Jason Lemkin, known to some as the Godfather of SaaS, says the time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace.
In practice, Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community of business-to-business founders, said on Lenny’s Podcast recently that this means he will stop hiring humans in his sales department.
Instead, SaaStr is going all in on agents, which are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.
He said the company now has 20 AI agents automating tasks once handled by a team of 10 sales development representatives and account executives.
That move from an entirely human workforce to an agent-based workforce was rapid.
In May, SaaStr had just one AI agent in production that it used for various digital tasks, Lemkin said. That month, though, during the SaaStr Annual — its yearly gathering of over 10,000 founders, executives, and VCs — two of its high-paid sales representatives abruptly quit.
Lemkin said he turned to his chief AI officer and said, “We’re done with hiring humans in sales. We’re going to push the limits with agents.”
Lemkin’s calculus was that it just wasn’t worth the cost of hiring another junior sales representative for a $150,000 a year position who would eventually quit, when he could use a loyal AI agent instead.
Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr’s chief AI officer, told Business Insider by email that by June, the company began ramping up the number of agents it had in production.
“We had only 1 non-core agent at the time with Delphi, but didn’t go deep on 2 to 20+ until the beginning of June,” she said. “It was a conscious choice after their departure to reallocate some (but not all) head count spend to agents.”
At the SaaStr office, the 10 desks that once belonged to humans on the go-to-market team are now labeled with the names of agents, like “Quali for qualified,” “Arty for artisan,” and “Repli for Replit,” Lemkin said.
Lemkin said SaaStr is training its agents on its best humans.
“Train an agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson,” he said.
SaaStr’s process is similar to how Vercel, the cloud-based platform for developers, trained a sales agent off its top performer for six weeks by documenting every step of their work, and then building an agent to mimic their process.
Many companies are experimenting with AI agents, but risks remain. One of the big ones is the threat of data leaks and cybercrime.
“AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you’re running them,” Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, recently told Wired.
All of that access creates more potential attack points for cybercriminals.
Security threats aside, Lemkin said that the net productivity of agents is about the same as humans. However, he said, agents are more efficient and can scale — just like software.
