SaaStr 803: AI, Sales + GTM in 2025/2026: This Really Changes Everything with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin and Owner CRO Kyle Norton

26:10You're going to see these silly silos where it's broken and things aren't communicated across and we're trying to avoid that. Yeah, I think it's a niche. We'll see. I don't have any passion on this, But I think by the end of next year, a point that everyone from Yamini, Rangan, everyone's agreed is all through the dawn of time, we've added better and better tooling. We added sales loft and outreach and gone. But sales reps still close the same three to five. They're closing three to five times their OTE. They're closing 500K, 400, 800, whatever. I think AI is not only going to boost that up, like your point.

26:42I actually think what's going to happen because of attribution is commissions are going to have by the end of next year. Yeah. Because this is how the math is going to work. You're going to get credit for the, it's not just PLG. You're going to get credit for Kyle's AI closing the deal without you. Yeah. Okay. But if that doubles the output of your org, inherently, instead of whatever you take on 10 % overall, 15, it's going to be five, but you get everything. Whatever your patch is, team, but I think commissions will have to have as part of this. Definitely. Yeah. I think where there will be some pressure the other way is for the best sellers.

27:14If you have an elite mid-market and enterprise seller, they will have so much more leverage with all of these tools that the competitive dynamic will say, that seller was worth$350K to me before, but now look at what they're going to produce. I'll pay$500K for that person to pull them from somewhere else. The best might make more, right? One way or the other, the best might make more, right? I think so. And then let's go on to the next point. Okay, so you're developing an elite team. You work so hard to recruit the best. That's why you're here. You're here to help the team, but you're also here so people see you.

27:47They're constantly, as we've written since Sastras at the beginning, like most of the best CRs, you're constantly recruiting one way or the other, right? What about the guys we just talked about? The one that said Sastras next week. Do they honestly, between us, do they have a job next year in this new world? Do they have a job? That mediocre rep working 15 hours a week from home with three side hustles, mostly working on their ADU and their Airbnb. This was everyone in 2021. one. Do they have a job? I don't think they have a job next year. I think most, I think they're going to quickly lose all, and they're not going, and I don't think they're going to step up and become AI experts.

28:21I don't think they're going to go to your class at Pavilion and the next week wake up and be like, okay, I want to work 50 hours a week on this AI enabled sales life. What's going to happen to these, to the others? I think you're right. Yeah. Would I make a hundred thousand dollar bet on it? Like you, I'll give you, I'll give you four to one. And if you just closed a billion dollar fundraising, I won't give you 10 to 1. I might give you 10 to 1 if you want. So I agree with you very much. I think AI will contribute much more to elite performers. And there's some research. I can't remember where it came from, but there's a bunch of research that showed that AI for call center teams raised the floor significantly.

28:58And most of the gains were attributed to the lowest performing individuals. It brought low performers up to a better standard. But in the world of PhD research, AI was actually making the best researchers even better. So the gains were going to the most sophisticated people in that craft. I think in many parts of sales, you'll see the best get better and there become an even bigger bifurcation. And if you're doing the side hustle thing and you want to work 20, 30 hours a week, yeah, it's going to be really tough. Yeah. To survive. one of one of the i've known him for a long time one of the best sale and i see sales i see i've known for years right emailed me this week while i was here if i could be a little saster hey jason i'm looking for my next role got any good ideas and i even on the back have you gone to the saster fund website do you even know what companies like owner i'm working with is now i haven't done that if it was two years ago i'd find him a job today i i just think it's hopeless i just think it's This is a guy who's had multiple roles where he was in the top 10%, right?

29:59But he's running that playbook. He's always worked from home in shorts, okay, since the very beginning. Now it's a Harry Stebbins vibe, okay? But back then I was like, I remember when he was hired back then, I'm like, we can't hire a guy that works from home in shorts, but he crushed it. Yeah. He crushed it. But man, that wasn't enough effort, was it? Emailing me in the middle of Sastor, didn't even know what's going on, and just said, hey, dude, I'm looking for a job. Didn't even know what I'm involved with. Yeah, that's tough. He ain't going to, this guy is, but my point is he was great. I don't think he's going to make the jump.

30:26I don't think he's going to make the jump. Without knowing him, I definitely lean in your direction. It's, it is going to be a very difficult market to survive in if you aren't still in a career stage where you are out there trying to figure out the next thing. Yeah. We haven't gone through this big of a dislocation since the beginning of the AI acceleration tool era. and I was super early. I was like one of the first sales loft cadence customers. Kyle Porter onboarded me himself and we got like a 5x leverage on a per BDR basis. The BDR team I inherited was like a dumpster fire. But all we had to do was some better training and we gave them this tool that nobody else was using and we still used that like predictable revenue playbook.

31:11Yeah. Hey, I'm looking for the person that does this and people would respond to that email and tell you the person and then you forward it. That obviously doesn't work anymore but the competitive advantage we got then was so significant that it changed the trajectory of companies and the same thing as with AI. You're going to win or you're going to adapt and build a competitive advantage or it's going to be really painful. And some of this will be competed away because everybody's going to do it. And so thinking about how to do it most thoughtfully and be ahead of the curve, things have never been more difficult, I think.

31:46Yeah. So this one, I think we hit the slide, But feel free to add on top of it. This is Zesha's site from Gorgeous. We talked about it. They've got 20 ,000 more and more AI-driven contact centers in e-commerce in the Shopify ecosystem that Kyle knows. And this is them and their competitors. I've blocked out the names, but you don't know who it is. So there's Zendesk, Intercom, others in there. And this was from a couple months ago, so it's already changed. But I'm colorblind. But the bar charts are what everyone says AI does. All their marketing sites say 60%. And these were the actual numbers based on a third-party study they paid for, okay?

32:19So on the one end, you can see that there's a delta between the marketing claims and reality, but none of them are zero. And so what we're already seeing in the contact center is, yes, some of the claims are a little aggressive, right? But folks are laying off 25%, 30 % of their teams, not just to save money, but because the AI is better. And the AI is always in the top 10 % of CSAT. It's never number one. It's never the best. and we can mock this and we say, that's because it's doing easy issues, right? But who cares? Who cares if Digital Kyle solves my freaking problem because I got the wrong watch when I ordered it online?

32:56Who cares? But this is disruptive. And I think in the end of next year, maybe when we're here next year, this is going to start to happen to sales and we're going to see an owner, it's only 10 % because everything's a demo. But at Gorgeous where you don't need a demo because most folks self-serve, half of it is done by AI. I think we're going to see charts like this next year for sales. 100 yeah then i think where you see people are going wrong right now they go oh it's not good enough to do x and y today so they're like not investing so we use much we hear that so we use crescendo for support automation in the first couple months yeah we're like you know you're you expect ai is going to be this like miraculous thing and it was like okay but our knowledge base was crappy at the time yeah and it would be really easy to be like oh i don't know it's not worth it But then every week we produce four to 10 new knowledge base articles and that AI containment, that bot containment rate jumps 3%, 4%, 6%.

33:55And now like almost 50 % of our tier one support tickets are AI contained. And it wasn't easy. And AI made us realize some deficiencies in how we were managing support. And so you just have to be betting on the future. Because that will, so it's 50 % of tier one. It'll be 80 % of tier one soon. And it's going to eat a bunch of tier two. And then what we use real support people for will be like very sophisticated stuff that you need more highly trained folks for. So I think you're going to see that everywhere. So you started, and then I'll tie this to what I learned from our AI. And then Dara from Delphi's app is going to explain how it really works.

34:33So you started with tool. You didn't upload enough of your documentation. We uploaded everything. We realized that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough, right? It didn't just magically work out of the box. So you added more. Did you do QA? Did you see mistakes and update and interact? Yeah. Every day? Every week, there's a QA meeting with Crescendo and their team. and we go through what needed to be escalated to a person and why and should that have been bot contained. We go, oh, there's nothing in the knowledge base that explains how this is done, even though our support team might know how to do it.

35:04So then - But then they just go out to training every week. Yeah, and then we're using AI to create that information. It just gets better, right? Yeah, through Guru. So we looked at a bunch of knowledge base AI stuff and ended up using Guru's AI solution. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, Rick's been doing this since the beginning. Super smart, the CEO. Yeah, and that's a great example of a company who could have been massively disrupted, but they went all in really fast. And we looked at a bunch of comparative things and we're like, oh, the best tool is the one we have. We just need to turn it on. And so now when there's answers in Slack, it pulls that into a knowledge-based suggestion.

35:35We do a quick, the knowledge team does a quick edit, clicks publish, it's in the knowledge base. It gets picked up on the crescendo side. And so there's this flywheel now of issue identification, content creation, deployment, and that loop is fast. Yeah. For us and Kyle's stories, but just to tie it together, if you go to try RAI, it's on sastra.com in the chat bubble or in the middle of the homepage. And you can see it here. It's trained. I took about a day to train it on 17.8 million words of content. And it was pretty good. And already it was great because maybe it had more content than your knowledge base.

36:08It has 12 years of sastra content, very specific. And then once in a while, then I read as many of them as I can. And once in a while, I tell you what I learned, specifically the mistakes it makes. And it's not that many. It makes a mistake. So I, and I enjoy it. I like it like you did. I like this stuff, right? So when I'm having my second cup of coffee in the morning, I see what the handful of mistakes it makes a couple percent. And I just go and I change it. It's literally, I don't even need a team. I do it in two minutes. The only real hallucination it did, and it is interesting, is for Sastra Europe, it kept telling everybody the wrong date for this year.

36:40And why did it do it? We have, and maybe Derek can explain to us how the ragging and vagging and vectoring works, but we've been doing this since 2017, but we didn't publish the date online. So it was guessing. Yeah. And it kept guessing. And it didn't guess the same, which is interesting. Sometimes it would say, we'll see you in London in September. Sometimes it would say June because we've had it at different dates. And I saw it a couple times. So I go and there's literally a train thing. It took me five seconds. And I said, the question is, when's to ask Europa? I said, we're having Christmas in London, first week of December.

37:08And the next day, next time, so it's just keep doing, improving it. This is the thing people don't get if you haven't done it. If your AI is great out of the box, great. Okay. If it does 20 % of things, that's a lot better than zero. But just improve it. Pick a fucking platform. It doesn't actually matter if it's Guru or Crescendo or doesn't matter. And just commit to making it better every week. And you'll be shocked where it does in eight weeks, right? Eight weeks, it'll be so much better. And I don't know if I blame the vendors for this or the buyers, but everybody expects it to just work out of the box.

37:41That's the air. This magical, miraculous thing. No, it's hard work. And we had the advantage at owner of being a very disciplined documentation culture. And so we use this company called Avara as an AI sales simulator. Now it's an AI sales coach. But I write a lot. And because we're a remote company, and I want everybody to have written documentation of all the things that we want to teach you. And so when we got stood up with it, it very quickly did a pretty great job of mimicking not a generic challenger style or saying, I know this is my methodology that I've created over the years because it's all written.

38:19But that's really hard work. And we have the advantage that it was already done. But I think the buyers of these tools need to understand that you need to go do a bunch of the foundation work to create the content and tweak it every single day, every single week. Like I'm in the one mind sim, like on every other day, just doing sims and filling up the spreadsheet. It's not easy, but the leverage is so significant. I know that every hour I spend there, the incremental leverage of now this thing getting in front of thousands of website visitors every single week. You got to do the work. None of it's magic.

38:59This is, yeah, people, some of it to the prior slide is vendors over promising. Let's be clear. But last, SASTR annual last one was not a year ago. It was only in September. And everyone laughed about AISDRs, okay? Tomas Tungus came and said he did this survey and no one could get them to work. I didn't have an opinion, but I did it on our LinkedIn poll. We had 3 ,000 folks. Only 2 % folks said they get the AISDRs to work. And so I'm all in, but I missed the point. I missed the point that fast-order-to-day SDRs do work. In fact, the stories I just told, Yamani said she responded to two AISDRs.

39:31It's just, you got to know what the tool can do. And every month it's going to get better, but expecting that the lazy approach to AI is also death. The lazy, oh, I'm going to hire an agency to do AIS-TRs. I'm going to just hire a clay agency and I'm done. That's where you're also going to get slaughtered. You got to be in it all the time, maybe forever. We're going to be, we have to be, how we train our AIs in two years is probably nothing like today, but we're still going to be training them. Yeah. And maybe our AIs will train our AIs. And you'll be at some point managing a bunch of people and a bunch of agents.

40:02But that's real work. Yeah. It's a different type of work, but it needs to happen. Okay, we won't get through all of this, but I want to hear you as a case study on a few of the points that I've made in the past. This one that folks can't see, but I said, not everyone has the quality of team of owner, but I said AI, for us, this is what I learned from our AI, is already better than almost any BDR I've talked to in terms of qualification. The average kid coming out of one year of school that doesn't know how to spell owner, that has done no research, that doesn't happen in owner, but man, it happens.

40:32it happens elsewhere that can't answer any of my questions like it's better so what i did for us is we have this prospectus for the sponsors here it's public facing but then we have this document 100 pages that amelia's developed on everything how can i get ice cream in my booth how big what's the artwork look like what's the dpi what is it right on our little team of three they don't know the answer right yeah i stuck it in rai through delphi and the next day i could answer all the questions and it started and then it answered all the related questions and then to answer the question, what's the difference between a silver booth and a gold booth and a bronze?

41:04And then all of a sudden it was better than any human because there's too much detail. That amount of detail, you cannot, you don't expect so many humans to know what's the size of the ice cream cone I can have in a silver booth and what time do I have to show up and how many leads will I get? And it said, on average, you get 218 leads for your type of person. So I'm like, I've never met a BDR this good. And I think, so my view and challenge this, I think the mediocre BDR in a year will be out of business. I don't think we'll need any of these BDRs that when you reach out, I think a website should be, an AI should be able to qualify.

41:34And no one likes to be qualified. Yeah. I hate being, I can smell the qualification, can't you? Oh yeah. It smells smarmy. So I just don't see the need at all for this qualified, not outbound, but this qualifying BDR very much in the future. I think for a ton of markets, that's very true. I think there's some niche cases where you have a prospect that really wants to talk to a person. And for us, it's going to be really interesting to see the pickup rate of our one mind superhuman with a restaurant buyer that is not very technology savvy. Yeah. And I would, I'm hoping to be proven wrong and people to love and cause it's AI Adam.

42:13That's the thing we've trained it to. I think they're, I think they're going to love it. I love AI. And I know it's tech focused, but we've had a, they love AI Jason better than me. And so I think for, I think for. At least by volume. You can't remember every single thing you've ever written. It's impossible. And so I think for most markets, this is very true. I think the SE thing is a great use case. You have these AI SEs that can join a Zoom call, answer questions when you're called upon. I think there's a bunch that's going to be really compelling. But then there are the solutions engineers that are great at asking the really incisive business questions and have worked with a bunch of similar customers and there will be value.

42:54But again, it's the best will still have a place and anybody that's punching a clock. Yeah. Like, why wouldn't this be better? Yeah. The other thing, what everyone, again, and then I just want to pick one related thing to get your thoughts on. This is one of my top learnings from our AI from these conversations is that people, and for a lot of reasons, will prefer to talk to a great AI. If it's mediocre, no one wants to talk to a bot. I think bot, people still use this term bot. I would banish it because bot is like IVR. It just has negative. Maybe Dara will disagree. I just think for me, it has negative connotations.

43:27The last thing I want to do when I'm ready to buy is be forced to talk to a crappy bot. Okay. But when RA is so good, it's like, great. Thank you so much. You're awesome. Thanks for doing people. This is to an AI. You're awesome. Thanks for doing what you're doing. You don't say that to a bot. Do you? No, you're awesome. Again, thank you. Great help. Thank you. I would rather, especially when I'm working at 6 p.m., especially when I don't want to wait to get scheduled. I would rather talk to this S tier AI and it knows the product cold. So I want your thoughts in general, but there's a specific bit of hubris that many folks in sales have.

44:03So many. I'm a people person, Kyle, and people like to talk to people. Now, people like to talk to the best solution architect in the world that also deployed my product, even if we don't even use it at owner, that also helped me get going at my buddy down the street. And this is David and he did it. I want to talk to David. But this idea that you can be a people person and not be a product savant and technology. I just don't care that you know who won the NBA finals. Hey, buddy. Like that. People think they're people person in sales and I think they're lazy and they're schmoozers and I don't think it's going to work in the age of AI.

44:39We're going to find out. Do you think being a people person and not knowing owner helps you close a deal? No, no, absolutely not. But most salespeople think that, don't they? They're great people persons? Many do. Many do. And a challenger would tell you, the challenger sales book will tell you that profile is actually one of the worst performing profiles out there. And what is the best performing profile? It's the challenger, somebody who can teach, tailor, and take control. Teach means you know the market, you know the product, tailor, I can really listen to you. I can do both. The third one's take control.

45:10You can do that too. Yeah. I think you can do the best, first two better than 90 % of humans going to that first point from if you build it the right way i think you've had great help building this i had almost no help amazing i appreciate the team that's what i mean i had an hour of help really this is the point people are missing the delphi team did wasn't they i had listen i was a little frustrated at the time in all fairness i got about an hour of help just because i had a little trouble with the ingestion okay i got no help after that maybe in the background i got a little i've done it wow i talked to people they're like yeah i hired this aid i'm like i did it listen i'm a little tech savvy but i haven't pulled up my python coding okay i'm not using i love windsurf i'm not using it i do it not knowing on the team what good for delphi that's a great yeah but all the tools in delphi is cool but all the tools should be this good there's no excuse in 2025 there's no excuse they're definitely not this is i think a lot of sales tools are not as good as windsurf and they should be yeah when sales tool this is my view the only reason sales tools aren't as good as windsurf is because varoon isn't building a lot of them yeah okay i just think and there's no criticism i love everyone that's here there aren't enough s-tier founders if it if a bunch of s-tier like the best in the world said you know what we're gonna build an ae not all the other stuff not discovery analysis sentiment yeah i'm actually gonna go further kyle we're gonna build you and me are gonna have the three best engineers out of open AI and windsurf and we're going to build a complete AE, not a partial AE.

46:41I think we could do it and I think it's possible today because it's possible in windsurf. GTM tech oftentimes doesn't attract those founders because it's so competitive and people don't want to invest in it. Go be that one. Be the windsurf of your category. You will run away, I think. I agree. I very much agree with that. Maybe owners a little bit of that. A little bit of that in restaurants, a little bit. Yeah, I think there's a one of the challenges that so many of my CRO friends have is trying to figure out who to choose. And there's so many okay products that are a great demo, but a really bad implementation.

47:18And there's 1000 people in every single category. And so you got this sort of paralysis. And so you have to be quite good at picking these early stage winners. If you want to be early, it means you're partnering with really young companies. And I've had the advantage of doing a bunch of angel and being involved in some venture funds and following it very closely. So I've been able to take my founder radar and apply it to the vendors I'm choosing. And so I'm choosing founders that have that like A plus upside that have a really sharp opinion on the market and have probably done it before. And so I've made some pretty good bets.

47:52Like Momentum is winning in their category. Avara, like they're ripping, like shipping product at a ridiculous rate. and I think that's a big reason we've been successful is because we've chosen good tools and I see a lot of people choosing this like the most random things coming out of it. Yeah, for sure. It's complicated. Our AI gets this question a lot. What should I use? Yeah. Because it is confusing. My meta advice is when the world's changing, copy someone you respect, whoever it is. It doesn't need to be that stack. It could be it, but talk to someone you respect, copy it, and then go in with five but measured expectations.

48:25go in and do not expect magic but do not expect it to be magical immediately you're this is a commitment whatever tool you pick guru delphi whatever tool artisan which is very cool all of them ampark and then every week you got to invest yeah you have to invest for real and you and this is going to make zeros and zeros have to be much more technical not engineers but much more technical you're going to and then every whatever platform you pick is still immature today it's still immature, but invest in it, improve it each week. And then the magic is going to your point. If you have a high velocity team, the product itself will get better every month.

49:01It's small, but with Delphi, like when we launched this two months ago, it couldn't ingest PDFs, okay? For whatever reasons. Then it added it. And now founders have uploaded like hundreds of decks for VC. Give me feedback on my board slides. Give me feedback. I didn't have to write a lot, do anything. It just added it, right? So if you invest in a platform and the team is high velocity every month it will get better too but you got to pick one and expect like you'll get half of what you hoped right it halves a lot and you have to be really committed to making it work you got to put the resources behind it and as a cro like you have to consistently push people on it the amount of times i have said in slack use momentum for that yeah somebody will be talking about oh we audited 20 calls to see if people are doing i'm like what are you doing use momentum you can just write a prompt run it on every single call that ever happens stuff into a salesforce field get a Slack notification.

49:49And so I've pushed it so hard on so many things. Now the muscle is there for people to be, to have an idea and go, Oh, like, I'm just going to talk about Rebofs and building that into momentum. It takes 20 minutes. Yeah. To do. And so you have to put in the work to set it up right and tune it, but then also consistently push adoption down to your folks. The other thing I'll say about picking vendors is push for pilots, push for somebody to show you that this thing actually works. It's not always possible. Why not? Why isn't it possible? I mean, yet there's training, but I'm with you. I agree with you.

50:23Push for pilots. I don't mean to be a grouch, but if you can't get a pilot, this is just me. I'm being a little, but I mean it. I'm not being, I wouldn't buy the product. Yeah. There's exceptions. There's exceptions, but it says something if you can't get a pilot, isn't it? That it's hard to deploy. We didn't do a pilot with one mind because there is so much in the implementation. We've put a lot of effort into it. And so I understand why a pilot wouldn't have made sense for that use case because it's trying to do so much. It's plugging into all of these tools we have. But basically everything else I said, this is great.

50:55I'm happy to pilot, but I'm not making any commitments up front. And 90 % of the time you'll get that. Back channel hard, tell me about some customers, and then go talk to them and get the real feedback. You've got to be really choiceful because you've got to waste a lot of time with the wrong tool. Yep. All right. I want to dig into one or two things for a run of time. We talked about these one to two call closes. You thought it might be 10%, but now you're starting to agree with me. It might be 50 % as we go on. It's on the time horizon. It will be 50%. Is that in six months, 12 months, 24 months, it is an eventuality.

51:26Yeah. Let me ask you about this point. I actually didn't realize it on the slide. I think it's actually the third one I'm colorblind in yellow or green or whatever it is. I said CROs and CROs, but I also mean RevOps. I think this year to be a RevOps professional, imminently in a CRO by the end of this year, you will have to know how to manage a 50-50 team. 50 % AI, 50 % human. Not just tools, but you will have to learn how to manage agents, agents, AIs, whether that's training, whether that's whatever. Your team, your extended team, this is PLG 2.0 on steroids, right? Your team may be half AI, half humans, or it doesn't matter if it's 2080 or 3070, right?

52:09Your team will, as soon as it's double digits, you better know how to manage this hybrid team of humans and AIs. It sounded crazy a couple months ago. I think you're going to have to know this year. Will the CRO need to do that? I'm not sure. How much of this can you have in your RevOps team? And it's, okay, we have these three strategies. This is what's happening. And the agent management is going to happen somewhere. This is why we're hiring this GTMAI lead. because there's a bunch of things that I want to do that I'm tinkering with and we're doing in RevOps, but I want somebody to own this.

52:40And so is all of the agent management happen? Can we put that in one function because they will do it so well that there will be so much more leverage? We're going to find, I'm actively trying to answer this question. I mean, I hope so. My worry though is if the CRO or VP of sales job is to hire Jeanette, that is my AI RevOps person, that to me feels like a CRO that's never done outbound hiring Mr. Outbound. I've written about like the 100 % failure rate, new VP of sales CRO comes in, only done inbound, only done whenever. I'm like, oh my God, I got to do outbound. I'm going to go find a director of outbound that then hires 11 SDRs off the street in one week and it never works.

53:19If it's not your core competence, super hard to do it out of the gate. So if it's, I hear you, you're the best of the best, but the next CRO I interview, I'm going to ask, how are you going to manage a team that's 25 % AI and 75 %? And if his answer is, I'm going to go, I'm going to find an AI guru. I think I'm going to tell the CEO not to hide. That's a fair point. Yeah. And maybe it's semantics. There's a bunch of my personal workflows that are all, and we're saying anything AI is an agent now. I have a different definition of agent, but we don't need to get into. But yeah, a lot of my job is done through AI.

53:54So am I managing agents today? Sure, you could call it that. But I think the point remains, A lot of your job is going to be through AI workflows and agentic services and managing all of these tools. A lot of my job is managing the system and infrastructure of our business anyways. And so the same thing called by another name. I think the point is you need to be a highly systems engineering focused CRO to survive over the next two to five to 10 years. If you don't have the acumen to be able to understand how customer journey connects to systems and infrastructure and connects to the rep process and how this whole orchestration works, you will greatly struggle.

54:40Because you can't win on, oh, I'm a great sales guy and I'm a good manager and people like me. I'm a good manager, people like me. That version of a CRO will not survive in this era. You need to be able to think in systems. Maybe the Pollyanna version is, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe what happens is another possible outcome in some cases is the CRO's role just shrinks. So imagine for your revenue in a year, 40 % sold, closed by an AI salesperson, and 60 % is by the sales team. Maybe instead of the CRO having to be an expert like we want, maybe their role just shrinks. And certainly in the B2C side, you've seen some of it at Shopify or at the low end of owner.

55:20In some ways that happened because marketing does much more and more of it. In the B2C side, if marketing can just run the campaign and close the deal, there's no salesperson involved, right? So maybe they don't become dinosaurs. It's just they become... But even that's a hopeful view, right? Is that a dated skill set just gets shrunk. But I think you're going to have to manage your AI team and your human team. Yeah, I agree. Which is different than a tool. It's harder than a tool to manage an AI team and a human team, right? There will be a bifurcation of outcomes. I think if you don't become AI native really quickly, your role will shrink.

55:51And then this will get done elsewhere. if you can become AI native, then your role as a CRO will contain that. I spent a lot of time on PLG. I spent a lot of time on this whole thing. So my role has grown, if anything. There's more things that I... It's grown, right? But I'm super early on it and I'm making it a big focus. Okay, last one. We touched on all this other stuff. It was great. This is my view that people think is kooky. I don't think it's kooky anymore. That maybe you're even going to pilot this. Maybe you hit it with Amanda's product, which is in the next X months, it's not everyone's got a friggin note taker a granola genola otter we do these workshop wednesday the sassers there's 200 note takers right i give up right i don't view that as and they're sales focused note takers and it helps right i think a digital se like this is brian halligan's digital one on delphi is going to come to the zooms yeah why wouldn't it the human it's a person is gonna be there and i brought this up and darryl said give me another release and this will be full duplex.

56:49Like my AI and Brian's can talk together, but this person is going to be there, should be there on all the Zooms, at least as an SE. Yeah. Like as good as you, like you're going to have Digital Adam, the CEO. Digital Kyle should be here. That is you, but better because you know everything in the product. This human-like version should show up. I think this is soon and will change the whole way we do Zooms and sales. This is very much on my roadmap. You're doing this, right? Not a note taker, not someone to send a chat, literally a human-like person that we're not pretending isn't an AI, but is better than a human as an SE, right?

57:24Yeah. And can be activated when called upon and also proactively jump in. What I would like is when a sales rep says something that's incorrect, the AI goes, actually, the integration isn't like this, it's like that. That's what I think is going to happen. But for what it's worth, and then we'll break. I don't think it's going to be proactive. I think this only works if they're on every call. Yeah. Oh, they'll be on every call. Every call. And they listen. And then you ask Kyle, Well, actually, I'm confused how our POS integration works. And Digital Brian jumps in. This is exactly how it works.

57:52And it's a little digital, but it's better than a human. But I don't think that a rep will even get to choose. It will be on every one, like a note taker. Absolutely. The rep will not be choosing it on or it will be there. You're the best. We'll dig on this more in the coming months. Thanks, my friend. Thank you for having me. Thanks, everybody.

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