Sep 23, 2025 · 53m · saastr
SaaStr's Top 10+ AI Agents: AI SDR, AI BDR, AI RevOps + More: The How, The Who, The Why
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Jason Lemkin and Amelia outline SaaStr's operational journey deploying roughly 20 AI agents across outbound sales, inbound qualification, RevOps, and custom internal workflows. They provide practical playbooks for automating go-to-market execution, eliminating customer friction, and achieving eight-figure revenue leverage with a single-digit team headcount.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Jason holds 43.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 6.1 Guest teaching 3.5 Guest disagreement 0.1 Jason pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:40 Amelia gently corrects ingestion frequency assumption
Amelia pushes back on Jason's assumption of daily syncs, clarifying that weekly sync is sufficient and less overwhelming for their workflow.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 20:05 Jason challenges automated ingestion capabilitiesJason presses on whether Artisan natively pulls CRM data automatically like Delphi does or still requires manual CSV engineering.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 13:00 Amelia educates on technical SDR prerequisitesAmelia educates listeners and the host on mailbox warmup requirements, domain protection, and CSV ingestion timelines for AI SDR platforms.
Jason holds their own ▶ 24:38 Jason lays down the law on vendor sales frictionJason forcefully demonstrates his go-to-market expertise by diagnosing why buyers reject vendors whose sales reps argue with prospects.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event Announcement: SaaStr AI London Conference | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory monologue, sponsor ad read, and SaaStr London event promo. No substantive guest interaction takes place. | |
| Instant Response vs. 24-Hour Delays: Delphi Example | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jason sets the stage with SaaStr's AI adoption timeline, contrasting instant Delphi AI responses with 24-hour response times. | |
| Deep Dive: Outbound AI SDR with Artisan | 6 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Amelia breaks down Artisan's warm outbound architecture and mailbox warmup constraints, while Jason drills into data source integration. | |
| Artisan Backend Demo: Workflow, Queues, and Prompt Tuning | 6 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Amelia demonstrates Artisan's live backend queue, response metrics, and prompt tuning. Jason queries the response rates and automated ingestion limits. | |
| Selecting AI Vendors and Eliminating Friction in Sales | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Jason shares strategic advice on vendor onboarding, warning founders to immediately drop vendors whose sales reps fight prospects. | |
| Inbound AI BDR: Implementing Qualified to Replace Static Forms | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Amelia explains why Delphi failed at inbound sales qualification and details how Qualified (Piper) replaces static forms with CRM-connected intelligence. | |
| Qualified Use Cases: Automated Bookings, Group Sales, and High Conversion | 7 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Amelia explains automated meeting booking, discount triggers, and group ticket handling, while Jason underscores the power of tracking repeat site visitors. | |
| Live Backend Demo: Qualified Real-Time Monitoring and Rep Pouncing | 7 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Amelia showcases the real-time 'pounce' feature in Qualified for high-ASP sponsorship leads, followed by Jason summarizing the meta-learnings on AI deployment. | |
| Dynamic Sales Collateral Generation with Gamma | 6 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Amelia and Jason detail how Gamma dynamically turns 100-page static sponsorship prospectuses into custom 10-minute decks that buyers pass internally. | |
| AI RevOps: Automating Salesforce and Call Insights with Momentum and Attention | 5 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Amelia details RevOps automation with Momentum and Attention, capturing call objections, contact creation, and stage movements in Salesforce automatically. | |
| Vibe Coding Custom AI: Replacing Agencies with Replit Speaker Review Agent | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jason explains vibe coding a Replit agent to replace a $15k/month agency tasked with reviewing thousands of speaker submissions. | |
| Custom AI Portfolio and the 'Buy Before Build' Rule | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Jason outlines their custom app portfolio and emphasizes the strict rule of buying off-the-shelf software before attempting to build custom agents. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Lemkin: SaaStr gets top results among all Artisan and Qualified customers
“On two of the ones we use artisan for outbound and qualified for inbound of all their customers, this is the most important thing. We're the number one vendor. Number one results.”
Lemkin: AI agents are not 'set and forget' in 2025
“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.”
Lemkin: SaaStr's Delphi AI agent has conducted over 100,000 conversations
“We use an app called Delphi to do an AI agent on Sastr. We've done over a 100,000 conversations.”
Lemkin: No excuse for lacking instant AI customer interactions in 2025
“There's no excuse to not have extremely high quality customer interactions instantly through AI in twenty-twenty-five.”
Lemkin: SaaStr generates eight figures in revenue with single-digit headcount
“You know, our organization is tiny, but you know, Sasser does do eight figures in revenue with a tiny team. So it's interesting to track us because we have a single digit amount of headcount doing eight figures of revenue.”
Lemkin: B2B companies should buy off-the-shelf software rather than build custom AI
“The main learning is only do this if you can't buy it from 99% of you. Like it's cool, but we did this for content review and other things, and we'll show you where there is no off the shelf app, but don't roll your own. Buy, buy, don't build, right? Use for B…”
Lemkin: AI agent success depends on daily deep training, not vendor choice
“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…”
Lerutte: SaaStr's AI SDR sent 15,000 messages in 100 days
“So in the last hundred days,
It's done about 15,000 messages.”
Lerutte: Every AI SDR platform requires two weeks for domain warmup
“So every AISDR platform I talk to needs this two week warm up.
So that's part of it. It's going to spend time just warming up those domains and mailboxes for you.”
Lerutte: Artisan CEO says average platform response rate is 2% to 4%
“Five percent, you know, Jasper and Arzen, who's the CEO, has said like, average is like two to four.”
Lerutte: Artisan plans to automate campaign pitch ingestion by year-end
“I do know Jasper from artisan says that's coming by end of year, but right now you just put it in yourself, you know, pick the best pain points, improve points.”
Lemkin: Choose AI vendors based on onboarding confidence, not best demo
“I would almost pick that vendor. The one that you have the most confidence you can onboard on, not the smooth, smoothest deck or sales process or best demo.”
Lemkin: SaaStr passed on two leading vendors due to combative sales reps
“And I can tell you there's at least two leading vendors that we said no to, not because the software is not good enough, but because the sales team fought us, they didn't know the product.”
Lerutte: Most users who query Jason Lemkin's Delphi AI become repeat users
“When we looked at the data, most people come back to it. So they'll actually ask Jason's AI a question.”
Lerutte: SaaStr's average sponsorship selling price is approximately $85,000
“Our ASP for tickets, yes, it's a couple hundred bucks for London, slightly more for South for annual, but our ASP for sponsorships is probably 85 K.”
Lemkin: Real-time 90% AI answers beat waiting a day for humans
“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.”
Lemkin: SaaStr runs 20 AI agents, with 11 core tools
“So my point is, listen, we started with one and now we have 20, right? And 11 core ones.”
Lerutte: Tailored sales decks save buyers from creating internal pitch decks
“Send them a either pre or post sale, highly customized deck. They can share it around. Like a lot of the times we do these decks now and send to folks, they, the number one response I surprisingly get is like, oh, I was going to have to actually do that myself…”
Lerutte: SaaStr had almost no Salesforce call notes before implementing AI
“We didn't have any call notes in our Salesforce prior to this. Like we just had like loose information. Like if there was a close one deal, it was in Salesforce. Otherwise it was pretty much not in there, which means it did not exist.”
Lemkin: SaaStr paid an agency $15,000 monthly to review speaker submissions
“And so what we did until through last year was we hired an agency. They worked for three years. We paid them about 15,000 dollars a month or more. And part of their job was to review all these inbounds”