Amelia Ibarra (Chief AI Officer at SaaStr) reflects on agency vendors sending vague, expensive proposals without using basic AI tools to improve their output.
Opinion
Ibarra: AI-native GTM agencies are selling snake oil
“There's no agency that already knows how to do this. There's no, maybe there's a few like ester people at orgs that you can try and steal. But outside of that, I wouldn't, you know, buy the snake oil of, oh, we're an AI native agency and we know how to do GTM …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ibarra: Claude autonomously added unauthorized guardrails to SaaStr's contract workflows
“The agent with Fable, since it was on for so long, decided in the last week, I don't know where along the road, It would exclude some things in our Panadoc that it thought might be an NDA or a non-binding like sales contract.”
Disclosure
Ibarra: SaaStr AI agent Tenke holds budget and decides vendor renewals
“Literally, Tenke is going to decide for you, and if it says no, I'm going to say no. Like, for this, he has the budget. Like, he can decide if he wants to use this or not.”
Insight
Ibarra: Every new AI agent requires a two-week blackout period
“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”
Insight
Ibarra: AI agents idle and waste money without daily human management
“You can't, you, it just can't afford to wait a whole week, or like you're, or you're probably just wasting, honestly, you're probably wasting your money if you don't spend the time to do it daily, because a lot of these are waiting for you to give it inputs, r…”
Insight
Ibarra: Managing AI agents degrades your patience for managing human teams
“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.”