Come with me if you want to sell.
There’s a version of the dystopian, Terminator-like universe where the machines are a little bit less T-1000 and a touch more like the one that tries to help John Connor. One company is leaning into that narrative: humans and machines working together to solve problems.
Workforce solutions company Asymbl built an AI SDR, gave it a job description and even a name.
“We gave him a name specifically to help the rest of our team think of him as an employee and not just a bot,” Asymbl CEO and founder Brandon Metcalf said. “We call him Theodore when he’s being naughty, and he’s Teddy’s when he’s doing a good job.”
Building an AI workforce
Theodore wasn’t an accident but rather was part of a deliberate drive to increase digital deployment in the organization. “We went through a program with Salesforce, of trying, iterating, adapting, coaching, all of that,” he said.
Theodore might just be stage one. Asymbl recently hired a chief digital labor officer with a modest task: find out how to make the company’s entire labor force a mix of human and digital workers, with the goal of having 40% of its labor come from digital employees by next year.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to eliminate our current team. It means we’re going to give them more horsepower,” Metcalf said.
Theodore’s job is to sift through all of the company’s prospects, identify the value of a potential customer, and when there is an ideal profile match, convince the prospect to talk to a human sales rep.
“Instead of having to hire more [humans], I can 5x Theodore’s capacity. I’m going to pay more for his usage, but I’m saving a tremendous amount of money because to manage [humans] requires supervisors, HR, systems access, time off, and all this other stuff that us humans need,” Metcalf said.
He made it clear that it’s not all on AI SDRs like Theodore, but that it is a part of a process that will “hopefully do 10, 20, 100 times more than we’re doing right now with the same human team that we have.” Metcalf says it’s a mix of different pieces, including generative and predictive AI.
The SDR behind the machine
Despite all the hype around the technology, the human aspect of AI’s success is impossible to dismiss. Enter Mitch Canaday, business development representative at Asymbl, the man behind the machine.
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Canaday said he understood the concept presented to him, that digital labor was going to take the form of a digital employee. “I was still going to have to meet with [Theodore] once a week and collaborate…just like I would any other coworker,” he said.
Following Theodore’s “hiring,” the two met in scheduled meetings and collaborated to win new business. Once he learned how to best leverage Theodore’s strength, Canaday said he felt more productive.
“The benefit is that I’m able to do my own outreach and be really specific and take the human approach and figure out what are good prospects,” Canaday said. “Then I can just meet with [Theodore], feed all that information to him, and continually update messaging that he’s sending out.”Canaday says he’s comfortable with the relationship because “it’s never going to be effective unless there’s a human being on the other side.” He recommends those who are nervous about the threat to sales jobs should instead lean into and have confidence in AI. He says his AI experience is essential knowledge that will propel his career forward.
“It’s like AI 101. I get the opportunity to have hands-on experience with this, and experience being able to create it, build it, feed it information, just have a really strong foundational understanding of how it works,” he said.
Do or d-AI?
Robert Wahbe, CEO of sales enablement company Highspot, believes AI can revolutionize entry-level workforces. This viewpoint conflicts with discourse suggesting AI will steal jobs from college graduates.
“People coming out of college can now operate as if they’re much more senior because they have AI, and yet they’re still very new and inexpensive,” Wahbe said.
Wahbe’s optimistic tone tracks with Canaday’s testimony, especially the idea that AI can be beneficial to the workforce if deployed in a measured way.
The flip side means risk. Highspot recently released a survey on AI implementation in GTM teams, which identified “AI leapers” as a category of companies embracing the technology without first building the right infrastructure. Wahbe emphasized that AI should be implemented within a strategic framework, like Asymbl’s two-year plan for digital labor.
“It’s the right time for every department. If you’re not doing it, you’re going to fall behind because this is a transformational time,” Wahbe said. “Like all transformational technologies, it’s overhyped in the short term and it’s underhyped in the long term.”