Just want to highlight one element in particular that jumped out at me:

"AI has nothing personal at stake. It doesn't feel the pressure of missing quota or the exhilaration of exceeding it. It doesn't have a mortgage payment riding on that commission check."

So the AI doesn't manipulate power dynamics to control its employees... and that's a bad thing? Okay. (It isn't true anyway; AI can easily do that.)

This has scary implications if extrapolated out to extremes, because a sufficiently advanced AI would do exactly what you’re describing, manipulate power dynamics to get to a superficial outcome.

Glossing over the whole AI thing... Maybe we shouldn't be structuring our systems so that the humans are one bad quarter away from financial ruin either

As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.

For a successful career, is it better for one to prioritize network over skills? It seems to me that the latter can be commoditized by AI, while the former can not. Rather than learning Lisp, maybe it's time to pick up golf. I'm only half joking. Someone please tell me I'm wrong.

Seems like a more reasonable path to me; more logic and less bullshit at the core, keep human creativity.

The director from the Travelers series, basically.

Just consider the potential savings...

But the role of steering a company is needed, that's why I think it's perfect for AI. Developers and VCs write the instructions together and AI runs the company.

You can just run the codebase through an LLM to cleanse it of any IP entanglements. Whatever parts of the business that doesn't cover... well those are the people you need to hire from the old one.

Drop the CEO and keep the developers instead!

- Do you want an LLM salesbot to close a deal your company isn't actually able to fulfill?

- Do you think your company will use AI more intelligently and reliably than the people who made a popular LLM coding system?

I want my AI support rep to create tasks to engage my team, with all the relevant data linked to it. It should be able to automatically schedule things and ask a human for confirmation.

It should be able to elevate communication to a human in the loop, using whatever mediums of communication makes sense given staff availability and workload.

At no point is it allowed to answer any questions unless the answers are constrained and probably directly quoted from a cited and linked section in our documentation.

In general, it should never confirm or deny things, it should never try to close things or acknowledge the content of any of the user's communication other than to call tools and surface public information which might be relevant to their request.

Most of this is a software architecture problem. The LLM is just there to provide an intuitive and extremely powerful natural language interface for search and tool calling. A little bit of glue between different systems, both internal and external.

It is lead by Musk and I am sure he will use AI for that. Present it as "If Musk Fails, we will fail".

So many of them are obvious AI to anyone who has used LLMs. The emails are always like "Hi, I really like how and how you used to . We can 10x your business..."

Another fun one is they say they care so much about our business that they recorded a personalized video of them exploring our website. But the video is a person gesturing at their computer screen that only shows a Cloudflare bot blocking page because their AI video generator got blocked by our site as a bot.

It's so lame. It feels incredibly off-putting and dishonest that I am having my time wasted by a machine pretending to be a real person spending their time on me.

The problem is that this automation leads to the death of the entire sales channel. If 99% of "personal" emails I get are computer generated and the volume of emails keeps increasing because it's now so easy to send them, I'm going to stop reading any emails. I feel burned.

This is the problem with AI sales. It can automate the current average sales process. This in turn makes the average sales process really easy, so it gets saturated by everyone and then it no longer works for anyone.

If anything, you should do the opposite of whatever the AI sales people are currently doing. That's the way to make a mark.

More often that one would like, enterprise SaaS sales isn't about having the best product - it's about convincing the CTO he's going to feel like a king whenever your sales reps are in town

As far as I can tell, selling B2B security products is mostly about making C-suiters feel like they're in a political thriller. They even build (and, at least when needed for these purposes, staff!) fake and useless "war room" sets to walk the guys through, inefficient dashboards that nobody doing the actual work uses because they suck but they look cool, stuff like that.

Oh I see you have not hung out with 'the sales guys'. That they did it on a motorcycle ride does not surprise me. There are some seriously shady dudes out there that will do anything to close the deal, "always be closing". If closing out a million dollar contract means the CEO's daughter wants to goto a water park? Magically there are the tickets aplenty. Bars, race tracks, sports games, horseback riding, Caribbean cruises, on and on.

Is it ethical? Not really. In fact many places have training specifically on vendor relations. How much, how little, etc etc. In a small startup environment? There are going to be basically no guidelines from the business to do anything either way. Larger companies tend to have guardrails. But many of the sales guys know how to work that system.

In technical roles we usually do not see this mess. Because we have a sense of follow the rules and logic. The sales guys are 'always closing no matter what it takes'.

on edit: Or Hell's Angels...

There is no """AI""" ready to be entrusted...

And people should compete upwards, "try hard".

I think this is one of these scenarios where feeling the pain is the only way they'll ever truly understand.

Heck, you can even A/B test it by randomly splitting your leads between humans and AI, then pick whichever has the higher ROI.

A better example (rather than replacing sales reps with AI, which is obviously difficult and nuanced) would be something like StitchFix deciding whether to fire their human stylists and moving everything to AI-recommendations only. Again, A/B test and see what users respond well to.

(Separately, I've always assumed StitchFix "stylists" weren't actual people, until I met someone with that job title... I was honestly quite surprised they still had a job)

And who cleans the following mess?

Fully automated company with no humans in the loop. That’s what’s coming.

My manager who has zero experience coding us now vibe coding all day.

Spoiler alert : it isn’t ending well

Production crashed, weeks debugging. Lots of wow I didn’t expect that

Tell them you have an AI CEO and they have to meet the same standard. I can show you a demo :)

I’ve given up on resisting this idiocy and am just trying to stay out of the blast radius while I roast marshmallows on the ensuing fires.

Literally the point of the article was that they successfully did that

If he said he "wants AI to do it all" then why shouldn't it include his job too?

Hardly. It's just "less than ideal."

> The end consumers and shareholders get shafted.

You're completely assuming that 100% a good deal CANNOT possibly be made on the back of a motorcycle? There's no reason to believe a suboptimal strategy can't arrive at the optimal solution.

> This kind of nonsense is especially pronounced and explicit in less well off societies and lowers the general standard of living.

This is the way business has been done in the first world for 100 years. You should calibrate your assumptions to the actual data.

`This is the way business has been done in the first world for 100 years.`. Yes, I am aware cronyism and low level corruption exist in the first world. In other places you probably just give the person an expensive gift or briefcase full of money and save time. But it's not optimal.

Point being, this story sounds like an argument in favor of AI to me.