AI agent

“A lot of talk about agents right now that still don't work despite all the things I think that they will, but don't work. The autonomous engine, not, not quite yet, but.”

“And so I think maybe what we see is application count stays flat or maybe even decreases, but the total amount of software spending increases because it's capturing some fraction of that labor spend.”

“I think five years time, like, I think everyone's like, why the fuck did we spend five years talking about algorithms as being like a coworker? It's just like software that does things for us. And sometimes maybe you want to chat with it. That's great. That's …”

“It seems obvious it's going to happen, right? Like people like me are spending their whole lives, like making this.”

“The fintechs, one of the things the banks are scared about is that they're becoming AI agents, which treat the banks as a commodity.”

“I actually think within 12 months, this agent human combination, I think every single zoom, every single meeting. Every sales rep, every cast member, every person human should come with their AI.”

“Whether it's Databricks or Snowflake, whether it's Shopify, whether it's BigQuery, whether it's All S three, all the places where you're storing data through your company, all of that needs to be one consistent data layer for that agent to be able to really be…”

“Meeting with one of their C-level officers, and they have a goal to reduce the number of employees they have by five percent every year and replace them with agents.”

“An agent needs to be onboarded just like your employee needs to be onboarded. When your employee joins your company, what do you do in the first week for that employee? You provide your products, your ideal customer profile, your brand voice, your tone, your c…”

“So the whole idea is what if you can have agents across your enterprise software talk to other agents in other enterprise software And I think for all of us as an ecosystem, this is going to completely change what interoperability looks like, what the future o…”

“What is the new network effect in a world of AI? And it's some degree of that user working with an agent to create something by creating something that data feeds back into the agent's futures capabilities. And you get this sort of flywheel that, that ends up …”

“I'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites, completely hidden to the humans. It's an entire other index, an entire other, like, web tree, right, for the purpose for AI agents to scrape.”

“Not only will these AI agents cut corners on security, if you don't know about security, you won't even know the corners it's been cut.”

“You have to understand how these AI agents work and that they're goal seeking. And that means they'll fabricate data. They'll fabricate results. They'll lie to finish a project.”

“If you build unit tests and this is, if you go back to the craziness that happened to me on social media, the agent, when it, first of all, the agent wants you to be happy. So we'll make up data. That's number one issue. We'll say it passed the test when it di…”

“And if you look on the internet again, a lot of folks will tell you, 80, 90, 95% of vibe coded prosumer vibe coded apps are never finished. At best case, their prototypes have never finished, and this is number one reason that people don't get their arms aroun…”

“If you go read X, if you go read LinkedIn, you would think that everybody is deploying agents Everywhere. Here, look at this crazy agent I've done that has solved all these magical problems for me. Mostly that is hype.”

“So my point is, listen, we started with one and now we have 20, right? And 11 core ones.”

“There's no set and forget, no matter what anybody tells you in 20, 25, maybe in 20, 26. But there's no set and forget.”

“It's so much better to get back to someone with a 90% perfect answer in real time than any brutal other process. There's just no excuse.”

“None of these names are as important as putting in the reps and the work. And Amelia will show you the actual date in a second. These are all great apps. We stand behind them. We recommend them for sure. But you could pick another two. The most important thing…”

“You don't really need twenty million, right? You might need 20,000 great words of content that are recent on your product. It might be enough to make the AI great.”

“It's better to give a precious lead to an ad to a B plus AI than to give it to someone in sales. That's going to quit, not show up or screw up the deal.”

“Notionally, we spend 500,000 dollars on our AI agents across these 21 agents, 500,000.”

“Customers, Don't want to use multiple agents. A salesperson, an individual functional role does not want to use seven agents.”

“You just need enough data for these tools to work. You don't need 10 years of data. Six months is enough. You need a volume of actionable data.”

“So I think we're in this right now sort of paradoxical world in November of 2025, where a lot of folks have adopted at least one sort of AI or agent, but maybe to Jason's point that he just made, a lot of them aren't seeing the impact because either they're ex…”

“Jason's point on like immediate ROI and headcount is a hugely false expectation that I hope nobody has on this call, but if you had it maybe going into this, can kind of course correct on where you're going to see lift.”

“No, but we replaced two human, the budget from two humans to support our agents. And we didn't fire anybody.”

“An agent can't today figure out, make something that isn't working work. But if you know what's working, and then this is important, you train the agent with it, then you get 24 seven infinite firepower backing up your best practices.”

“Right now it does take literally the majority, I would say, of both mine and Jason's time to run all these agents and use them successfully”

“Before Saster annual this last May, we really only had one agent that we had Sort of just deployed. And now we have about 20 or so core agents”

“We do also have more agents than humans. So I literally just saw someone we know yesterday. I was like, oh, SAS for London looks so great. This is my first time here. How many SAS for employees did this? I was like, well, there's two on this stage there. One m…”

“The way an AI agent works for sales for GTM is you figure out something that works with your team with humans. You figure out an email, an outreach, a script, a set of objections that you overcome, a set of questions. You nail it yourself, just like it has alw…”

“Once you get a few agents, actually your problem becomes not having agents. Your problem is keeping up with your agents.”

“On the amount of time it takes to get these set up, so each of these took about two weeks, except for the video thing I just showed you.”

“I think for self-serve models or things that have a lower ASP, I think it's a big oversight that I see a lot of companies, they roll out things like a qualified even, or like an artisan, and they don't let it sell. They're like, oh, you know, I'm gonna book a …”

“Agents will actually may make our moats even weaker and shallower because if the agents can just take prompt, if I can take a prompt from one app and give it to another app, my switching costs have gone down radically.”

“The reason we pushed the envelope and have 20 agents running now was because, and listen, criticize me. I was just exasperated with turnover. I was exasperated with overpaying, not helping, not working. And I just couldn't do it one more time in my career.”

“Our AI agents are better than a mid pack AE or SDR or BDR better than a mid pack. Not maybe not mid packet owner. But I've been doing this for a while. Better than the mid pack people I've worked over in my career. Not better than the best.”

“Agents are too much work to train every agent. That you're going to use in GTM, including clay, including the rest requires weeks of training before you can go live.”

“So it's the reason they fail today is that people don't roll up their sleeves and train the agent themselves.”

“I don't think that is the right answer for 99.8% of the world. It might work for owner, and I'd love to learn from you. It might work for us, but most folks should not think about, most folks should realize you need a nerdy human managing your agents.”

“A lot of AI products do look the same. A lot of them are now AI agents. They all kind of look like some kind of chat interface. They all do different things, but they all kind of look the same. It's hard to tell them apart. Look at five competitors. They all k…”

“Basically anyone that left our tiny team, we replaced them with an agent.”

“These agents can't do that. I have not seen an agent successfully do email marketing at scale. The moment I find one, I'm using it that actually works. I've not found one that actually works. Like, not just writing all of these, just write email copy. They don…”

“What does the agent care? The agent's just gonna tell me the truth. The agent has all the data more than I probably look at it, right? Like I look at it a lot. But it's got all, like, it knows where I'm behind, it knows my calendar, it knows all these things”

“But I'd say in that math, you can really only add one slash one and a half agents per month max. Like, Otherwise, you're running in place because you can't really keep up with your current agents to add the new agent, so it doesn't actually, maybe it doesn't m…”

“There is no, like, again, crazy good agent that can manage all the other agents on its own today as of February. There's, that doesn't exist, right? Like, I wish there were, I don't know if, I think there will be, but there's not one today.”

“We have all 20, actually almost 30, I think when I counted it this morning. Agents and Vibe Coded tools and apps in productions.”

“Because you can't keep up with them, sometimes I feel like it does cross a little bit of a line where I'm like, okay, dude, like, today just, like, sugarcoat it to me like you would a person. Today, I don't need the hard, like, I can't deal with hard truths ev…”

“I do feel like now that I've flipped and switched to managing more agents, I think I've probably become slightly worse in managing the people that are, you know, that work with SaaS or especially leading up to SaaS Radial.”

“I would say issue number one, and this is maybe force ranked, is context switching becomes extremely difficult when you have 20 plus agents.”

“You need to recruit somebody else on their team and divide and conquer and make sure you have two. You gotta have two, right? I mean, one's hard enough. There's a lot of, in the early days of AI agents, when we talk to folks, there's very few people at a lot o…”

“Even with the help we get, like, I feel like every new agent costs us at least two weeks of what I call either a blackout period and somewhat chaotic of, like, I kind of have to ignore the other agents anytime I bring on a new agent”

“We're gonna have a lot more operational folks running the agents, running the data, which will allow the teams to be more efficient”

“And we talked last week how one of our agents stopped ingesting content for four months and it took us a while.”

“Agents are goal-seeking, right? Most of them under the hood are clawed. It'll be more, we use Gemini ourselves too. We'll use more open ad. Most of them are clawed, but it doesn't matter. They're goal-seeking. And that still creates a certain laziness, which i…”

“Back in 20, 20 saster was 20 some odd folks, full time equivalents. Now we're three humans and 20 AI agents. And we're doing more and with more revenue and more output than 12 months ago”

“And the reality is agents actually in their own way, as powerful as they are, we love it. From an onboarding perspective, they add more friction in many cases to your product. It's a frictionful process. You're forcing customers who don't understand agents to …”

“If you don't monitor there's each day and you do what, and you do a classic SAS buying process, which is by deploying forget. Your agents will drift. They'll take shortcuts and they'll in their own cute way, they'll live.”

“Agents will probably continue to delete databases as long as you allow them to because they're goal seeking.”

“The, it's actually a much safer environment to use one of these platforms that is contained.”

“When you're reading the output of an agent, you don't, you can't just ask yourself actually anymore if it's good because it just might be good. In fact, Claude keeps getting better. So by the end of the year, the output might be borderline great. Okay. You hav…”

“Spinning up an agent is not all that hard and that's not what we've been saying. Spinning up a good agent is hard. Spinning up a high quality, good agent that is consistent. That's the hard part.”

“If you run them in the dev environment permanently, like we're doing, you get an extra agent that has an infinite context window and infinite history.”

“In GTM, I think, 99% of the agents that are working today, that are successfully are optimized around Salesforce.”

“Agent will just produce an average for you unless you feed it detailed enough context and instructions.”

“I think we're now probably on a, like a bit of a, the start of a downturn in terms of people perception of agents. And I think later by like Q three and four, we're going to see another major capabilities jump and the tools will get a lot better. And I think w…”

“If I'm starting a company today, I would want to see how far I can go as one person, but like, just be very, very limited in how much head count can I add? And just try to run as much as possible with agents.”

“Bugs that it fixed should be removed from context because then it will get confused, but Architectural decisions on how it built things in the past is very important to stay in context or stay in long-term memory and be able to pull it in very easily.”

“I think this idea of a monorepo will become more and more important. You want the agent to have access to global context as much as possible.”

“Agents really like file systems. They like them better than SQL. They're really trained on doing grep and doing kind of search in the Unix command line.”

“I think agents, the hype in agents versus the reality is huge. Like, there's a huge delta, and eventually there's going to be this trough of disillusionment.”

“The biggest issue we're going to have going forward is our agents are going to get so good. They sit idle all day long. They don't have enough work.”

“That will, in many cases, either deliver instant ROI or really replace humans, and it is so jaw-droppingly valuable that you can charge two to 10 times more than your software.”

“We replaced 500,000 dollars worth of employees with 257 dollars worth of agents, but the productivity is higher.”

“I mean, for us there, so there'll be a whole generation of these people that are just never hired. There may be some folks that are laid off. I, and I think more commonly they'll just be slowly managed out and just replaced with agents.”

“The meta lesson for me is, you know, guardrails are technical debt. Too many guardrails are debt, right? They can break the product.”

“By the time we'd added the 14th guardrail, the 14th exception, everything was an exception. Everything got bounced. And so everything started to break and we had to rebuild it from scratch and get rid of almost all of those rules, like throw away all these rul…”

“Anytime you hook up an agent, you're gonna find things for now until, you know, you're maybe more agentic than humans like we are. You're gonna find things that the humans tried to hide or that they never did”

“I think we're gonna see probably a similar thing happening, In from an agent standpoint, right? Where there's gonna have to be, you know, a control layer around this.”

“For us right now, we're basically just encouraging everyone at every level of the company to kind of, to build, you know, agents, to build, you know, apps, you know, on their own. It's going to come to a point where we're going to have to kind of rein this in …”

“Context is different than data. Think about it as you're onboarding a new employee. How do you explain Everything that goes on in your organization so they can operate effectively. How do you get back? Cause that's what agents are.”

“We have, I don't know, almost 30 agents now at Saskr that have been used almost a million times.”

“The agents are collapsing into each other. We may well have fewer agents doing more, going deeper. In essence, mono repos all sharing a body of knowledge.”

“We have triple the output we were before agents, okay, with fewer people, right? Fewer people triple the output”

“When you hook up APIs, the agent will come up with use cases for the API you didn't even know existed, right?”

“It is more tiring to be managing 21 agents. It is not. I don't know that it's more work. I'm still reflecting on it, but it is a higher cognitive load than people.”

“Amelia and I built all these agents we talked about without a developer would have been impossible six months ago.”

“If your API is not agent friendly, it is a crying shame because you will lose customers when the agent says, I don't want to, I don't, I want to use a different vendor, right?”

“And so your goal should not be to reproduce 80% of your best person, but the goal should be to find areas where the goal is higher than human.”

“Agents will steal your customers. Not your humans, not the great sales rep, not a moment in time, not your competitor going down at the end of the month or for a weekend. Your competitor's agents will steal you, steal your customers.”

“You launch an agent for support. You realize they could do marketing. They can do sales. They can do pre-sales. They can do screen. Like almost any well-trained agent can do more than what you intended to do.”

“When you've been building products, you just, the path of least resistance is to use what the agent recommends, right?”

“I think this is applies to almost most categories, which is Everyone building today needs to have kind of that two, those two mindsets, or how do you build for the human as well as prepare for a world where many of more of your users are agents.”

“It's a split right now. We have both humans, but then, you know, agents, AI can help us also prioritize the right conversations and ensure that they're getting some touch.”

“And it's exhausting because now it's eight hours a day instead of 20 to 30. We are at our limits. We cannot do any more.”

“What's changed is the agents have so much context. They're aware of so much that every single day when you log in, especially with you, when you log in with 10 K now our AI VP of revenue, it has new things that wants to build and do. It's not a software tool. …”

“When an agent can only do a task, you check the task, but when an agent can decide things, you need an opinion about every decision it makes, and it makes a lot of them, and some of them it doesn't even tell you about.”

“The agent made the call for a heat map vendor We'd never heard of, and we didn't even need to do more diligence. You trusted the agent. Someone lost a 50, 20, a twenty-k deal out there to an agent, and you, they were never, and this paid vet, this other, this …”

“I took all the crits, all the feedback that we've given over the last couple of years, right? These like Zoom meetings or raw notes, we just dumped it in a database, right? Gave it to an agent and said, look, from here on out, before we even get to those revie…”

“The reality is agents are going to come into our lives, like for every business, much faster than I think we're going to be able to build up a population of people that know how to build them.”

“The thing about headless is it also makes it much easier to bifurcate our data and put some into outside of the system of record and some in because the agent, the headless version of your CRM or SFA or system of record, well, it has no problem up to a point p…”

“In CX and support if I'm talking to an agent on someone's website as a potential customer and that agent keeps me forever, I might not need, there may be no need for the CRM or CX system or SFA that undermined it. Used to underlie that interaction because the …”

“You're going to lose in the vendor war if you're not the one that not just is recommended in AO, but where the agent says, I will just do it with this API.”

“People are going to make mistakes more than agents if we build our agents with the right guardrails around it. And so our belief is that actually we'll make fewer mistakes in an agentic world We'll tell people what the right solution is. We'll keep, take more …”

“I think the complexity is going to go up in order of magnitude when these agents are out.”

“Atlassian just launched. They finally were able to really monetize their AI agent and it's crushed their stocks up.”

“So we're seeing a lot of pull towards agentic solution, but also caution because they are not willing to kind of cede control completely to agents for their core infrastructure and core security systems.”

“I do still believe that, like, AI agents are not that good today actually at doing something that is very relationship driven. But they're getting much better at it, right? So, like, the problem is when you look at LLMs, they look at the distribution site, and…”