We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

Episode Overview

• The podcast details a radical experiment where a company replaced its 10-person sales team with 1.2 humans managing 20 AI agents, achieving similar business results and prompting the decision to stop hiring humans for these roles.
• It serves as a call to action for Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders, arguing they must personally invest the time to learn and implement AI agents—not delegate or outsource—to avoid becoming obsolete.
• The discussion explores the future of work in sales, predicting the extinction of entry-level roles like SDRs and the rise of a new, highly-paid professional skilled at orchestrating teams of AI.
• It offers practical career advice for professionals at all levels, emphasizing that embracing AI-driven transparency and productivity is the only way to advance, while resisting change is a path to being left behind.

Key Concepts

• Human-to-AI Workforce Transition: A traditional sales team was replaced by a small human team managing a larger team of AI agents, demonstrating the viability of AI in complex GTM functions.
• Displacement of "Mid-Pack" Performers: AI is not just automating menial tasks but is displacing mediocre and average-performing office workers, raising the bar for human contribution.
• The DIY Imperative for Leaders: GTM leaders cannot delegate or outsource the implementation of AI. They must get hands-on with the tools to understand their capabilities and maintain their strategic value.
• Buy, Don't Build: For GTM functions, the best strategy is to leverage and orchestrate third-party AI vendor tools rather than attempting to build proprietary solutions from scratch.
• The AI Learning Curve: The first AI agent implementation is brutal and time-consuming, but the core learnings, particularly prompt engineering, act as "cheat codes" that make subsequent deployments much faster.
• AI and Increased Workload: Counterintuitively, AI leads to more work, not less. The massive increase in productivity generates a higher volume of output that requires human management and oversight.
• Radical Transparency: AI tools provide complete visibility into employee activity and productivity, exposing underperformers and creating a new standard of accountability.
• The "Forward-Deployed Engineer" Model: A high-touch customer success model where technical experts are deeply involved in ensuring the customer succeeds with the product, mirroring the early days of Salesforce.

Quotes

• At 0:00 - "You used to have about 10 people full time. Now you have 1.2 humans, 20 agents." - Lenny summarizes the dramatic workforce transformation at Jason Lemkin's company, SaaStr.
• At 0:16 - "We're done with hiring humans in sales." - Jason Lemkin makes a definitive statement about his company's new hiring strategy after successfully replacing his sales team with AI agents.
• At 0:26 - "I'm not going to hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what SaaStr does. I just can't do that one more time." - Lemkin expresses his frustration with the performance of past human hires, justifying his shift towards more reliable AI agents.
• At 0:31 - "AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the mid-pack and the mediocre." - Lemkin articulates his core thesis that AI's primary impact will be on replacing average-performing office workers rather than just undesirable tasks.
• At 0:40 - "We should have $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Vercel, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people." - Lemkin paints a picture of the future sales professional as a highly-paid orchestrator of AI agents, not a manager of people.
• At 0:54 - "Folks that qualify leads coming in, the contact me's that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year." - He predicts the imminent extinction of the inbound lead qualification role, believing AI can handle it entirely.
• At 28:18 - "So if you can do one of these, it'll be really hard, it'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then you're gonna be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it yourself." - Emphasizing the steep but rewarding learning curve of implementing AI agents and the power it gives to those who master it.
• At 28:32 - "If you're waiting for an agency to do it, I think you're going to be out of a job." - A direct warning about the career risk of not personally engaging with AI implementation.
• At 29:11 - "None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it yourself. You're not Vercel." - A critical piece of advice to use third-party tools for GTM agents rather than attempting to code them from scratch.
• At 61:35 - "Quit the day we rolled out the AI robots. You know why? He hadn't done anything in 30 days." - Lemkin shares a story about an underperforming employee who was exposed by a new AI tool that provided total transparency into their daily activities.
• At 62:06 - "If you want to fight the future, good luck to you. But embrace it and you will leap ahead of your peers that aren't embracing this." - A stark warning about the necessity of adapting to AI in the workplace.
• At 62:21 - "We do more work with AI. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked." - Lemkin makes the counterintuitive point that AI increases the volume of work by making teams more productive, rather than leading to less work.
• At 62:49 - "Be the guy, the gal, the person that loves these tools and that is the first person to embrace whatever it is. Don't fight it." - Advice directed at junior employees to become the internal champions and experts on new AI technologies.
• At 68:54 - "I do think the classic cadence-based SDR running campaigns through a tool him or herself will be mostly extinct within 12 months." - A specific prediction about which sales roles are most at risk of being automated by AI.
• At 70:19 - "Being a people person is not enough anymore... You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson, Lenny? You ask them what they're really good at, they're 'I'm a people person, Lenny.'" - Lemkin argues that soft skills alone are insufficient in the new AI-driven sales environment.
• At 76:29 - "Net net, we're going to need more sales and go-to-market professionals than ever." - Despite automation, Lemkin predicts that the massive growth of AI-powered companies will create a net increase in GTM jobs for those who adapt.
• At 81:38 - "Pick one of two paths today. Either be working harder like even you and I are... or honestly... join something more slow-growing." - Lemkin’s advice for professionals to either fully embrace the high-productivity AI era or opt for a more stable, traditional company.

Takeaways

• GTM leaders must personally spearhead AI agent implementation; delegating this critical function to agencies or junior staff is a career-ending mistake.
• Focus your efforts on mastering the orchestration of vendor-provided AI tools rather than diverting resources to build GTM agents in-house.
• Cultivate the skill of managing AI agents, as this is emerging as the most valuable and highly compensated role in the future of sales.
• Embrace total transparency in your work, as AI tools will make daily productivity visible to everyone; use this to demonstrate your value rather than fighting it.
• To accelerate your career, become the go-to expert on new AI tools within your team and company.
• Invest the time to create one great AI prompt, as this "cheat code" is highly transferable and can be quickly adapted for other AI platforms.
• Re-evaluate the viability of traditional entry-level sales roles (SDR, inbound qualification) as a long-term career path, as they are rapidly becoming obsolete.
• Develop a skill set that goes beyond interpersonal abilities; process-oriented and technical skills are now mandatory for success in sales.
• Before launching a new AI startup, first explore how you can leverage AI to supercharge your existing business, especially if you already have happy customers.
• Make a conscious career choice: either commit to the high-intensity, high-output world of AI-driven work or seek a more stable role at a slower-growing company.