentic because I did it in. In one minute. Right. And it did seem to, you know, with six emails sent, it did seem to have high deliverability. I don't know, but it was sort of an interesting agentic discovery.
- [11:44]
B
Well, I feel like here's the visceral part for us too, right? Like I post annual and we have a bit more time. Like I feel like it would take us a day to fully build out, you know, and maybe we'll do it over this weekend like before SAS renewal. So it's for the session. But I feel like he's already at a point where he has started to send light emails for us in the same way that QB has sent emails to our customers.
- [12:07]
A
Our AI VP of marketing.
- [12:08]
B
Our AI VP of marketing. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So he started to send some of these segmented again. Right now he mostly stops short of hitting the button for a few things. You know, hyper segmented list. We're talking like 100 or so people. We have our resound hooked up, he can start to hit the button. But I think beyond that, part of what makes me nervous is what happened with our Marketo. So if you guys have been following along. Last week we talked about how our Marketo API was really dated and we hadn't even hooked it up. So this weekend I hooked it up to try and solve the issue we've been having, which is still ongoing.
- [12:46]
A
Let's step back for a smooth. I want to hear the story. But we've been using Marketo for marketing. It's a very old platform, but we've been using it since you started, so since 2018 or so. Mainly because a prior person just switched us without telling anybody. So we were prisoners. Our data was hostage here. Right. And we actually the API is so old. Replit said some of it hadn't been touched since 2014. At first you thought actually it was impossible to use it with the agent. It was sold first.
- [13:14]
B
I thought okay, obviously there's no native integration like there is for Salesforce or Claude or other things. So I was like, you already know it's going to be in a handicap, which is what we said last week. It's not, it's going to suck because it's not native. But we've had this ongoing issue where we have had folks unsubscribe from either one of our newsletters or all of our emails. It's aster we sent a lot of emails and it wasn't accepting them. Like they would unsubscribe. I would see them as an unsubscribe in Marketo and for some reason they would still get one of our newsletters even after they were, you know, check the box, unsubscribed. And for some folks, even after, you know, they asked us, hey, I unsubscribed. I still got an email, you need to delete me under camp spam rules. And so we would delete them immediately and they would still somehow get these newsletters, which baffled me because if you're deleted, you're not in my. You're not in my database. So how are you still getting email? That's not something I can fix. That's not a setting on a page or a form got out of sync. That's not something I can fix as a user. That's something on the platform. Right? So we reach out to Marketo and how this all comes full circle is this is why I'm just a little bit nervous to move some of this autonomously to our AI VP of marketing. Because right now even our legacy platform cannot handle unsubscribes the way it should. But here's kind of the double edged sword. So because it wasn't able to handle unsubscribes the way you'd normally would expect, I went into Rapplit. I finally hooked up the Marketo API after our last episode and I said, I know this is going to be dated and it's going to be terrible because it's not native and there's no integration. But what can we do? Like, can you help me see the problem, et cetera? I explained to Replit what I just explained to you guys. It said it couldn't find the issue because again, these contacts were deleted. So like, how are they still getting emails? It said, reach out to Marketo, which we had already done. But beyond that, it said, here's what I'll help you do. I'll help you build an unsubscribe page that actually works because now that I have API access, I can unsubscribe these people for you automatically. No forms needed, no nothing. It'll be cleaner because right now it's a form. You know, you hit the page, you fill out the form, you put in your email, you fill out the form, you hit unsubscribe. Then on the back end it does all this stuff to unsubscribe you. Because Replit now had some API access. Even though it was dated, it said it could do that for rest without all the middle steps. Right. Which seemed a little cleaner. So what we did is we built this custom unsubscribe flow using ReKit, a Vive coding tool to solve the problem we're still having ongoing with a very legacy platform. And so I feel like it's put us into a precarious position where I'm like, okay, I'm obviously not going to stay on Marketo, but the fact that a Vibe coding tool could fix this problem for us in the interim, yeah, we can just take that further to your point. We can probably just start sending all of our emails if we hook up at the right APIs, get all warm, et cetera. And if in theory we can find the right tool to actually handle unsubscribe, actually handle some of the data processes that it's doing now. Why wouldn't we just do that?
- [16:24]
A
We might. It's also an interesting learning is as the dated leader. The old folks of B2B and SAS get older and older in the agentic era as we're able to like you know, a few months ago when you had a massive feature issue like the unsubscribe button doesn't work pretty bad. You were a prisoner. You had no choice. The only choice you had was to migrate. Can you, can we leave to tab spot right now? If you can vibe a hack vibe and a little agent or an agentic fix so that the fix is plugged, one that's, that's extremely powerful. Right. You can solve your own problems. It also just makes the vendors look worse. It's just terrible that Amelia can vibe a solution to a critical issue, a can spam issue in Marketo that she can vibe an answer in an hour of work, but their whole engineering team forces her to have an all hands call and weeks later has no proposed solution. They're just going to make you look worse and worse and worse as vendors. If you can't work at this pace, if your customers have to vibe their own fixes to your Bugs now they can, they don't have to be technical. An API is exposed to everybody, so it just makes you look worse. If we can do it in an hour and you can't do it in a month.
- [17:36]
B
Yeah, we're on day 10 now of no resolution from the Marketo side, which.
- [17:43]
A
Yeah, I see. This is the page you vibed to then go into the Marketo API and just delete the record because they're unable
- [17:50]
B
to do it correct. So now this will do it for us. And actually if you're signed in, which I'm not, it'll. Yeah, if you're. If you click this from the email, it'll pre populate your email address, which is pretty cool. It's already. That's better. And then these boxes you can just check of like. Yeah, what do you want? You want to just unsubscribe from everything? And now it'll directly do it from the API. And Replit did this in about 10 minutes. It maybe took us 20 minutes. Took up the API because there were some. Again, it's old, there were some issues. But as soon as we hooked it up, it took him maybe 10 minutes to make this page. I just swapped out our, you know, default unsubscribe link in Marketo to this one and there you go. I haven't had knock on. Okay. The newsletter comes out every other day. We sent one yesterday. I did not get any angry unsubscribe emails. So I actually think the Replit band aid solution worked. And yet on the flip side, with these legacy Sassools, we're on day 10 of no solution from the Marketo side. And you know, it literally took them until day seven, which was Monday, to say that they were investigating this and they wanted us to get on a call, which I did. And basically what they told me on the call, the actual humans there said that they hadn't really investigated yet and replicated the issue and they didn't really know what was going on. I said, well then why did I get on a call? So it's just interesting the vast differences of support there, right? Like fixing it yourself in 20 minutes/waiting now 10 days for a non solution.
- [19:22]
A
Yeah, it's. I mean it is pretty bad if you have to hack your own solution. Here it is, it is interesting. I want to move on to the next topic, but you could imagine, will you show up to a mediocre customer success or other call and there's not a problem, they just tell you to go vibe your own Solution. Hey, it's 2026. I can't help you. But here's. Here's $50 of credits on Vercel or Rappler level. You go solve the problem. I can't. I'm not going to do it. You go solve the problem. It's like this should accelerate our churning off these data platforms because they look terrible. But I wonder if it'll make. If it'll make mediocre CS folks even lazier. I, you know, you go solve it. Right? And yeah, someone, someone had a comment on LinkedIn saying I'm surprised Marketo didn't hook you up to some consulting firm. Those who charge you $40,000 to fix the problem, maybe they will. Right? But maybe the. The AI version of it is you go solve it. You figure it out. We're just a 20 year old software platform that charges you $60,000 a year. We're not. We don't provide support. Okay. So I want to go to the opposite topic next. One thing it'll be helpful to folks. One thing that over the last week or so has been in the news. I mean cursor and other things have been in the news more. But. But one was Mark and team at Salesforce did a big announcement of this release on headless Salesforce. I don't want to talk about the product itself but what I thought would be interesting was to talk about how our head sales source is already headless inside of Tankto and others. We don't. I use. I have never used our Salesforce instance ever. I don't even have a password. I don't even have a password to my knowledge. Or an account. I don't even have an account. Yeah, you're having.
- [20:58]
B
I don't Jason and Saster does not exist in Salesforce. Does not exist.
- [21:02]
A
Okay. But here's what's interesting. Now that we run Salesforce headless among other places inside of 10K or AVPV marketing. I check Salesforce every day. I never used it for a decade. Now I use Salesforce because it's headless every day because that data is exposed inside of our AIBP marketing that has all of our 360 data and that I can use. So that's interesting. The other thing that's interesting that when you dig. Dig on which I should have known we're down to a couple seats on Salesforce per se. Right? Because Our team is 20 agents, three humans. But we pay more for Salesforce than we used to.
- [21:34]
B
We do.
- [21:34]
A
This is the thing. So there's a lot of folks out there that are saying the death of the seat is the death of traditional software. And to some extent maybe. But with our agents using so much data and so much access, we pay more and it's okay. I mean, we wish we didn't, but it's okay. So you want to talk about the cost and then how headless works a little bit.
- [21:53]
B
Yeah. So on the cost piece. So our Salesforce bill, as it stands, and this is before I do anything on the marketing side to fix the issues we're having. But yep, as it stands today versus a year ago. So a year ago, April 2025, we had more humans. So our Salesforce bill was something like, I want to say 12 to 15k ballpark off the top of my head for, you know, price per seat, whatever. It's like a couple grandish per seat and there's like an API seat, whatever. It's 12 to 16K. That was our bill last year. This year, right now, as it stands in April of 2026 is, I believe something like 22 and change and users
- [22:33]
A
came on a percentage basis. That's a lot more.
- [22:36]
B
It is a lot more. However, I don't mind because the price obviously per seat went down because we don't have as many users. You're not even a user. You were never a user. So it's basically I'm paying for me and David and I think one more like admin seat for some other API thing. So let's just say 3.3users effectively on account and the rest of it is just data usage. It's, you know, our Agent Force usage. And they did base it off of like how much we used and blew through all of our like free Agent Force credits and all that jazz. And they're like, this is how many you're going to need for the next year. So at least it's for, you know, the next year. And they also, you know, they did it. That also included a increase of us to the Slack enterprise plan so that we could use Slack. Bottom. We were also on a free trial, but then we used. We blew through all those in like a day, I think. And Slack was like upgrade. So we upgraded. That was like only, you know, maybe a thousand of the. Of the bigger increase. So that one wasn't. That one is honestly, if you're just upgrading anything, just upgrade that one because it's pretty cheap for what you get out of it. But so that's, that's how it's changed. So now instead of paying for seats, we're paying for Pretty much data calls and actions. Right. And you can. I know some people are critical of Salesforce on like, how much they charge per action. Do I wish it was a little bit less? Yes. But I think they'll get there. I think part of how Slackbot works now of, you know, being able to call up your agents kind of for you is a. Is a good way to do it where it's a little bit unclear how they charge on all that right now and how it all gets worked out. Maybe the marketing team don't care as long as you're using it and getting your agents deployed. So I do think our Salesforce, even though we're calling a lot of data and we may call more data next year, I still think it may go down a little bit year over year because they'll decrease the cost of all, like the data actions. And since we're starting to store more and do more with not only Salesforce itself, but mainly the APIs for this headless, kind of agentic Salesforce rerun. I don't know, maybe it's the wrong intuition, but I think ours will go down even though we're calling more data because it's just, it's. The data is getting more efficient, though, because now it's becoming one place. Right. So that's helping some of its efficiencies too.
- [24:47]
A
So we, for folks that are thinking through this, we have cut our sales for over the last two years. Let's go back two years. We've cut our Salesforce seats back 60% or 70%. Right. I mean, we're basically down to two plus an API. Right. So we've had our. So Salesforce hadn't raised prices and nothing else had changed. Our bill would be less than half. We'd be paying less than half of what we were.
- [25:08]
B
Sure.
- [25:09]
A
Now we're paying 80% more because of our agents and data instead of paying half. Like if that. Now if I were a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, I saw my Salesforce bill went up 80%. Of course, we'd have to have a conversation, Amelia. Yeah. But I think the meta thing for folks to. To take away is it's worth it to us to pay more. Right. And that the seat story, even at Salesforce, even at the classic. The folks that basically invented the classic seat seat story is not that simple. We now that we have 20 agents running and really four or five core ones that run through Salesforce that are pushing data and pulling data out, mostly the sales folks one, but may do more marketing net net. We're paying 80% more and we don't. We. You know, the. We're getting it better at it. So we will drive some costs down. Our agents will get better. We'll use less data. Maybe Salesforce will be. Pricing will come down a bit, but in the wash. It's a good deal for both sides. Yeah, right. People are missing the story here. And so as more folks go Headless, this. I think this is a for everything for every core app. I think it's because we have some. It's such a positive to be headless, right. And now I don't. Maybe in six months, 10k our VP marketing, maybe we'll have a different agent that's like our support. But right now our VP marketing runs everything for us. Right. It is becoming our hub and it just makes Salesforce so much powerful to see Salesforce, not this isolated app with leads, contacts and opportunities, but it's integrated into every single metric, every single attendee, every single dollar. It's tied to how many newsletter subscribers we have and how many social media followers we have. It's all integrated inside of 10K. And it actually it means we can do anything and run any analytics and any query we want against it. This headless thing. So anything else we. I think that the economics now we use it or anything else that is interesting running Headless that folks might not
- [26:58]
B
get only because I think we're a little. They just announced this, right. So like a week ago. So I think this is from what I've heard from the folks at Salesforce, right. This is still a newer concept for most of their customers community that they're. You know, I think people were still getting their heads around just Asian Force and now headless Asian Force are like, what does that even mean? We were just getting on the Agent Force train and now you're. You're. You're. You're like here's the shiny bullet train to get on, which is headless. So I think that piece is interesting, but just because we've already been living it for six months, the headless piece, you know, to some degree, I don't. Because the API is good. I think more apps and tools will become headless. Right? Like, as long as you have a central. I think the why headless for Salesforce in particular works is one. We already had a bunch of data in it. So to Jason's point, did he need to log into Salesforce? No, he just needed a Vita dashboard that hooked up into the API so he could see what all the rest of the team and the business is doing. Plus he can talk to it. Like I think the biggest thing about Headless with the API is you can talk to it in a way a CEO can't normally really talk to their data in Salesforce, like you can talk to Slack Bot if you have enough data and it kind of replicates that vibe now, which I think is pretty cool. So I think they're catching up in in that regard. But outside of that, I think being able to just talk to your apps with your API and say, tell me what's in the data, give me ideas the way our AI VP of marketing has, tell me where we're behind, give me a list of folks that have turned that maybe I should reach out to that the sales team hasn't reached out to. You can just talk to it. And I feel like that is really the piece of it that is helpful. I think for us that sometimes Salesforce, I think they'll even admit sometimes it's a little bit clunky to get things done and it's hard sometimes to find things or know what the right filter is to get the right report or see the right dashboard or sometimes that stuff is hard. And as a CEO you may not have time or the want to just go through all the filters and figure out how to do it properly. But now if you just talk to your agent or talk to Slackbot, hey, run me a port of all these things and it does it for you. Doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't matter what's on the back end. As long as the API works and it can get you that outcome. I feel like more apps will start to become this way.
- [29:18]
A
Yeah, it was interesting the I'm on the board of a startup called Owner that, you know, that's sort of a next generation Agentic Toast or Sofa restaurants. They're at about nine figures in revenue, growing triple digits. And the CTO just made a lumen. He shared it with me. You saw it too. They run Headless Salesforce and he built this before they called it Headless, but he did well. He was inspired by us and he wrote his own on a hackathon. And as a cto what he did was a couple things that were pretty amazing. They built their own AI VP of customer success like that we did, but it does even more. It's pretty cool, right? They didn't really have this before. So that one human can manage thousands and thousands of restaurant issues now with their eight and it runs all underneath on Salesforce data. More Interestingly, as a cto, he took momentum, which we used to that Salesforce bot, and he used all the calls with all the prospects and, and one lost and won one. Okay, one. He looked at both and used AI and Salesforce to analyze every single call to figure out what the top feature gaps are that they knew to win these deals and then the real reasons they chose owner over other solutions. And that was pretty cool. And at any point, what's great is like, I, I, I used to not enjoy working with Salesforce. Like, it's not as a cto, right? I mean, I love Dean, but at the end he's like, I didn't used to enjoy working with Salesforce. Now we have this incredibly powerful data set that is figuring out why we win customers, why we lose them, and can in real time analyze every single one of our 10,000 existing restaurants and customers. Headless. That is so powerful. Right? And I suspect they'll pay more for data. Right. They probably have a 200 seats in the Salesforce. So headless thing, it's a big deal. Okay, next topic I want to talk about is very micro. So I was very macro. Headless. Salesforce. I want to talk about another thing you built this week. It's. It's a very micro N equals one app. As. As I think I'm going to say that Dharmesh Shah coined this term, but maybe he didn't, maybe I copied him, who knows? But an N equals one app, which is something that's super powerful but only you need. Right? So in a way, our VP of marketing is that and that the custom version we worked used only this. But everyone needs an AI VP of marketing. But you built an AI parking pass app. I really, literally no one needs this but us. Well, maybe others like us, maybe Coachella and Websephenita. But why did we build an AI VP of parking pass? And it's for us. It's actually disruptive. Right.
- [31:45]
B
Coachella could use it for the shuttles. Hit us up the. All right, so just for some context and background, I've talked about it, I think on episode one, but historic because this relates to everything of like costs and efficiencies and people. So just a quick backstory. We typically use an agency or two this time of year to help backstop backfill some of our humans. Even now still with AI, we still use a couple agencies to help backfill our humans. Slash, you know, we have some folks that are really good at things that the agents can't do yet. So we always Backfill every year. So I said a couple weeks ago how much our bill has gone down with both of these agencies because we have such great efficiencies with our AI. And actually they like it because then they don't have to do these tedious tasks that they used to have to do. They can focus on the fun stuff. So we have more fun stuff at Zaster. And they can help me more with like the human and the loop support and like speaker support again, that they previously didn't have time to because all their time was spent on like mundane, you know, step and repeat tasks. So that's a little bit of context. So every year, typically we'll see our bill go up the month before annual, which is now because we have to distribute perky passes manually. Super niche problem. Right?
- [32:59]
A
Like 4,000 packing passes manually. They're all individual PDFs. They're not just a code. They're 4,000 individual PDFs in a massive file. Right?
- [33:09]
B
In one massive file. So the first thing I did is I gave the folder of 4,000 PDFs to Claude Cowork. I said, separate the PDFs because last year we had a person who did this and it took them about a week to go into Acrobat. So tedious. And literally separate the patients one by one and then save them as their own file.
- [33:32]
A
Oh my God. Not only I know it's 4,000 cut and acrobats to individual pages. Save it as a file. Get the file name right. Not blow your brains out because you did the same one three times. Yeah, that's. That's a full time week.
- [33:44]
B
It's a full time week. Super tedious. So I did quad rip through it in I want to say two minutes. He said, here you go. Here are all your files individually. I put it in a folder for you on your Mac. I said, what the. I said, actually, if you're done in two minutes, these parking passes we get from the venue don't have the address on them. It'll say like you're assigned to the east lot or the west lot. I'm like, most people don't know what that means. They're not going to go look that up. I said, can you append the actual address, the street address where they need to go, so when they're driving to the venue, they know exactly where to go. He said, sure thing. Maybe 5 minutes later I got all 4000 back in a folder. Not duplicates. He just updated the existing files, which I thought was pretty cool. He updated the Existing files with the address in a nice banner at the bottom. So he highlighted it and stylized it already and said, this is the actual parking lot address you need. And I said, fantastic. So then I took the folder into our replit that powers aster AI annual 26 that you see here building a form super easy. I was like, hey, here's all the info I need to assign these. Okay, great. Then I said, okay, here's the kicker, because this has to work. Now, can you take this folder of 4,000 parking passes and wire up logic so that if I say I'm an attendee and I need all three days, that you will give me the right parking pass? And it said, yes, here's what I need you to do. And it said, put the parking passes in a folder by day and by type, which clogged. Just rearrange the folders in five minutes. So he did that and then give me the logic of who gets what lot. Like, okay, attendees go into like the east lot, you know, speakers go into the south lot, sponsors go into the west. So he was like, give me all the scenarios. If, if I'm filling this out, what do I need? And then I gave him all that. I gave him the folders again. And he said, okay, but can you put that into Google Drive so that I could actually Access all the PDFs? So I did that. Then he said, okay, now give me the logic. He did some test runs, right? Okay, give me the logic. If I say I'm a sponsor and instead of picking all three days, I say I need, you know, just Tuesday and Wednesday. I think he said, I think my theory is I think I should give them a parking pass for Tuesday and a parking pass for Wednesday Instead of blowing one of your all three days parking passes, which is good for all three days, I think I should give them individual passes for Tuesday and Wednesday. Is that correct? I said, yes, that logic is correct. Typically when we've done this manually, if somebody doesn't request all three days, we give them the individual days that they need. He said, okay, great. He said, let me rattle this up for you. He's probably working for like 15 or so minutes in the background. And then he said, okay, it's ready. Do a test. And I said, okay, let's, let's, let's fricking try this. So I filled out my email. I'll fill it out right now and I'll show you guys what it gives me. So I'll do my email plus like 12 or something because I tested this so many times. All right, so I'm going to put in my name.
- [37:05]
A
Yep.
- [37:06]
B
I'm going to put in my company. Does it really need to ask for this? But what it's doing is it's checking our API integration just lightly to see if this person seems like they have a ticket to disaster versus giving it to a spam bot. So I was like, I don't know if I needed all these fields, but it felt better about giving it to actual people and not getting hit on the form constantly by putting that in. So I'll submit that request. Okay, check your inbox. Your parking pass and lot assignment have been emailed to you. Okay, so now let's pull up my Gmail here. Okay, so here it is. It's the cursed email in my inbox. It is my two parking passes because I picked two single days and magically here are my two individual PDFs. So here's the address that, you know, Claude appended. That's cool. So I picked Tuesday, there's Tuesday, I picked Wednesday, there's Wednesday, there's. And then the last thing I did with Replit before we launched this is I said make sure you burn these. So like whenever you use a parking pass, they are.
- [38:14]
A
Don't send someone else.
- [38:15]
B
Yeah, don't send it. I said, I was like, whatever you do, don't send it to someone else. I was like, hard code that in your memory. Don't send it to anybody else. This is one and done. Never repeat the same PDF or parking pass twice. And it said, okay, you got it. And then it said also just as a backup, he said, give me a zapier webhook and I'll put it into a Google sheet of which parking passes I assigned to which person. I'll also store it in the database. So if you're ever worried that I sign the same pass to the people, you can spot check it and make sure I didn't. So super niche use case. But this not only did the setup of it used to take us a week literally distributing parking passes was a full time thing for all of us. Like we would all be on the inbox and we'd be like, someone else has requested a parking pass. We would have a Google Drive. We'd have to make sure between the humans we didn't use the same PDFs
- [39:05]
A
for a lot of human error in that process with multiple people who didn't want to do. Who did not want to do this job for weeks.
- [39:10]
B
Why wanna send people parking pass?
- [39:13]
A
Yeah, you have more important things to do.
- [39:15]
B
But it took so much time that it was one of those things I had to help the team with, right. I was like, it's just one of those things that's such a big time. It's like every year I have to give people parking passes. So I said to myself, this year, instead of that, I'm going to take this, maybe took me 90 minutes total with testing and hooking up all the PDFs and getting it all together. I'm going to take 90 minutes, one shot on Sunday and get this all done and routed versus hundreds of hours leading up to Zaster, which is a huge disruption.
- [39:45]
A
Okay, this is a good transition to our next topic of where you find your Amelia. So you were able to have the experience and the foresight to identify, okay, what issues are coming up for. For a large event. And everyone's got their own issues, whether it's a release, an event. What are the big blockers that we could create an app 5 an app that could solve massive blockers, right? And so you quickly identified one that takes hundreds of hours of people's time, is incredibly tedious, prone to error, prone to friction and creates hundreds or maybe even a thousand or more tickets and questions, right? Because everyone needs one and there's issues thousands of it's. You'd have to have a massive team to support this. Or frankly what most folks do is they don't even try. They don't even try. Like you just show up to a large event and it's terrible. Like we showed up to Coachella this year in our team trip with our agents and our three people and they're the three hour wait to the bus at our hotel, right? They just decide not. These problems are so complicated without an agent. You can't solve them with humans, right? So you solved it. You had the foresight to see it, to care, to scope out which top issues that were worth solving, right? Because we can't solve everything agentically. And then you executed in about 90 minutes with a lot of experience. So this isn't. Now this isn't the first app you've built, right? Or applet that you've built. So I want to give you a quote and then ask you a question. Where do we find in Amelia? And Aaron Levy was on 20 stepping Harry stepping 20 VC this week and said there's going to be a whole new category of 500k to a million dollar new year jobs for operators over the coming years. They're somewhat technical like you. You're not an engineer, you can't really code, but at this point you're getting somewhat technical. They're deep in AI, MCPs and CLIs and skills. We need these folks. And I know we would both agree. App, apps, effing lutely. Everyone needs one of these folks. Right? You don't even need a hundred, but where the hell do you find you? Everyone needs like what I just described. Every organization needs this. Right. You can imagine a hundred blockers you have in your company. Right? Someone could even just vibe code the fixes to Marketo if Marketo had a couple of folks like this. Right. So any thoughts on this? Because I think Aaron's right, but I think he's understating how hard it is to find these folks and what it takes to build them internally.
- [42:10]
B
Yeah, I. I almost feel finding these folks internally may in some ways be easier than going out to the world to find these folks because how will they have the pro? It's chicken and egg, right? Like, even we've tried to loosely look for somebody who can help with our agents and like, there's just no.
- [42:30]
A
Yeah, we'd hire another Amelia if we could find her and pay her well, right?
- [42:33]
B
Yes. So if you're listening, hit us up. But we can't find another million. We literally can't. I've had people message me on LinkedIn and say, okay, you know, I've done this XYZ with agents. I know you guys are hiring. I'm like, that's not good enough. Like you just employing this little agent that doesn't do a heck of like, I'm glad you deployed an agent, but it doesn't do enough. Like, I need, I need you to understand all of our agents 24 7. But more than anything, I need you to understand the product. And I feel like that's. That is the harder part. Maybe it's a little bit easier for folks to find somebody internally. So I'll give you guys a good example from Salesforce, right? So Lindsey, who's our FD, it was not an FD previous to probably November of 2025, she had a different role at Salesforce, but at Salesforce, she's pretty, you know, she's more technical than me, less technical than you. So she's pretty technical, but not a full blown, you know, full stack engineer. The way some of their FTEs are. She was more on the SE side. Right. Because she sat somewhere in the middle. But not only does she know the product, she's so good. She was so good at helping people like us get deployed. That they have now promoted her to, like, lead some of the FTE team. Because for them to find this person internally, they were like, okay, who's hungry? Who's already kind of spending some of her free time on Agent Force just out in the world? Who was spending her time, you know, in Slack bot, testing all the features, trying to break things. Who was intellectually curious about getting their customers deployed? Who had the most deployments, who had, like, the best, like, ratings. And she. It's because she knows the. She knows all the. Here's the thing. She knows all the products. Salesforce has so many fricking products. She knows enough about all of them. She'd be like, oh, I know you need to use this XYZ thing that we have at Salesforce or this connector to do that. And you can use Slackbot to do this and you can use AgentForce to do that. And now you can use qualified to do this and Momentum to do that. Like, she knows enough about all the products that she is. I consider her one of their Amelias, right? Because she can absolutely spot problems before they happen. Because she's helping with deployments. She knows the products. She. She's helping with deployments every day. She just told me she's got like four customer deployments today. She's doing plus a demo with me at the tower for their summit. So, like, that's the folks you want. You want to find people.
- [45:00]
A
That's a good insight. If I had to hunt, if I wasn't going to homegrown my, you know, VP of Agent Operations, right? If I wasn't going to homegrown that person or head of, maybe head of. We don't want someone that won't do the work today as we do this. Maybe recruiting someone that's a strong FD anywhere for this job that just doesn't want to be like, they don't want to do the 28th replicate deployment. They want to do a little bit more. Maybe you can steal them from Replit or Lovable or Vercel or wherever and pay them well because they're not cheap and say, hey, you get to deploy 20 agents for us over the next year from diverse vendors. Most people will just stay put at a hot startup. But in theory, if you get that person that's a good Persona, right? One of the top FD because they've seen it all. That's who you want. I think there'll be a lot of folks going to the comment. You saw the folks that reached out to you, linked to. There'll be a lot of folks with very limited agentic experience. Which is still better than nothing. Right? It's still better than being terrified. Like so many people are terrified of rolling out an agent, but their ability to have translated one chatbot they released over six months to running 20 agents for you, it's too big a leap. Yeah, it's. And people are going to make this bet and they're going to make the fancy LinkedIn bet. And I think these hires, these Aaron leaving hires are going to churn at a higher rate than CRO because they'll talk the talk, but they won't be able to deploy the agents.
- [46:23]
B
Yep. The other thing I've seen commonly, I was just on a panel recording and the CEO, one of the CEOs that was on the recording for this Inc thing that's coming out, I think in a week or so, he was talking about how he solved this problem. He's got like I think 120 humans or something and he has a lot of agents. He's like a Salesforce partner. And the way he solved this, which I've heard from other folks too, is he hired an ex CEO like he hired an ex technical founder who was burnt out on his startup, didn't want to do this for himself anymore, but was technical to be. I forget what they call him. Like their head of agentic operations. And now that's.
- [47:01]
A
That's always one Persona that works.
- [47:03]
B
Yeah, that's the Persona that worked. And he said he's had this person now for over a year. Like he hasn't gone anywhere. So retention's been good there. But I know a few other companies have done that too where they've, They've hired ex CEOs that were technical founders to come be their head of the agents. So that's another one that works. But obviously pros and cons to that one. Right. Like me and Lindsay are like a little bit younger. If you're hiring somebody who's maybe a former CEO and a technical founder, they, they may be a little bit more burned. Right. So I think you just gotta.
- [47:30]
A
That's the biggest risk. Sometimes they're burnt. They're too burnt.
- [47:32]
B
Yeah.
- [47:32]
A
But I will say, you know, almost everybody, you know, folks have been using this playbook. Parker Conrad quietly kind of. I think there's hundreds of ex founders that work at rippling now. Hundreds like he. And everyone's done this. Adam from owner has quietly done it. Everyone should have a couple ex founders, if you can, if you have the. Listen, they may not go if you're slow growth and more traditional. But if you, if you have a reasonably hot startup, hire a few founders, if nothing else, to kickstart new things. It could be, you know, a new bu. A new geography, but a new, A new agent. Deployment's a fun one because it's smart generalist, can replicate what you did. You're a smart generalist, right. And so today that's a good Persona, like the super smart generalist that loves product and knows what an API is. That's probably enough. But they really have to meet those criteria for real. You can't cut corners here.
- [48:22]
B
And I feel like founder mode works in that scenario within your company because founders will figure out what works. And I feel like part of this issue that Aaron kind of raises is if you go out to deploy AI agents for anything, but you don't actually know internally what success looks like with an agent or don't take the time to figure that out in the deployment, you're just going to, you're going to end up with slop. Right. So I feel like that's why founder mode works a little bit better. Maybe if you can find this person could work. You got to manage the burnout factor. But I think in some ways it can work maybe better because these are folks that will, you know, take the time to figure out, okay, what do I need to do in sales to get the agent to work. What do I need to do in CS and marketing, though? They know every function, right? They they so across the board for functionality, they get points, right, for setting up your agents and deploying them, because they'll figure out, okay, that sequence didn't work or that context didn't work for my sales agent. Let me try something else versus just letting it run.
- [49:19]
A
Yeah, I think one thing I watch, watching what you've done in particular, but also a lot of the FTEs we've worked with at vendors, I'm actually. It's not something we would do, but I'm actually more optimistic that as the year goes on, consulting firms and agencies that are good at this are the key right now. If you hire a mediocre agency that's been doing this for six years with the same people, you're going to see a lot of recycled folks that aren't agentic enough do it. Just like so many folks are trying to recycle their customer success. Folks in the fds, it's a failure. But I think as the space matures, if you've done six agent force deployments or you've done 20 Artisan deployments or you've done 10 Monaco deployments. There'll be agencies that specialize in all of these things, and I do think they'll get pretty darn good. It won't be cheap, but they'll get pretty darn good at doing the 20th or 30th deployment. And I think maybe they'll add even more value, these top consulting agentic firms than they did when it was just setting up a shopify store for you. That seemed hard enough back in the day. But actually, if you can set up an agentix store, it may be more valuable than just uploading assets and connecting you to. To a few APIs.
- [50:26]
B
Yep, yep. I. It's funny, we used to be. I'm still a little anti consultancy firms at Saster and I'm still a little ant anti fractional folks. But listen, if, if you can do it for real, if you can actually get these agents into production, I think those folks are like the top, you know, one or maybe 0.5% of agencies that are. There are some out there already that can do this really well.
- [50:53]
A
There are some.
- [50:54]
B
There are some that can do this. I think those folks are going to have such a boon. And the agencies that you know, waste all your time picking tables, you're not going to need those people. And I don't think you need them now, but you're definitely not going to need them in three months because you're going to say, you know, this other agency can actually deploy my agents. Maybe that's what I care about more.
- [51:12]
A
Yeah, I think it's going to solve itself as they bifurcate these consultant agencies. The one captain obvious point, I'll say, and then we'll go on to the next one. But because we do a lot of it do reference calls. The reference call died sometime in 2020 and 2021. I mean, literally, it died during hiring. It died everywhere. But we get a lot of them. Even I get them, you get more. Hey, how is your implementation with qualified or artisan or Monaco or agent force? Like we had a lot for agent force do this is do it. Like if you gonna if it and do it. But I mean, don't just do it yourself. If you're gonna hire an agency or a contractor, a consultant or a fractional firm, great. Maybe only 1% of them can really do what we do. Maybe it's 5%. Right. But ask for three references and just email them and we will. I, maybe Amelia is more patient than me. I won't get on the Phone with most of these folks, I don't have time, but I will do the reference. If you LinkedIn me or email me about 1 of earners, I will give you that reference. I'll give you the five or six bullet points. It's super valuable. And if we tried something and there's not much but if we tried something that's failed. Right. Because mostly we've invested in things that have had success, I'm not going to be a jerk about it, but I'm going to tell you I don't think it's a good fit. So this is the what as you're trying. I know this is Captain Obvious, but as the reference check has died, please bring it back for third parties to help you on agents and deployment, whether it's hiring or consulting or agencies. And I say this because I've. You've gotten more than me. I've gotten more reference requests on folks to help and vendors in the last three months that I've gotten in my whole career. More than my whole career. And I'm. It's heartening me again, I'm not going to get on the zoom, but I will respond. Even I will respond if you. If you say it helpful. Hey I not I need 20 minutes or can I buy you coffee to talk about your agents? Quick question, right? How is working with Monaco been I get like three or four of those a week. We get a ton of them for artisan. Right. We get a lot of them for Agent Force. Make it a low lift request on folks that you trust like us and do three. Like just do that and then go for it. So okay, related two last points and then. And then we'll wrap up really simple. A low level one relates to this on support and then want to talk about who CIOs are getting rid of and how that compares to our experience. So the low level one, on the one hand this is really, really, really, really minor compared to a lot of stuff we have. On the other hand, this has been emblematic of our agentic journey. Okay. So a tool we don't talk about much is one called Get Recall only. I really use it. Okay. It is an early agent tool. It's great. It is, it is. I think it's been around since the beginning. It might have been the second tool thing I used after Delphi for my digital mind. And it's another version of a digital mind. It will take every YouTube you've done, every blog post, everything you've ever read, everything you've ever seen and Create essentially a digital repository where you can talk to all of this with AI instead of just talking to whatever chats you have in Claude. And so what I've done over our history is put every podcast we've ever done, every, a lot of our blog posts, but especially all of our podcasts and YouTubes for history. And at first I used it because to get this to work they needed better transcription service than I can find otherwise. Because if the transcription doesn't work on the YouTube, you can't really talk to the YouTube. Right. And you can get a transcription out of the API and there's other things, but it just, I, you know, I asked ChatGPT or Claude what should I use? And a year ago it said use this one called Get Recall to get the best easiest transcripts. And so it's been great. I've used it every day. It had and they did a big release this last week and I, which I don't care about because I only use a subset of the functionality and for about an hour it was broken. Okay, for an hour. Now they fixed it, no criticism. And like a lot of times I might have been even the only one that noticed because how many folks are uploading their YouTubes and really using it for their better transcription? Probably only a small subset, but I noticed it was broken. It didn't, you know, didn't bother me that much, but I tried it like eight or ten times like most folks would and then I saw that the error message wasn't the something a product person would write, but it was a classic engineering error message. Error number 72 or API unavailable. Right. Just. It's clear there's a bug when you see one of those messages. Right. That looks very, that looks. That was not written by a human or. Yeah, you know, there's a problem. I've been around software, so. So at an hour or so later it did resolve itself. But it's a long story. Here's my point. For the first time ever, I tried to reach out to support for Get Recall doesn't exist as near as I can tell. There's no chat window, there's no email, there's nothing I could find. I had an almost worse problem trying to get my own clerk working, which we talked about before. Right. With almost non existent support. So my rambly point is, and maybe Amelia, you could add to it. I just want to challenge everyone in the agentix space. They seem to have skipped support. Listen, I love Replit. We have the best relationship with their FD and engineering team. They're the bat. Like I love, love this team but when I started on the replit journey 12 months ago, they had no support. They've added it, they've upscaled, they brought in the whole team. It's great and I get it. A lot of engine. These are developer first products. CL I don't know that Claude has great support. It probably doesn't, right? We've never used it. So if you're an engineer developing, if you're a developer developing something that's developer first, maybe figuring out how to do support is not high on your, on your priority list. But I got to tell you, like I just have these with get recall for the first time with clerk for weeks I just have endless. I try to be self sufficient and then I try to ask Claude to help me and then I play around and then I come back in an hour. But if I can't get past a problem in an hour, I need help, man. I mean I got, I got stuff to do. Amelia.
- [56:40]
B
Yeah.
- [56:41]
A
So anyhow, you could add to it, but I just, I just find that so many of these products that we talk about and love every day, unless we have an fd, unless there's something, we get no support. So do better guys because it remains the best investment you can have in references, referrals, NPS and push it down. Don't just do FDES for your Fortune 500 companies. Try to do them for everyone if you can. It's okay if you break even. Like having epic experience requires not just epic onboarding. FD requires epic support. So that's my rant. I just, and I don't want to poke. They fixed it in an hour. I just, maybe they have support. I couldn't find it with my, you know, limited patience. And I can, I could tell you more stories, but I won't. So anything you want to add to that, Amelia? To my, to my push or cautionary tale to please, please invest in support. Hot AI company.
- [57:32]
B
It's funny, I feel like so many people have said in their data and I think it's true on replit and lovable and, and certainly agent Force that like support is the number one use case.
- [57:42]
A
And there's the irony, isn't it?
- [57:45]
B
That's the irony. I'm like, but a chat bot does not equal true support. And yeah, I feel like that's the difference. Like even what we've done with our AI VB of customer success qb, we added a chatbot to him. But I've said now for three episodes in A row. He's not a replacement for what we do. Like there is a chatbot. There's a million AI on Sasori Annual which sometimes people chat there as our customers. They still email us either me, David, anybody on our production team, they still email us and we still respond, you know, as quickly as we can. It's not a replacement. Just having a chatbot on your website is our replacement for actually fixing the problem. I think it's worse if there's no chatbot because then you just have nothing to your point or you get a contact us form like a marketo. But having that does not, that should not exclude you from actually backfilling support, from finding FDs, from finding folks that know the product, from finding people that can actually solve your customer's problems. I feel like the irony is that too many folks have said oh it's gonna chat bots that you know, people will just figure it out themselves. I'm like no, especially for agents. This is why I'm not a fan of self serve with agents either. Like you need support to get these up and running. As good as Jason and I are, we need FTEs at all these top companies to help us get them, you know, and maintained. Right. We, we've need some, we've needed some help with maintenance from our fts. So I feel like yeah, that's, that's really the true irony of the April of 2020.
- [59:17]
A
It's an irony I will say. And you're right, I will say even before that, just at a def, a deflection level, I am shocked how many products just don't have a well trained support agent. It's so easy go buy one. Or we just built like Amelia asked me the other day if we could have a do a good AI chatbot on qb, right? Big customer success. I said I could bill for that for you in five minutes. So we did it in five minutes and then we told it to train on the data it had and then we had to keep training it with top questions and then build a document and retrain it. So it takes a while. But there is no excuse to not have a support agent that is trained on all of your website documentation that ideally is connected to some sort of backend to get some resolution for customers. Most folks pre AI have this. Okay, everyone in E commerce has this. But I'm shocked how many folks. Yes, you need a human, you need escalation, you need all this. But I'm. But they either have nothing or it's untrained. It's literally they buy a tool because they don't care and they stick it, stick the JavaScript on their website and they ignore it. Just like we talk about. These are AI leaders. So just buy any support tool on planet Earth and then have someone's job to train it and then to update it every week. Like just at least do that. Right? At least do that.
- [60:29]
B
Especially when you get that right. It will route the cases to the right humans. Right. Like that's part of the magic of our qualified and our cube right now is it's not one, it's our replacement, but two since it's like it will give people answers but if it gets stuck or if it thinks this person still needs help, it will route it to the right person on our team. Not just a generic, oh, you know, we're going to route you just to all of customer success and we'll get back to you. Or all of customer support and we'll get back to you. It's yeah, okay, I've tried to solve this person's issue. I've given them some live help versus just sending them resource links. Like I've, I've tried to triage them by, you know, chatting with them. They still need some help. Here's their specific problem. Here's the right person that it needs to be escalated to.
- [61:12]
A
Yeah, okay, the last one and maybe we've hit some of it and then we can wrap. But just because this was super popular on Saster, we I wrote up a red point for Redpoint Ventures, top VC fund investor owner that we talked about and many other leaders, Stripe and others. They did. They just surveyed 141 CEOs the other day and 54% said they're consolidating vendors. They want to shrink the number of B2B vendors they have. And that 45%. 45% of all this AI budget which is leading to explosion, explosion and cloud explosion and hot legal startups explosion, everything. 45% of that is coming. It's displacement. In other words, it's being stolen from old vendors that they're either canceling or cutting back. The number of seats are cutting back. That's massive. 54% are consolidating vendors and 45% are grabbing budget for all of their spend. It's not from net new budget. 45% is not net new budget. In other words, 45% of AI spend is that CIOs are trying to grab from existing vendors and they listed and I just want to get Amelia's quick thoughts. We can talk about and then we can break because we hit some of them and what are they consolidating the most Customer service. We talked about finance operations. We can do a quick update on project management. We can talk about in sales automation which we've done a lot of. So customer service. I mean we have spun up pretty good agents on our AI VP of marketing, our AI customer success Digital Jason and Digital Amelia and we haven't used any legacy vendors. Did you ever think to use Zendesk? Did you ever think to set a time with the Zendesk reps calendly for next month?
- [62:52]
B
No, never.
- [62:54]
A
It's just if I can Vibe code for you, a very strong AI powered customer success agent for Qubie. It's pretty disruptive.
- [63:04]
B
It's disruptive. He also with any third party tool it's going to be out of the box, right. Everything that you do that's custom to you, you have to kind of force through or find a way to do. And the magic of our AI VP of marketing and our AI VP of Customer success is it's built fully custom from the ground up for us first Astro, just for us, for our customers. The way that we have unique customers who are sponsors and media sponsors like in our segment vertical, like everything is hyper personalized. Both disaster plus our customers plus you know, the attendees who are customers of us as well. So everything is hyper personalized to them. Now we've always said too like we're still in the 90%, you know, buy versus build mode and that is still true. Right. But I feel like when it comes to cutting things or reallocation of budget, I've. We're reallocating budget right now. Like we were just talking about how we've. We've reallocated some. Now this is a slightly different example but we've reallocated some budget from other tools to increase our Salesforce tooling. But I took from other tools we were using that we don't use anymore, put it up to Salesforce. There are other tools we don't use anymore that are reallocated into things like Artisan Monaco. Like we're, we're doing a bit of both, right. Like we are doubling down our spend for one of our legacy tools in Salesforce and we're also reallocating budget right now that used to be in salaries and people into these AI tools. And I feel like folks will start to see you've already seen it in the data but I think we'll start to see more of that. But I, you Know, to our point though, on customer service, I feel like that's where maybe people take it a little bit too far of they're like, okay, I got an AI chatbot that fixes all the problems. Maybe for E commerce you still need humans. So especially if you're an agentic product, you still feed a lot of humans and a lot of FTEs. However, however you classify them to get your customers up and running.
- [65:06]
A
All right. The Second one that CIOs are consolidating is finance operations right now where Brex, Bill and I guess some QuickBooks is sort of our slightly embarrassing stack for finance. Am I missing any finance apps that you can think of?
- [65:19]
B
Not those.
- [65:19]
A
Are those, are those at risk? Do you think Brex and bill have and QuickBooks have agentic risk at little team Saster?
- [65:26]
B
Yeah, and I'll tell you why. I mean QuickBooks is for me as a non finance person, listen, I've always had, I've had a login for the last few years. It's like the Salesforce example. Like I haven't tried to hook up their API yet, but if it sucks, I'm getting off it. Like I need some sort of agentic API that I can use with my agency.
- [65:52]
A
Oh my God, I need that too. When I ask that, like some of the external finance folks, it could be a month or two until I get an answer.
- [66:00]
B
Not only that, as we've said, they're so bad at collections.
- [66:04]
A
Yeah, collections is the number one issue that we have. Right?
- [66:06]
B
Collection is the number one issue. So I haven't even tried to hook up QuickBooks. I'll see five times you before our next recording of this. But I'm going to find if that doesn't work, which I suspect it's going to be dated because even the platform itself is pretty dated. Like I suspect, much like Marketo, if I can hook up the API, it's going to be fairly limited. So I'm probably going to move off of it. But I'm going to find something that is at least the API can talk to our agents. But also the thing about finance is it has to be secure, dude. Like I can't have you leaking billing information and banking. Banking information. Like that's hypersensitive. Right. So that's a double edged sword on the finance piece, which is, I think that's. That piece is why it's so surprising that the finance thing is so high. Because you're like that's maybe the most sensitive data all of us have is our finance data.
- [67:00]
A
Yeah, I don't know if folks are necessarily thinking of replacing their ERPs or QuickBooks. I think they're. They're. But maybe, maybe they are. I think it's the rest of the stack, maybe that that's at risk. Right? Well like for sure, when we build an agentic accounts receivable agent, what will that displace? Will it displace QuickBooks? Will it displace Braxton, Brex? Bill and QuickBooks have a lot of data in them. So they have moats and they have a double moat. Bill and QuickBooks have a double mode in that our contractors and our agencies know them well. Like accountants and stuff. No, Bill and QuickBooks like the back of their hand. So moving off to that, to Bob and to some hot company from like Combinator instead of QuickBooks and Bill is a. Like we're creating massive friction with, with, with our contractors and agencies. Right?
- [67:51]
B
For sure. Yeah.
- [67:51]
A
So sure. Might be hard. All right. Project management is a third category. I mean we're not going to ever buy a project management. I mean we do use notion, Right? But Notion even for us is at the edge of stealth churn, isn't it? I mean we barely use notion anymore. Do we need notion?
- [68:09]
B
I don't use it anymore. We've definitely self turned off. Well, it's funny.
- [68:13]
A
Oh yeah. We don't even use notion for our stand up because notion used to be our stand up. Right now. I didn't realize our AI VP of marketing has replaced notion as the head of our standup each. We don't need. I've. You're right. I don't think I've used notion in months.
- [68:27]
B
Yeah, there was a few weeks of overlap when I first built our 10K VP marketing because again, I built it as a dashboard store. I built it as I couldn't get. And this is just a failing. I don't think this is a failing on Ocean. More of a failure on me. I couldn't for the life of me for one more week log into something and manually update numbers. I was like, you know what? If I can Vibe code, this is where 10k started. If I can vibe go to an AI VP of marketing just for dashboards that has all of my ticket data, all my revenue data from Salesforce, all of my everything of like where, you know. And if David on our sales team doesn't have to update it because Salesforce just pulls his pipeline automatically, wouldn't that be awesome to save me an hour every Sunday so I don't have to do it on Sunday? And so it was for selfish reasons, because I was tired of literally copy pasting into Notion that I originally built our AI VP of marketing. And so for a few weeks, we had overlap because as we've shared, our Salesforce integration kept disconnecting. It's now been fixed, but since it's been fixed, for the last couple months, we. I haven't logged into Notion. You just realized you haven't either.
- [69:35]
A
I mean, we probably pay a hundred bucks for notion, right? Or 200 bucks a month, right? So. But yeah, we stealth churned. We both. We didn't. We months. We stealth churned when we built our. Now, it's interesting. Notion does have a lot of agents, and that is they've. They're accelerating. I don't know what they do. It's possible if we hadn't started on our journey earlier and weren't good at vibe coding our own agents, maybe we would have futzed with Notion's agents. And maybe if we have time, we will. I, you know, look, Notion remains a great pre AI product, so you can get the agents to do it. Like, if. If our Notion could have connected to our salesforce and built dashboards that random people couldn't delete. And all the other issues we have with Notion, like, if we could have built it in Notion before we built it, we might have, but now we're gone. Like, we're not going back to. There's no chance we're going back to Notion. Like, we're gone for. We're still. They don't know it in the bill, but, you know, I made this point on 20 VC to everybody. Dudes, you got to look at the mouse and Dows and Wows, you got to. In the stealth churn area, because if you're feeling all confident because your product's cheap, so people don't. So there is a laziness to churn off credit card payments. Right. For a lot of reasons. Or whose credit card is it on? There's the prisoner dilemma with like a bill or QuickBooks for us, but look at those Dows and Wows. Because our Dows and Wows and nows are zero for Notion. And I used to think these were like B2C consumer metrics. Now I think they're the number one most important in B2B because you're under threat everywhere. From stealth churn, from agents doing part of your workforce. Our Dows and Wows and Nows, if you include API calls for Salesforce like a hundred times a year ago. Right. That's as Green as you get on the health meter. Right. They went from red to green but our notion one like I know no one's going to care to follow up with us for 100 bucks a month but we've been red light for 90 days and no one's even emailed us. That's an F isn't it?
- [71:20]
B
That's. Well that's even my.
- [71:21]
A
I haven't even logged into Canva. I've logged into Canva twice I think in the last 60 days. I haven't gotten any email or anything from any agent. These are. These are like you got to track the Dows and Wells and these are stealth turn everywhere. I didn't even know we'd still turned off notion but now that I've been like that I'll cancel. I don't care. Do a quick export. But I've even looked at the dashboard in a couple months. I don't care. I don't care. It's not as good as 10k. I don't care.
- [71:45]
B
I don't know my log.
- [71:46]
A
Stealth churn man that's brutal. Okay, project management. We already changed our whole stack. I didn't even realize it. Goodbye. Love you notion but goodbye. I don't need you anymore. Right. You were great when you were great but we don't. Okay, last one that folks are consolidating or turning to sales automation. Look, we've talked about Headless Sales source on this. We've talked a million times about our AISDR stack including today just and you and I haven't discussed it. But is there anything else we're thinking of adding beyond this to our sales automation stack that would even more lead to change or consolidation? What are we thinking in sales automation as our final point?
- [72:23]
B
Yeah, I think where we're pushing this all now is how much can we get it to sell for sell. And so right now, right, with all of our different AI SDRs that we have, we don't. Maybe you guys have noticed we don't have an AI VP of sales. Like we do not have a VP of sales by definition. That is. That's one kind of. We have momentum which is joining all the calls which is great because it'll send me, you know, summaries it'll give fast and items. It'll move stages for deals for us in Salesforce. But it's not at that point of a true human VP of sales where it can join the call, say hey I also joined this other call and this is how you should do the follow up to this person like we get that very lightly right now from our current staff. Very light. Right. But right now it's still a human taking the call. Are AI agents do.
- [73:19]
A
So sorry, there's a lot going on there. You want to figure out how we can close without a human? Close a 50k or 100k deal without a human or what are you saying by that? What's your goal?
- [73:29]
B
Yeah, I would, I would. Maybe not for 50 or 100k but I think for something like our. Sometimes we do these add ons for saster. Something like an add on. Something like a media, a podcast.
- [73:41]
A
Sponsor our newsletter. Right. Which is sponsor our newsletter. Fixed work to do fixed work. Right.
- [73:47]
B
Fixed, fixed availability based on like our current event calendar. Right. Of like how like.
- [73:52]
A
Yeah, that should all be automated way. Right?
- [73:53]
B
Yeah. This month for April, we're really full in May and like June's getting really like just take all that data. And instead of me or David having to get on with these deals, can't the agent get them either fully to close or maybe to contract where we just send the contract and say thank you the agent for the commissions. That's where I want to see how much we can push the limits there because I feel like our tools are really good and they are helping us close a lot of deals. But at the end of the day we've still, you know, a human has closed the deal and sent to the contract. So I want to just push the limits there and see how that's it.
- [74:30]
A
So one is can we, can we get, can we get our agents to close more like 45k and below routine, higher ACD deals? Yeah, yeah, that's like right now it's closing.
- [74:40]
B
Our agents have closed a lot of ticket revenue, right? Like hundreds, hundreds of thousands now of ticket revenue.
- [74:45]
A
Maybe probably seven figures.
- [74:47]
B
Probably seven figures now, right? Yeah, because that's what I looked at a couple of months ago. So. But the ACV on a ticket previously was sub 1000, now it's a thousand. Right. So low ACV, it can close it on its own. It can send people the code, it can follow up with them. It's already doing a very light ACV version of this. So the challenge to myself now is can I get that to work for a higher, for real ACV that's like more like 25 to 50k. Can we get that to work?
- [75:13]
A
And so I think that's enough for today. I guess, you know, the last one and you didn't make your list. So it's telling me all these terms Orchestration and this. They all drive me nuts. They're too even training. But the idea of having an agentic fabric at least in sales that can manage all of our GTM and sales agents, that would be nice, right? Is that, is that on the. Do we think we could do that this year or do we think having a true agentic fabric that can manage all of our sales and UTM agents. We think that that's just not a solvable problem problem we're solving this calendar year.
- [75:48]
B
I would like to. I think I call it more of like a gentic sales aura, if you will, of like something that's just always there. Right. Like could I hook up our, let's say five core different sales and now CS agent because it's part of sales. Could I hook them all together enough either using Salesforce or something we custom build on top of our Salesforce and our other agents to be always there. Like an aura, like in the background.
- [76:12]
A
Like an aura. But. But it would have to be. It would have to also manage all the other agents too for correct. Fully achieve its goals. Right. I like the aura idea too. Don't get me wrong. It's always there, right?
- [76:24]
B
That's my hope is by, you know, fall maybe of 2026, we could get to a sales aura that's always present, always on, can sell, can escalate to human in the way we've done with some of our other, you know, lower ACV or, or, or marketing things that we've done. I, I hope we can get there and I hope it's in a way that can truly manage all the agents together. Because right now that's our biggest roadblock. Right. It takes you and I a lot of human hours to manually manage all of our agents.
- [76:56]
A
Does. All right, Salazar, I love it. Okay, we'll wrap on that. If you've made it this far to the end. Thank you. And if you are on YouTube or go to YouTube, literally put in a comment your question for me and Amelia. I can't promise you Amelia's busy. But if you, if you look at what I do with Harry and Rory and 20 VC, I literally respond to every comment there. It's a very efficient way. Like put a comment in the agents on YouTube. Questions you want answered on your agents. And as long as you don't mind them answered someone in public, at least I commit to doing my best. So thanks everybody. We'll see you next week. Emelia, you're the best. And we'll keep learning and try and make this better. Thanks, everybody.