Discover how Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai transitioned from being an AI skeptic to an advocate, and learn about the innovative platform that allows anyone to build and customize AI agents, regardless of their technical skills.
Mike and Sam explore what AI agents are, share real-world examples of how marketers can use them for tasks like research and content creation, and discuss how AI is reshaping the future of marketing roles.
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About agent.ai
Agent.ai is the #1 professional marketplace where users can build, discover, and deploy trustworthy AI agents that deliver real-world value.
Founded in 2024 by Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, and led by Sam Mallikarjunan, Agent.ai empowers professionals to revolutionize their workflow across sales, marketing, and customer service through intelligent automation.
Since its launch at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2024, the platform has experienced explosive growth, amassing over 1.5 million users and hosting more than 1,200 public agents by early 2025. The platform distinguishes itself with its intuitive low-code agent builder, access to cutting-edge AI models, and a vibrant developer ecosystem.
About Sam Mallikarjunan
Sam Mallikarjunan is a growth strategist, entrepreneur, and the Growth Lead at agent.ai. He is the former CEO and co-founder of OneScreen.ai, a marketplace for out-of-home advertising, and previously served as Chief Revenue Officer at Flock.com and Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, where he drove significant customer acquisition and revenue growth.
Sam is a former professor at Harvard University, where he taught Advanced Digital Marketing and Innovation, and he currently shares his expertise as a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. He is also the co-author of the bestseller Inbound Commerce – How to Sell Better than Amazon and frequently offers insights on AI, marketing, and business strategy
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Sam Mallikarjanan from Agent.ai
00:01:41 – Overview of Agent.ai and Its Features
00:02:45 – Understanding AI Agents in Marketing
00:04:10 – Practical Applications of Agents for Marketers
00:10:34 – Target Audience: Individuals vs. Enterprises
00:12:57 – The Importance of AI Confidence in Marketing
00:17:27 – Future Changes in Marketing Roles Due to AI
00:19:59 – The Shift from Performance to Brand Marketing
00:22:44 – Best Marketing Advice Received by Sam
00:24:07 – Career Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:27:15 – Conclusion and Closing Remarks
Quotes
“The more focused you try and make an AI, the more effective it’s gonna be at whatever the task is that you’re trying to have it do.” Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
“The biggest challenge is getting people to become AI curious and AI confident.” Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
“It was an interesting project because it’s what helped turn me from an AI doomer into an AI boomer.” Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
Follow Sam:
Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallikarjunan/
agent.ai’s website: https://agent.ai/
agent.ai’s on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pulsar-platform/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Sam Mallikarjunan at agent.ai
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sam Mallikarjunan
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Sam Mallikarjunan. Sam is from Agent.ai. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Sam: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Mike: So we’d like to start off, we’d like to give people a chance to introduce themselves, talk about their background. So what led you to found Agent AI? How did you get here?
Sam: Yeah, so Dharmesh Shah, who founded HubSpot, founded Agent AI. He came to me with the idea last year. I worked for him when I used to run HubSpot Labs way back in the day. And it was May 30th, he emails me and says, can we have 100,000 users by inbound, which is in September. We did. We had 156,000 users by inbound. And now it’s, we’ve gotten kind of the old band back together. A lot of the early HubSpot executives, people that I worked with back when the company was 150 people, not, I don’t know what they are now, probably like 8,000 people. But yeah, I know it was an interesting project because it’s what helped turn me from an AI doomer into an AI boomer. Like I didn’t want to see a world in which we went from having millions of websites to like dozens of orchestration agents and all dominated by major players. So I really like the ecosystem play. So yeah, I exited my last startup back in 2023. And it was too interesting, I think not to work on.
Mike: That sounds really exciting. I mean, do you want to explain a little bit more about what agent AI does? I’m sure some people listening will be familiar, but maybe some people won’t have heard of a platform.
Sam: Yeah, we are less than a year old. So the idea is we have an agent builder. So anyone, regardless of technical skill or budget or anything else like that, can come use the free builder. It always has access to all the latest models. We don’t charge for it because we assume performance is going to keep going up and costs are going to keep coming down. So it’s silly to try and charge for AI usage. About 25,000 agents have been built on the site, which is quite a lot. And a lot of them are just like very niche applications. So it’s LinkedIn prospecting for executive recruiters in Scotland, not just LinkedIn prospecting. So make it more precise. And the rest of the 1.5 million users are using agents that people build. So we wanted to make it so that anybody could build an agent or customize an agent. And then the marketplace side of it is anybody can discover and use an agent. So that’s the majority of the users are finding agents that people have already built and then using those in their daily lives.
Mike: And that’s interesting, but I mean, we’ve got a lot of marketers listening. Can you just unpack exactly what you mean by what an agent is in terms of the AI world?
Sam: Yeah, so an agent, first of all, this is why we should never let engineers name anything. The CEO at OpenAI had this joke. He’s like, yeah, we’re running out of weird number letter combinations to keep naming GPT dolls. An agent has quite literally agency, not in the philosophical sense, the literal sense. You allow it to take actions on your behalf. So it’s not just the AI we’ve worked with for 20 years has been about predicting things. So, you know, auto completing texts or giving advice. An agent actually goes and does stuff on an ongoing basis for you. So it attends meetings for me and generates a summary based on things that it thinks I’ll find interesting. It does, every morning I get an audio overview because it looks at my calendar. Everybody that I’m meeting looks at their company, their LinkedIn posts, generates, when I go for my morning walk, an overview for me. So it’s, we’ve started to trust computers enough now that we let them take some actions on our behalf, generally as long as we’re still in the loop. It’s called human in the loop. But that’s the difference between the normal AI, like autocomplete. Everybody’s familiar with that. It’s just instead of autocompleting sentences or predicting the next word, now we’re having it autocomplete entire emails, entire articles, or entire essays and books.
Mike: So, I mean, do you have some examples of, you know, some of the agents on the agent AI site that maybe would be useful for marketers, you know, the kind of applications where you can do something that’s just a little bit better than opening up chat GPT and driving it yourself?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, again, I love ChatGPT. They do great stuff, but they’re solving for a generalized use case, which is very hard. In general, the more focused you try and make an AI, the more effective it’s gonna be at whatever the task is that you’re trying to have it do. The main thing, I mean, markers use it to draft copy. That’s totally fine. They use it for prospect research, which I really like. So understanding what do the people in your audience want to read? What are the questions that they have? I think it’s my favorite thing about AI is you can ask it to adopt a specific perspective. It’s really hard, unless you’re me, because I’ve had an easy career. As I said earlier, I was at HubSpot. We were literally marketers marketing to marketers about marketing. Most people aren’t the exact customer that they’re marketing to. So having it ideate with them, having it say, you know, how is this simulated persona, how is it going to perceive this email, this article that I’m writing, or even this landing page? So now that it can actually see things, you can have it, you know, tell you how you should change the page to make it less interesting to you, potentially, but more interesting to the people who matter, which is the people that you’re actually marketing to. So that I think is the most practical way. You can use it to automate all the stuff that you already hate, right? You can post LinkedIn spam at scale. That’s fine. It’s how most people are using it. You could have a draft and write blog articles for you. It’ll get you probably 85% of the way. But that’s still a big time saver. It allows you to provide different languages.
So Most people don’t realize the T, the Transformer, the T in GPT was originally built for language translation. And so like having that context and that ability to provide support, provide collateral, everything else that you’re doing in multiple languages, very important for a lot of marketers. So you can automate things you do. You can expand your skill set too, right? Like I no longer have to go bug the engineering team every time I want to write My local pub, I built a drunken spelling bee game for them. And that’s maybe not the most powerful application of AI, but it was particularly interesting that I didn’t… I haven’t written code in 20 years, at least none that anyone used, but I was able to do that without bothering them. You know, like back in the day at Upspot, we had a woman, I think her name was Diana. She like took a week off, taught herself jQuery and like manually coded, she was on the marketing team, manually coded a slide in CTA, now it’s a feature that they have. And like kind of the goal is can everybody be a Diana, right? Can everybody have access to code? Sales reps can generate presentations so that you don’t have to, you know, be bothered by that. Can you do advanced data analytics, you know, without having to loop in the data science team? So it’s like we’re still T-shaped markers, we’ve got our deep specialization, but the breadth of the T, the number of things we can be mediocre at has dramatically increased. So like automate the things you want, you can have access to new skills, and then access to different perspectives and ways to communicate with people, those are my favorite ways to use it.
Mike: And so what an agent is doing is basically, and this is probably not the right technical word, but tweaking an AI so it’s more focused on achieving a certain task. Is that what you’re trying to do? Or what exactly is agent AI trying to provide?
Sam: Yeah, so an agent generally needs access to tools as well. So even just using, you know, my example of my daily briefing that I get, it has to access my Google Calendar, right? Then it has to access LinkedIn because it firstly enriches the contacts using a different system. Then it accesses LinkedIn. Then it generates the text, which GVT 4.5 is pretty good at. Then it uses a different AI to generate the audio for me. And then it like sends it to me. So, the ability to have multiple steps, multiple tools, have specific instructions, so you can have it adopt a specific perspective. It doesn’t get lost in the memory chain. But then also, different AIs are good at different things. You may want to use Anthropic, so Claude, for something. You may want to use Perplexity for searching, which Perplexity has completely replaced Google in my life. I just don’t use Google anymore, except when I’m looking up the HubSpot stock price. And, you know, it’s not always like just use GPT, that’s not always kind of the, or Chachapititas, not always the best thing to do. So it’s the ability, if you can use workflow tools, right? Like just be able to think logically about what you want to have it do. Like I have it, and it’s not always work related, right? I have one that’s a chess coach. So every week I have my chess lesson and I got really annoyed at this like 20 something year old genius, like calling me stupid every week. So I built an AI agent that looks at my games, looks at the lessons I was supposed to watch that week, tells me what I clearly didn’t learn, then it generates a quiz. So it pretends to be a teacher, generates a quiz, and then improves my answers. It tells me how I can improve my answers so that I show up to that meeting slightly more educated than I would without the help of the AI. So it’s the ability to use different AI models and access different tools and then be able to force things very logically. Forcing AI to think step-by-step is not very easy when you’re just using chat. You can tell it to think step-by-step, but it’s going to forget and get weird. As opposed to if you build your own agent, you can force it to do this, then this, then this, then this.
Mike: But I think Asian AI takes it a step further. You don’t actually have to build your own agent. You can actually use somebody else’s agent. So do you want to talk about how you’re giving people access to all these different potential helpful agents?
Sam: Yeah, like I said, 25,000 agents since we unlocked the builder in January. They’re generally fairly different flavors of the same thing. So you can take an agent, somebody else. When you build an agent, you can either keep it private, you can make it public, You can use it for lead generation or in the future, you’ll be able to monetize it. You’ll be able to just like an Apple app store kind of situation. If you make it public, which is about I think 1,500 or so agents on the site are public. So most people keep them private. If you make it public, then people can clone them. So you can let people take the agent that you’ve built, which does something interesting. Maybe it’s a meme generator. They can clone it and say, I want memes specifically for B2B enterprise marketers. Here’s examples of really good memes. Here’s examples of really bad memes. And now you have a meme generator for B2B enterprise marketing. That’s not something you can do with just a regular agent. But yeah, that’s like, right now it’s all citizen developers. Nobody’s making money off of building agents on agent.ai yet. They will eventually. Right now it’s just people building stuff that they find cool. And then other people taking that stuff and building on top of it.
Mike: And what’s the cost? I mean, is this sort of an enterprise type thing? You said people were citizens developers. So is it just individuals doing this?
Sam: For the most part, it’s individuals that are building agents. Not a lot of enterprises are using it, because if you need an enterprise solution, there are other AI studios out there that have great enterprise-grade solutions with SOC 2 security and everything else like that. Our focus is the hundreds of millions of global professionals who aren’t in the enterprise, or whose enterprises just haven’t adopted it. I’m speaking at a big banking conference later this year, and people want to use AI, but their companies are just so slow. And if your company’s not going to pay for it, but you still need it because you are an enterprise marketer or whatever, then you can come use HDI. So it is mostly individuals who are using it. I think like most disruptive technologies, it’s going to start from the individual and then move on up more than it’s going to be a thing that you can’t wait for your company to evaluate a solution, buy it, implement it, train everybody on it. By the time that happens, six new AI revolutions will have happened. So it is a lot of individuals. But I think that if you’re at a big enterprise, I think you count as one of those.
Mike: So it’s fascinating. I mean, obviously, you know, you’ve got plans to grow and presumably by monetizing the agents that gives you a chance to drive revenue. So what’s your strategy for growing the business growing the number of users? What’s your marketing strategy overall?
Sam: Yeah, so we’ve been remarkably effective with paid acquisition. Turns out we’re pretty good at that. We also, obviously, we’re not part of HubSpot, but we are, I call it, strategically adjacent to HubSpot. We share a founder, obviously. We have a lot of reach into marketing with them and kind of their channel program. We’re about to announce, actually, by the time this airs, probably we will have announced, a $1 million grant fund to subsidize people who want to build agents but can’t afford to quit their jobs and focus on it. And then the thing I’m really excited about, another thing that we’re announcing this month is, it’s a terrible name, we’re calling it essentially the Corporate Builder Program. So if you’re a company, and you want to offer agentic functionality in your own platform, but you don’t have AI engineers, or maybe it’s just like really expensive, maybe you’re a startup, you’ll be able to build an agent on Agents.ai and have your users experience that agent in your own platform.
So right now we’ve got a million users. The way to get to 10 million users by inbound of this year, which is our goal, is mostly going to be around, can we empower people who already have big audiences, already have platforms that they’re monetizing, etc., to enable those people to provide agent functionality to their users? That I think is, we’re not going to buy our way into 10 million users. You know, our normal marketing channels might get us to three million users by September of this year. I think the rest of the growth for our target is going to come from letting other people build, not just on our platform, because we don’t care at the end of the day if the user knows it’s agent AI or anything else like that. Right. Like we just care that people are using AI agents. I think that’s going to be the real issue. It’s also the thing I feel good about because I know one feels good helping Microsoft make more money. Right. But like you feel good helping startups like my local pub. They built an agent. where they upload the stuff they want to get rid of, food and booze and stuff like that, and have it generate recipes and clever names. So these people who can barely update their website are doing inventory turnover optimization that would make Amazon proud. Those are the types of people that we want to help. So that’s the strategy. There’s definitely organic acquisition that we’re doing. The biggest issue Much like the early days of HubSpot, I had to convince people that search engines mattered before I could sell you SEO software for quite a long time. And blogging was something your nephew did on LiveJournal, not something you thought serious businesses did. So our biggest challenge actually is, and the reason I do all these podcasts is getting people to become AI curious and AI confident and go try it out. But yeah, the biggest growth I think is going to come from that core program where we let other people build AI agents and we keep footing the bill, like it’s fine. We don’t mind footing the bill. We just want people to build cool things and we want to not live in a world where only large enterprises have access to build AI, which by definition means only people with large budgets have access to the AI that those people are building.
Mike: There’s so many things I could ask you from that. I mean, obviously, you’re, you’re in a great position because you can foot the bill. Your your pounder Dharmesh has obviously got another company did okay HubSpot, I think is probably made him a few dollars. You mentioned a term that I thought was was really interesting. You talked about people being AI confident. And I think it’s interesting, you know, if you talk to a lot of marketers today, they’ll probably say, Yeah, I feel confident, you know, sitting down engineering a prompt for AI, that’s okay, you know, this, this whole prompt engineer thing that’s kind of gone away. Now, we can we can do that ourselves. If you said to them, how do you feel about building your own AI agent, I think, you know, a lot of marketers would be like, well, that’s, you know, There’s programmers go do that. So how difficult is it really to create, you know, an agent that maybe looks up some data from LinkedIn to enrich your CRM or something? Is it hard or is it really straightforward?
Sam: It’s casual effort. If you can build a workflow in like an automation tool where you’re just listing out like the steps that you want it to do, you can build an AI agent. My local pub They can’t update the QR codes on their website without having me help them. That’s the level of non-technical. Nobody opens an Irish pub in Cocoa Beach, Florida because they want to be a software developer. So if they can do it, anybody listening can do it. But my big thing is this change is happening much faster than any of us are used to. Industrial Revolution, we had a century to get used to it. Didn’t happen everywhere at once. Even digital transformation, I mean, you had like 20 years to figure it out before it became a huge competitive disadvantage to not have CRM and analytics and stuff like that. This is probably more like five years. I mean, Shared GPT is only, what, three years old? right? Less than three years old. The paper that founded all of this, I think was published in like 2017. We went from underlying theory to, oh my God, how do we keep up in less than 10 years? The main thing I want to explain to marketers, I literally study this stuff for a living and I barely understand it and I can barely keep up. So I know it’s an instinct for all of us to pretend like we know what’s going on. And if we don’t know what’s going on, to find it very intimidating. But if you’re curious and can overcome that, This is an, it’s just an amazing time to create advantage for yourself because nobody is as far ahead of you as you think they are. All of the thought leaders on LinkedIn and everything else like that are, I don’t know, a couple of weeks of study ahead of somebody listening to this podcast who’s never even logged into chat GPT.
Mike: That’s amazingly positive on one side and unbelievably scary on another because you really bring home the speed of change. I mean, that leads to this obvious question. How do you think the role of marketers is going to change over the next, you know, and let’s keep it quite short, you know, one to three years because of AI?
Sam: One, I think we will be able to and therefore expected to do more in the organization. So we’re going to be expected to be able to do data analytics, light coding, stuff that we haven’t been expected to do in the past. The flip side of that is we will be able to expect others to do more on their own, like the product team being able to do product marketing and research, the sales team. Do not bother me with another question about what was our sales pipeline at the beginning of the quarter or something like that. Ask the freaking AI and let it figure that out for you. Have it build presentations and stuff for you. So like, we’ll take on more responsibilities, we’re going to lose some of those responsibilities. I think brand marketing is going to become much more important. So for the last like 20 years, it was kind of the quantitative marketers who were the popular ones. You know, performance marketers, PPC, conversion rate optimization, all that kind of stuff. The storytelling One, in a world in which everything’s optimized to death, right? Like marketing is a game of millimeters before generative AI hit the stage. And now it’s going to be even worse. Everybody’s going to be good at that part. The brand’s storytelling will set people apart. And also, optimizing for language models, because we are not far, and already people are using language models to help them shop, right? I asked Perplexity the other day, should I buy a new router? And it actually told me no. which I’m sure is not ideal for the people at the Netgear Corporation. But it’s not like search engine optimization where it’s keywords and links and stuff like that. It is more about what does the kind of zeitgeist of the internet writ large think about you and your brand and your product and your competitors. And that is more of a PR brand storytelling thing. You’ve got to get the internet to think something about you. more than just getting the right links and adding metadata and all the kind of, or A-B testing, copy and stuff like that. All the things that quantitative marketers have done. So I think if you are a pure performance marketer, start picking up some books about brand marketing. And if you are a brand marketer who has seen your budget cut for the last 15 years as PPC marketers got all the love, you’re about to reenter your heyday.
Mike: I think that’s fascinating. It’s been an incredible cycle, actually. And, you know, we see people like Ram Fishkin talking about zero-click marketing and the importance of brand as well. I think what’s happened with the internet is it came in, it almost killed brand marketing and made performance marketing like some kind of marketing god. And then 15 years later, as you say, it’s actually reversing the situation. It’s incredible how much priorities are changing in terms of marketing and how quickly it’s happening.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, when everybody has access to the same tools, like when you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. Right. And so it was an advantage for us. Like 15 years ago, if you just had a blog, you were ahead of the schedule. Right. I was back then I was the number number nine or something CMO on Twitter. Right. Like number 10 was the guy from Best Buy. And it’s not because I was particularly interesting at the time. I think I was CMO of a cigar company, but there were only like 20 CMOs on Twitter. So it pays to be an early adopter to things. And this is the most leverage I’ve seen, where if you can be an early adopter to all the stuff that’s going on right now, you can have a huge advantage. But everybody else is going to have those too. So content creation on the internet is already a slop. I mentor some startups that are publishing 2,000 blog articles a month. Right. This is going to crush things like SEO. The AI is going to write better ad copy. It’s going to run better experiments, especially as we let it take more and more actions. We trust it more and more. The way people interact with the internet is going to change. Everybody now has the ability to do advanced data analysis. Great. Makes it not a competitive advantage. So you have to have an interesting perspective. It’s the only way to win in the future is you actually shock, actually have to have something interesting to say in order to be effective at marketing. You can’t just be really good at math, which is a bummer for me, by the way, because I built my entire career off of performance marketing.
Mike: And I was going to say, I started my career as an engineer. So that’s not necessarily a positive view for me in terms of marketing, because clearly math is one of my marketing strengths. I mean, Sam, it’s been fascinating. You know, I really appreciate your time. We’d like to ask just a couple of questions at the end. I mean, I feel there’s so many things we could ask. There’s a couple of standard questions you’d like to ask. And the first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice someone has ever given you?
Sam: The best piece of marketing advice someone has ever given me was actually one of the early HubSpot customers, where he reminded me that what’s obvious and potentially boring to me is novel, mind-blowing, and very interesting to the customers. So by definition, you know more about your industry, your product, your service, etc. than any of your customers. Otherwise, why would they be coming to you? And I think that is something that’s hard to remind myself of right I write articles or even when I’m designing speeches and lectures for teaching. It’s hard to avoid trying to make it interesting to me, and remembering that, like, marketing is a service that we provide to customers, our job is to educate and entertain and help them make a decision. So that, I think, is Tom Schwab, if you’re ever listening to this, was the name of the person who first told me that. And that perspective has stayed with me.
Mike: That’s awesome. The other question we’d like to know is, if you’re talking to someone who’s just about to enter marketing as a career, what career advice would you give them?
Sam: That’s tough. My 16-year-old nephew actually just asked me that question. He’s coming from a computer programming kind of angle. So what do I major in in college? I think broad experiences matter more than specialization. So in the world of weird things coming full circle, liberal arts degrees and having a broad exposure, I think is going to be a lot more important. Start using the AI tools if you aren’t already, if you’re just starting your career. The good thing is the younger generation finds AI tools very intuitive. It’s not like, you know, people who have to kind of like figure out, oh, okay, this isn’t a person. They also get better results from the language models because they don’t, they’re not like over engineering their prompts, right? They just interact with it in a natural way. But if you have a bent towards quantitative stuff, take some brand classes. Take a creative writing class. If you are a very creative person, take some more technical classes. Because I think our T-shape is getting wider. And again, the expectations are going to be important. But also just being able to understand different perspectives, different disciplines and trades, that’s going to be really important. So don’t just take the classes that you’re super interested in that you think are very relevant to your marketing career. Take other ones, take sales courses, take a finance course. Like we all need to be much have much broader tees since we have the skills to do things. Now we need like the wisdom and context to be able to do those things.
Mike: I love it. It’s fantastic. I mean, just to follow up on that, I think one of the things that some industries have seen, and I think software engineering is probably the best example, is that actually, the opportunities for younger people to enter have shrunk quite dramatically as some of the entry level tasks get taken over by AI. Do you think that’s going to be a trend in marketing as well, that it’s going to be harder to get into the industry because AI is going to do a lot of entry level work? Or do you see a more positive future?
Sam: Yeah, that used to be one of my main concerns, right? If you automate all the entry level sales reps, where do the senior sales reps of tomorrow come from? Because AI is just not going to be able to do things that require wisdom, judgment, context, experience. I’m more bullish now because there are interesting companies out there that are doing things like, it’s hard to replace a sales rep, a full sales rep, right? It’s quite easy to replace a prospect. So having a junior person is actually better for them because historically we would have to waste leads on junior sales reps that might have closed if we gave them senior sales reps. Now we can just create synthetic prospects and you can practice all day long. You can learn all of these things. And it’s the same with marketers, right? One, you have unlimited information. You have an incredibly patient teacher. I sometimes just have chat GPT sit there and teach me quantum mechanics or some weird thing that I want to know more about. But you also have the ability to practice things. If you’re applying for a job, you can practice interviewing. We all suck at interviewing. right? Unless you’re a sales rep or somebody who’s inherently good at managing a conversation. It’s incredibly important to your life and it’s something you probably only do like less than 100 times, right? In your life. And if you get it wrong, you’re dramatically changed the trajectory of your life. So using AI to help younger people have access to wisdom and mentorship. They’re creating these AI clones of people now, right? Like you can have an AI clone of Dharmesh and ask him for advice. He’s always willing to give advice and talk to people, but there’s limits on his time. He can’t give advice to a million people. So I think taking advantage of AI as a learning tool and an opportunity to simulate the things that you’re going to have to do and learn from that, I think it’s actually going to make younger professionals more successful versus getting crowded out of the marketplace.
Mike: Thanks, Sam. I mean, that’s just a great positive view to end on. I think that’s really exciting. I mean, hopefully people listening to this will actually be really motivated to do more around AI, and they’ll want to try Agent AI. So if people have questions about Agent AI or just want to get started, where’s the best place to go?
Sam: So I actually suggest going to community.agent.ai. It’s also linked in the footer of the main site itself. We don’t pretend that we know all the answers. And much like the early days of the internet, there were forums where like developers and marketers were talking to each other. We have the same thing going on in the community. So join the community, ask questions, share perspectives that you have, we’re all going to learn this together. It’s not going to be, you go to the agent AI blog and you learn everything you need to know. And now you’re a AI master. I think the really interesting stuff is going to be the stuff that we don’t think of. So yeah, go check out community.agent.ai. Even if you just watch what other people are talking about, you’re going to learn a lot.
Mike: That’s amazing. And it shows that even if you’re leading one of the most exciting companies in one of the most exciting sectors, you can still be humble and say the community knows more. I love that. Sam, that’s been brilliant. And nothing has humbled me more than the AI revolution of the last several years. Sam, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for your insights. And thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
