'Done with human hirings, going to...': 'Godfather of SaaS' Jason Lemkin has replaced most of his sales team with AI agents

Jason Lemkin, founder with SaaStr, a network of B2B executives and founders, made a radical decision after his last salesperson quit the job: replace the entire go-to market team with AI agents. A veteran SaaS investor who has deployed over $200 million into B2B startups, Jason Lemkin said he trained up agents after two high-paid human employees resigned, reports Business Insider. Jason Lemkin, known by some as the 'Godfather of SaaS, said time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace. SaaStr is the world's largest community of business-to-business/software founders. He simply meant he will stop hiring humans in his sales department and will rely on AI agents that can complete tasks autonomously. Without being prompted by a user, these virtual assistants break down problems, outline plans, and take action. What started as an experiment has transformed into a new operating model, where 20 AI agents managed by just 1.2 humans now do the work previously handled by a team of 10 SDRs and AEs.

'Done with hiring humans'

Jason Lemkin said that SaaStr now has 20 AI agents automating tasks once handled by a team of 10 sales development representatives and account executives. The move from an entire human workforce to an agent-based workforce was quick. As of May last year, SaaStr only had one AI agent in production that it used for multiple digital tasks, Jason Lemkin explained. However, things changed when two of its high-profile and well-paid sales representatives abruptly quit during the SaaStr Annual.

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Lemkin said he turned to his chief AI officer and said, "We're done with hiring humans in sales. We're going to push the limits with agents." Lemkin reasoned that hiring another junior sales representative at a $150,000 annual salary—only to see them eventually leave—wasn’t worth the cost when a loyal AI agent could do the job instead.


"We had only 1 non-core agent at the time with Delphi, but didn't go deep on 2 to 20+ until the beginning of June," Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr's chief AI officer told Business Insider. "It was a conscious choice after their departure to reallocate some (but not all) head count spend to agents."

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Desk now labelled with names of agents

At the SaaStr office, the 10 desks that once belonged to humans on the go-to-market team are now labeled with the names of agents, like "Quali for qualified," "Arty for artisan," and "Repli for Replit," Lemkin said. Lemkin said SaaStr is training its agents on its best humans. "Train an agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson," he said.

Many companies are experimenting with AI agents, but risks remain. One of the big ones is the threat of data leaks and cybercrime. "AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you're running them," Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, recently told Wired.