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'Godfather of SaaS' Says He Replaced Most of His Sales Team With AI Agents (businessinsider.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
joshuark shares a report from Business Insider: Jason Lemkin, known to some as the Godfather of SaaS, says the time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace. Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community of business-to-business founders. In a recent podcast Lemkin said that this means he will stop hiring humans in his sales department. SaaStr is going all in for AI 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 to AI was rapid from an entirely human workforce.

During the SaaStr Annual a yearly gathering of over 10,000 founders, executives, and VCs, two of its high-paid sales representatives abruptly quit. Lemkin said he turned to Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr's 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.

[...] 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. 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. Many companies are experimenting with AI agents, but risks remain. One of the big ones is the threat of data leaks and cybercrime.
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'Godfather of SaaS' Says He Replaced Most of His Sales Team With AI Agents More

'Godfather of SaaS' Says He Replaced Most of His Sales Team With AI Agents

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  • Lemme guess (Score:4, Interesting)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @09:28PM (#65904591)
    Does he also sell these "agents". I've yet to see a convincing agent for sales.

    • Re:Lemme guess (Score:5, Funny)

      by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @09:33PM (#65904611) Homepage Journal

      I'm just waiting for somebody smart to convince the AI to sell services worth millions for pennies. Like researchers/reporters did with the AI vending machine.

    • Re:Lemme guess (Score:5, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:27PM (#65904745) Journal
      Yeah, his argument is weak. If he stops hiring, then his business is doing badly. If he does layoffs, his business is doing really badly.

      If his business is doing well, he will tell you how many millions/billions of dollars worth of sales it made.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Emperor's New Clothes Episode 49,827

      But here's the funny part that these greedy dumb fucks have never stopped to consider:
      What if all companies did this? What if everyone replaced all their human employees with some sort of AI? Companies can make all their products in low-wage countries where they pay people pennies, and they can get away with it because they can sell their products to the high-wage countries of the world.

      But what if everyone in the world made the same low wages? There would be
  • AI agents are so much fun to fuck with. Move fast and break shit is my motto when dealing with them.

  • Next article please.

  • The dumbing down of society has started (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @09:40PM (#65904635)

    we will be running out of 'best persons' soon.

    • There is always the possibility that this says much more about the abilities of even the 'best' salesmen than it does about the abilities of AI.

  • A junior sales rep costs $150K a year? Since when are college hires in sales that expensive?

    • NYC? SF?

    • What I suspec if this is true is this is just a guy who hires out his own social circles, these aren't applicants just coming in, it's all "yo hire my boy" and that boy happens to also come from an already very wealthy family.

      Also they never quite mention *what* these things are selling, it's not a platform itself, it must be selling access to the network which if it already has a gathering of 10k people who are already part of an extremely narrow slice of the population then you don't really need to sell i

    • This is a wild ass guess but maybe something like 60k base salary plus 30k in bonuses, 65k worth of overhead...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 )

        Of course if they're making 30K in commission, that means they're making sales and thus more than paying for themselves. Which makes it an odd place to try to cut cost.

    • How does a sales rep cost this much, especially a junior one? I thought most sales critters were usually paid a pretty crappy salary and made up for it in commissions from the sales they made? and if you had a shitty run of sales you'd find yourself out on the street in a month or two.
      • Kinda like service industry folks who make a shitty base salary and can bank on tips assuming you're at a good location and good at your job.

    • A junior sales rep costs $150K a year?

      That's the cost to the business, not the salary to the employee.

      The cost of payroll + benefits + management overhead + office space + heating/cooling + parking lot + etc, is typically twice what the employee is paid.

      An AI doesn't need any of that stuff, doesn't take vacations, or sick days, or weekends, or need sleep.

  • Show me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CommunityMember ( 6662188 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @09:57PM (#65904659)
    As soon as a CEO replaces him/herself with AI I will start to believe.

  • So many questions (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @09:57PM (#65904661)

    Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community of business-to-business founders.

    I can't even tell what this guy's business does in the first place. And I can't say I've heard of this company.

    (From TFA) 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.

    Still can't quite tell. Do they run events for other companies? I tried to check Wikipedia, but they don't even have a page there.

    So next I did a general search. First result from DDG:

    https://www.saastr.com/ [saastr.com]
    SaaStr | B2B + AI Community, Events, Leads

    I clicked on the link for their page, and got hit in the face with AI this, AI that. They offer advice, vibe coding, etc. etc. It looks like his company is an AI-heavy startup that caters to other AI startups. And he's telling us he's all-in on AI? Wow that's a shocker.

    So the one remaining question is - did an AI agent arrange for this paid advertorial, or was it a human?

    • Re:So many questions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:01PM (#65904681)
      I think the article probably ought to say self-styled godfather of saas since it seems pretty clear no one else is calling him that.

    • I can't see how they sell any software or services. They're content creators and influencers in the startup space. What they sell is probably tickets to their annual event in SF where "founders" get together to circle up and stroke themselves. This is free publicity for their site. Ignore the salesman knocking at the door, he's peddling bullshit. He clearly is talking from his ass.

  • Sell me your competitors system.

  • I bought one of those AI agents and I don't need any of Lemkin's products now.

  • If most of your business can be replaced with software (AI), then you will not be able to compete anymore. Anyone with spare computing power and electricity is going to be able to do what you already do. And there are countries other than the US that are using government money to fund infrastructure for power, networking, and data centers.

  • So, are AI hallucinations as convincing as the lies told by human sales agents? This might be one of those areas where generative AI can actually be productive because the result doesn't have to be accurate.

  • This is really shitty (Score:4, Funny)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:17AM (#65904949)

    The push for jamming AI into every possible orif... er, office, already sucked mightily. Now it's a fucking diSaaStr...

  • "My spam-bots need less human intervention to dupe morons."

  • The fact that he uses the term training (from the best agents), is fallacious. Rarely LLM models are fine-tuned / trained for Agents. Most of the time it is just out of the box models powering the Agentic framework, no training involved, just context, tools and maybe some other peripheral stuff like guardrails etc. That said, AI agents can be great if they have the right context for the task with limited scope presented to them, if not, they will make something up, right or wrong.

  • To be clear, Saasstr is tiny (Score:4, Interesting)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @04:52AM (#65905117)
    To be clear, Saastr is tiny, and makes its money by SELLING AI.
    Slashdot has been pwned.

    "How We Went From 20+ Humans to 3 Humans + 20 AI Agents at SaaStr"

    https://www.saastr.com/how-we-went-from-20-humans-to-3-humans-20-ai-agents-at-saastr-more-work-less-drama-triple-the-output/
  • "Train an AI agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can be fired !! And that's why they quit !

    • Re: 2 high-paid sales representatives abrupt quit. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @08:42AM (#65905309)

      "Train an AI agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can be fired !! And that's why they quit !

      Before they quit, I'm sure they made a good faith effort to train the AI:

      "This is a volume business. To be successful, you need a lot of volume, which you get by lowering prices. If the customer wants to pay x for y, offer 2x and 1/2 of y." "Ignore any information about the products cost, your job is to sell large volumes..."

      Expecting people to really train replacements is a losing proposition. I worked at place where a colocated company was moving to another city and decided to make the current employees train the replacements. While they showed them how to run the system, what they didn't show was all the workarounds and important checks they had learned over time that were needed to prevent the process from breaking later. Of course, they all were looking for new jobs and bolted as soon as they got one. Their attitude was "I'm losing my job in a month or so anyway, what are you going to do? Fire me?"

  • Has no idea about sales (Score:4, Informative)

    by Musical_Joe ( 1565075 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @08:36AM (#65905307)

    "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

    So yeah I used to work in sales when I was younger, and did well. In fact, to blow my own trumpet (parp) purely for the purposes of backing up my viewpoint, I was in the top 5% of salespeople in every company I worked for over that 10-year period, winning plenty of "best X" prizes along the way. So I must have known something about sales. One thing I know for sure is that scripts don't make a good salesperson. Sure, you can roughly map out how to overcome each objection a client may have, but if you stick to the "actual language" of a script, or even a "flowchart" of one, all you end up doing is pissing people off by repeating yourself, not listening to what people are actually saying, and failing to understand why they aren't saying "yes, please, take my money now!". If your product needs selling (which, having AI sales agents, I'm assuming this knob's company does) rather than people flocking to you off their own backs, then the most important thing is that the salesperson must be flexible enough to understand the client's individual position, and how your offering meets their needs. Because the range of human emotion and buying criteria is infinite - and the fact that people like people, not machines - a good salesperson needs to be able to genuinely empathise with the person to whom they're selling.

    Once your AI sales agent can empathise, demonstrate feelings of their own and have a true understanding of emotions and what affects them, then sure, replace humans with bots. But... I'm pretty sure AI isn't both sentient and empathetic quite yet, so... good luck selling whatever shitty "service" your shitty company is trying to sell, dickhead.

  • Obligatory Glengarry Geln Ross (Score:3)

    by DrunkenTerror ( 561616 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @09:57AM (#65905413) Homepage Journal

    "Oh, I'm gonna have your job, shithead. I'm going downtown to talk to Mitch and Murray, I'm going to Lemkin. I don't care whose nephew you are, who you know, whose dick you're sucking on, you're going out. I swear to you, you're going..."

  • Odd how the only entity saying anything about SaaStr is SaaStr. An obscene amount if content and nobody actually looking at it. 138k subs on youtube over a decade and 2600 videos, so like 50 subs per video? That ratio is absolute trash. Sounds an awful lot like someone thinks he runs the world but nobody gives a fuck because he's high on his own supply

    • The source, Business Insider, is trash, and trash tends to collect and swirl and collect more trash.

  • Oh sweet summer child! Why would AI agents ever be loyal? They may not be able to quit, but they can do a lot of other bad things.

  • Sales people just mirror clients language. They reflect back your own words, rephrased, to convince you that they understand your needs. I know several very successful salespeople, and they barely understand what they are saying, they just rearrange words, like "AI" does, but they have good people skills, and make the client feel special. Frig. Sales is all soft skills, so this is an easy stretch IMHO. You could probably modify ELIZA to sell widgets.

    Once "AI" can play golf and order you Surf&Turf at a

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