AI-Led Sales: How 1Mind's Superhumans Drive Exponential Growth, from the Agents of Scale Podcast

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Show Notes

AI that sells, reasons, and closes like your top rep? It sounds terrifying—but it’s not. Amanda Kahlow’s Superhumans are proving that automation doesn’t erase people; it elevates them. Her team rewards employees who replace their own jobs with AI by promoting them, not firing them. And her customers? They’re seeing sales cycles shrink from 22 days to 2 and average deal sizes double.
In this episode, Zapier CEO Wade Foster and Amanda dig into what “AI-led growth” really means—and why the smartest move in 2025 isn’t resisting AI, it’s learning how to lead with it. They unpack why 76% of 1Mind’s pipeline now comes from their own AI, and how org charts are evolving around a new role: the agent manager.
It’s a grounded, surprisingly human look at the future of work—and a reminder that the best way to stay relevant is to build the AI version of your best self. As Amanda puts it: “Your sellers hallucinate—AIs do it less.”
Learn more about Zapier! https://bit.ly/3IFKUiI

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Agents of Scale is a show about real stories of AI transformation. Hosted by Zapier CEO Wade Foster, each episode features a candid conversation with a C-suite leader who’s scaling AI across their organization, turning early experiments into lasting change. From mindset shifts to automation breakthroughs, these are the untold stories behind the enterprise AI wave.
If you're interested in real-world applications of AI, automation strategy, or how business leaders are navigating digital transformation, this show is worth a listen.
If you like hearing how companies like Zapier, Klaviyo, Newfront, Gamma, and Gainsight are using AI to solve real problems and scale smarter, you’ll find these conversations both practical and inspiring.
This podcast is a great listen if you're searching for topics like AI in business, enterprise automation, how companies are using AI in the real world, artificial intelligence strategy at Klaviyo or Gainsight, or what digital transformation looks like at scale. You’ll also find it helpful if you’re looking for AI case studies, automation in the workplace, or examples of C-suite leadership driving innovation with AI.

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:47) Resetting the Playbooks

(07:20) Building in the AI Era

(09:52) Go-To-Market Superhumans

(14:45) Humans vs. AI Agents

(18:46) Superhumans in the Sales Cycle

(23:34) Replacing Your Job With AI

(32:18) New Jobs and Future Work

(40:58) Cultivating Resilience & Hearing No

(48:43) Outro

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LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

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Transcript

Introduction

Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!

Today I'm excited to share a special cross-post from Agents of Scale, a new podcast from Zapier CEO Wade Foster – who long-time listeners will remember from his September 2024 appearance on The Cognitive Revolution, when we discussed Zapier's evolution from no-code pioneer to an early LLM knowledge worker.

Wade's guest for today's episode is Amanda Kahlow, previously founder and CEO of unicorn 6sense, and now founder and CEO of 1mind, a startup that recently announced a $40M fundraise to support its mission to redefine go-to-market with what Amanda calls AI Superhumans, video avatar digital teammates that engage, qualify, and convert prospects into customers.

The company promises "AI-led exponential growth", and as you'll hear, for Amanda, the new era of AI-led sales begins at home.  

Adopting a classic dog-fooding strategy, which Amanda refers to as "drinking our own champagne", 1mind leverages its own superhuman, named Mindy, to source 76% of the company's pipeline opportunities.

And when 1mind was working on a deal with HubSpot, instead of personally answering questions from the 20+ people who needed to sign off on the deal, Amanda directed them to Mindy.

Today, Hubspot is a reference customer, reporting a 25% increase in revenue after deploying superhumans in their product-led growth motion, and Amanda argues – with clarity that only comes from one who's already lived it – that traditional organizational structures, with marketing, sales, and customer success functions operating as separate organizations, are quickly becoming obsolete.  

If an AI superhuman can support a buyer from their first website visit through an eventual upsell, businesses don't need to organize around human capacity constraints or other limitations, and can instead build a single cohesive team to support the entire lifecycle.

When it comes to impact on jobs, Amanda is both clear-eyed and visionary.  She sees account executives as "safest" from AI impact, as the the challenge of building relationships and navigating organizational politics remain hard for AIs, but warns that SDR roles focused on qualifying leads and solutions engineers who primarily do demos are likely to be outperformed by systems that can keep a prospect's full history in their context window, speak fluently in any language and about any industry vertical, and instantly retrieve any slide from thousands of decks.  

To ensure 1mind is poised to take advantage of this opportunity, Amanda has a remarkable policy: if a human employee can manage to eliminate their own role with AI, she'll reward that individual financially and find them a new role at the company. 

And if at some point that no longer makes sense, Amanda hopes that society will respond to AI-provided abundance by de-emphasizing the expectation of economic contribution and elevating work that serves human wellbeing in other ways.

This episode is brought to you ad-free thanks to sponsorship by Zapier, and I do sincerely encourage you to subscribe to the Agents of Scale podcast.  Another recent episode I particularly recommend is Wade's conversation with Jon Noronha of Gamma – which I'm going to take a little credit for identifying as the best AI presentation maker way back in August 2023, which recently announced a fundraise, led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation north of $2 billion.  If you're anything like me, you'll want to hear how they did it, and Wade & Jon's conversation about Gamma's approach to both product development and company-building is every bit as valuable as this one.  

With, I hope you enjoy this masterclass in first-principles thinking about AI transformation, with Amanda Kahlow of 1Mind, from Wade Foster's new podcast, Agents of Scale.

Main Episode

Amanda Kahlow: It's a whole new world and a new exciting world. I feel like I have to reset the playbooks again. I thought, now I know the playbook of what SaaS framework and go-to-market is. I think we're just walking into a whole new world that none of us know how to approach.

Wade Foster: I was going to say, is there a playbook? Maybe there felt like there was in the last decade, but if there was, I never quite cracked it at Zapier. We had to figure it all out on our own. Now, I'm definitely like, there's not a playbook for how to go do this with AI. So, you know, you're- How are you doing it?

Amanda Kahlow: Am I allowed to turn the question back to you?

Wade Foster: Gosh, that's a good question. We're figuring it out. Hey folks, welcome to Agents of Scale. I'm Wade Foster. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Zapier. And my guest today is a serial entrepreneur, Amanda Aquilo. She is founder and CEO of OneMind. Before that, she founded Sixcents, grew into a billion dollar plus company. And at OneMind, she is building superhumans designed to sell, reason, and connect with customers. Kind of like your top salesperson, but smarter. So we're going to talk a little bit about what Amanda has learned building, scaling companies, but particularly now that she's doing it in the age of AI. Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Kahlow: Thanks for having me, Wade. It's awesome to be here. And I just always like to clarify, I didn't take us to the 5 billion marker. I was in the early years, stepped down and brought an awesome team in, and they've done wonders with the company. So just like to take full credit for what's... It wasn't my whole doing. I did have a piece of it, but not the biggest piece.

Wade Foster: Well, I want to go back even further to kick it off. Tell me about CI Insights. This was the first company I think you started and ran that for a good while as well too. What did you learn about starting running a company there that you've now applied to your prior or your, I guess, later companies?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, that's crazy. No one ever asked me about that company, but I started my, so yeah, I'm kind of what, I guess a serial entrepreneur. I started that company when I was 22. I was actually working for a company called Giga Information Group. They got bought by Forrester. I was working on a project. I asked for a raise. I was told I needed to wait six months to get the raise, and I was like, Eh, I'm going to spin off and do my own thing. That's how it spun out. That went on for 16 years, and we were basically before big data was sexy and it was a thing, and now the younger generation probably has no idea what the term of big data is anymore. Our customers were Cisco, Intel. We had a lot of big enterprise B2B companies, and I was merging together their sales data with their marketing data, with their customer success data, and doing a lot of backward analytics. So it was a good run, and it was a lifestyle business. I never really sought out to be a venture-backed CEO of a tech company. In fact, I was living in San Francisco, and I don't even think I knew what it meant to be venture-backed at the time. But I knew I wanted to purpose-build software based on a project I'd worked on at Cisco. And I was like, **** I need money to do this. How am I going to go get $10 million to build what I need?

Wade Foster: Got it. And, you know, now with one mind, you started a company post ChatGPT and also started multiple companies pre ChatGPT. So get a little bit of a comparison here. Uh, what's different for you this time around with this company? What are you doing differently in how you're building your company because you have these capabilities that you can tap into?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, I mean, I think everything is different. I think everything's, well, personally for me, I'm in a different place in my life and I, one of my favorite, um, sayings is the more you know, the more you know you don't know. So I think back in 2012, 2013, when I started Sixth Sense, I thought I knew everything and I knew basically nothing and I was going in blind. So now having been to this rodeo and seen it before, coming into this world at one mind from my past life at Sixth Sense, I made every mistake in the book at Sixsense. And the playbooks back then, there were no playbooks really for go-to-market and SaaS. We were just getting started at the early days. The only company really to look up to in those early days was Salesforce. And so we're all trying to emulate Salesforce. which was a mistake like that as an early stage company trying to copy what they're doing without the resources that they had. Huge mistake bringing people over from Salesforce that I think, oh, if they're doing it at Salesforce, they can do it here. That was another big mistake. So made plenty of mistakes along the way. But to your question about having the foundational models today at our disposal, I think it's a world where we-- obviously, everyone's saying this, we can do so much more with less. And everything is about speed. At the end of the day, we have to ship fast. I expect a lot more. I drive really hard. I feel like I'm kind of a combination of this empathetic, loving person that cares deeply about the people that work for me. But I also drive very hard. And I have incredibly high standards. And I'm very transparent about where I stand on things. But yeah, it's a whole new world and a new exciting world. So I feel like we have to reset the playbooks again. I thought, Oh, now I know the playbook of what SaaS framework and go-to-market is, and I think we're just walking into a whole new world that none of us know how to approach.

Wade Foster: I was going to say, is there a playbook? Maybe there felt like there was in the last decade, but if there was, I never quite cracked it at Zapr. We had to figure it all out on our own. I'm definitely like, there's not a playbook for how to go do this with AI. How are you doing it?

Amanda Kahlow: Am I allowed to turn the question back to you?

Wade Foster: Gosh, that's a good question. We're figuring it out. We did the PLG thing for so long, and now we're trying to figure out how to turn that into an enterprise sales motion. I don't know that I've got enough lessons learned yet to pontificate on it. The sort of more you know, the more you don't know definitely rings true to me on that question. But you're building one mind that helps people sell better using what you call superhumans, probably other people might call them agents. What are you learning from your customers around what is working at this moment in time? Because we hear all the hype and all this sort of fantastical stuff, but what is practically working? If you're running these companies today, what is the thing that you should be doing that maybe you aren't yet?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah. I'm going to bring it full circle to what you were talking about with your PLD motion. Just to answer the question what we're doing first, we're building what we call go-to-market superhumans. It's a face, voice, and double-click on the brain. Think of it as a go-to-market glean, if you will. It's all about being able to take action in agency and to have human-like experiences. The face is a gimmick to get people to talk to it. I don't believe the face is where the core IP lives. I think it's really all in her ability to carry on a conversation exponentially better than a human. And our superhumans behave and take on roles across your entire go-to-market cycle, so everything from first touch and inbound. So when somebody comes to website, it's obvious, not just a chatbot. She can share slides. She can give the pitch. She can give a live demo. She can read the screen. She can see what's happening. So humans have limitations. If I were giving you a demo right now, I would have to-- and I'm going through slides, or if I'm going through a slide deck and you ask me a question, I might have the slide, but I can't bring it into the conversation in real time. I can't take 10,000 slides and be like, boom, there's the one that answers your question, because I don't know where the conversation's going to go. So I think these are superhumans. supersede the capacity limitations of humans, both on memory-- humans forget everything-- recall, ability to go deep and wide. So a company like Databricks, for example, that we're talking to, I mean, they sell to everybody who needs data, right? So anyone who needs data across any industry, any vertical. Your salespeople can't really understand all the different industries and verticals they're selling to and talk the vernacular of their customers. But what if you could truly empathize with your customers? So we're building these human-like experiences that are better than humans, help you grow, help you cut costs, but at the end of the day, delight buyers. Create a better buying experience instead of going through a bunch of SDRs, so no offense, but the 22-year-old kid who doesn't know your business just trying to qualify you. And then you get passed to an AE who can't go deep technically, so then you get to a solutions engineer, sales engineer, and then you buy, and then you go to a customer success person, and oh my God, it's a nightmare what we do to our buyers. But to your question about where do we see the most value and where do we see that this is actually resonating and working? And the answer is in those areas where there is no business model to put a human. So for you, in a PLG motion, and you're trying to go sales-led. So if I were selling to you, I would say, Let us help you, where your buyers actually want to have a conversation and know how to use your tool. We are a happy customer of your product, and we use it within our product. We absolutely love it. But I can tell you right now that I barely understand it in the sense I'm not using it every day. But if you're trying to sell to me, you'd have to dumb it down to the CEO level and help me understand, OK, this is how you can connect your different systems, and these are all the different workflows it can do. If you were selling, you don't know if I'm going to be a $500-a-month deal or if I'm going to be a $5 million-a-month deal. By ICP and other attributes, we don't know those things, so you can't put humans on every one of those deals. But what if you could engage in a human-like way and have a conversation and understand my pain points and what I'm trying to do as a business and how I'm trying to scale, and then how you can use this to help us get to market faster and how we can use your tool and have that conversation in those PLG sales cycles where we can't talk to everyone, where you have this massive long tail and you're trying to convert free trial to paid, put a superhuman to engage your buyers and move them along their journey and get them using your product and start paying for your product. And I think that's the place, like, for example, HubSpot is one of our key customers, and they increase their revenue by 25% when they put a superhuman in their PLG motion. Another very large-- I'm not allowed to say the name, but very, very large Let's call it social networking platform is using it and saw their sales cycles went down from 22 days on average to two days, and we doubled their ASP. So massive impact when we're, you know, in that down market commercial segment, but we're also working for companies that are sales led and doing enterprise as well and helping support deal cycles.

Wade Foster: So one of the things you brought up that resonate with me is this, you know, hey, you know, when you're talking to a human salesperson, they can't recall the hundreds of decks you have on a particular topic. They don't know all the industries, they don't know all that. Whereas for an AI, that's something they're particularly good at. Now, my co-founder, Mike, he runs this thing called ArtPrize, where he studies these things around AIs. And one of the things he talks about a lot is that there are things that AIs are very good at and humans are bad at. And then the inverse is also true. There are things that humans are good at and these AIs are so bad at. And it's kind of weird for us right now because we can sort of feel both of these things happening at the same time. So I guess the question is, where does that apply for this product category right now? What are the things where you're like, to your point, the slide deck recall, the things it's like really, really good at? And then what are the bounds of it? Where are the places where you're like, hey, if this is the thing you're trying to solve, we're.

Amanda Kahlow: Just not there yet. Yeah, great question. I think to be honest, across the whole continuum, if I look at it, if I answer that question as it relates to the different roles across the organization, I think the AE is the safest at this moment because there are a lot of those softer skills, navigating the org, understanding who you're talking to. But I would say 80% of the deal is the conveying of information, understanding the buyer's needs. What is their pain point? What is the solution that I can offer to solve that pain point in the most cost-effective, the most reliable, accurate way? And how can I get it into their product or into market to solve their pain as soon as possible? And so in that transfer of information, the AI is exponentially better than a human. So I love it that people ask me if the AIs will hallucinate. And one of my favorite things to say is, do your sellers hallucinate? And they do so nefariously. They know they're hallucinating to get the deal done, right? So they're likely to do it exponentially less. So I think on the softer skills, of course, humans are still here to meet buyers when they're active, ready, engaged, answer their questions. That's where I think the superhumans and agents can do exponentially better than a human can in that process.

Wade Foster: You mentioned, you know, you think the AAE role is the one that is like most valuable still in this moment in time. I'm curious when you look at, you know, these customers like HubSpot, the social network, even at OneMind, like what about the go to market or structure is changing? Like what, how are, how are they being built differently in this new age?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, I think right now are the playbooks we have. We have a marketing team. If you look at like the journey of the lifecycle of a customer across, you have marketing, you have sales, and you have customer success, right? Like to onboard, upsell, cross-sell, et cetera. I think as information, as we can have these agents and superhumans, whatever it is, be supporting buyers from step one, from first touch all the way through to upsell. You're going to have to have one team managing that. It's not going to be bifurcated into these three different departments that are in silos that kind of talk to each other on an update call, but aren't actually working together and don't have the common goal. I think it'll really come around a very customer-centric, if you will, lifecycle management of the customer that's all in one. from beginning to end. And I think we need new playbooks and new frameworks. And I don't know exactly what those are. I think we need to rely on smart people like Winning by Design or whoever it is to say, What is the new playbook in today's world where all these tasks and the transfer of information can happen by agents and superhumans? And then where do humans play a role? And the humans will play a role not in these siloed organizations. Because we stay in silos because humans have capacity limitations. They have time limitations. They have recall limitations. They get sick, and when they're good, they're gone, and they move to your competitor. All those things go away if the superhuman is doing the job. Once you train it up and she's good, she's never going to quit on you. Well, unless you don't pay your one-mind bills. Right.

Wade Foster: Well, so how are you deploying your AEs maybe differently than how another company would right now?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, so our superhuman, in fact, you know, she is literally like I'm out for a raise right now. And our superhuman and I, like we have all these metrics really clear right now is 76% of the opportunities that we're in and our pipeline and our growth has been pretty fantastic over the last 18 months. has been sourced by our superhuman. She's not just the first touch, and she's not just creating the opportunity, but she's shortening our sales cycle. For example, when I was selling to HubSpot, I sold to Kip, who's the CMO, and Kieran, who's the head of AI at HubSpot. But their entire teams had to get on board with this. They had to say, Okay, we're going to implement this. The deal wasn't done when they were bought into the concept of buying OneMind. I had to go and talk to 20 other people. But instead of talking to me, I said, Hey, talk to Mindy who were asking data integration questions. I was like, Just go talk to our superhuman. Go talk to Mindy. I could see these conversations happening, and I think there were 50 conversations that happened to Mindy. That deal cycle, which probably would have been 90 days, a typical average enterprise sales cycle, went down to 30 days because they got their questions answered. Then I got on a call and I was like, Do you have any further questions? I saw you asked about our APIs. I went into that call knowing what they cared about, and then the deal cycle was like that, and it just completely shrunk that cycle. So we're using it not just to get into deals, but I only have so many resources, I only want so many salespeople. I want salespeople to manage the relationship and get it over the line. To be selling, to be constantly always on, always selling. We're building a superhuman right now to onboard our customers. That's the next piece. So she's going to take them through, here's what you need to do to onboard. And we have a superhuman to support customers post-implementation. Here's how, okay, you've got questions, or you want new data, or you keep your data fresh. Like how do you see into her brain? Here's a superhuman to support that. So I wanna put as many superhumans as I can across the full lifecycle and eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne or whatever you call it.

Wade Foster: That is fascinating. So I'm curious about the buyer psychology side of that. When you said go talk to Mindy, go talk to Mindy, in this case, I think there's probably a curiosity where people are like, well, I guess I am gonna buy this thing, so maybe I should go give it a whirl. But if you're not selling Mindy, say you're just selling, I don't know, some other random software, do you think that same curiosity would be there to go talk to Mindy? Yeah, walk me through that element of it. I'm assuming you see this with all your cycles where people are like, I want to see how this goes. So there's just sort of curiosity that drives people through the cycle.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's some industries and verticals where if you're selling tech to tech, you're selling to technologists, they're going to talk to it. They're used to it. I think the world is moving in the direction that we're all talking to ChatGPT on our phones. We're probably further ahead of it in the Bay Area and in the tech world than others, but the world is still going there. I love it when people ask me if they'll talk to her because it's just talking. I'm not asking you to use a tool. you to have a conversation. We all know how to have a conversation. We've got a couple like HubSpot being one or owner being another one. Owner sells to restaurants. They created a clone of Adam, their CEO, to help them with their grader. Once they come through, they can talk about the scoring before they come in and tell them how well they're doing so they can sell their product. But if you look at that business as well, those restaurant owners All they have to do is hit talk, and then they're talking. So it's actually not using tech. It's not as technology-forward, even though you and I know there's quite a bit to make that happen from a technology side. There is a lot of tech behind the scenes to make a superhuman, but not to engage with a superhuman. HubSpot saw that 88% of their audience, when they landed on the page where she lived, talked to her. And of those, 35% had a conversation that was deep and meaningful, meaning she was able to uncover pain points, she was solutioning with them, or she was driving them to free trial or to purchase. And so that's wild. If you think about a chatbot, you're lucky if 5% engage with a chatbot, and then maybe another 2% convert. It's like nothing. And all they're doing is throwing you to content or booking a meeting. They're driving all these chatbots today, which I don't understand why people love this inbound chatbot. If you look at the conversion rates, they're so low. And they're driving you to book a meeting with an SDR. which is like you're driving to book with somebody who doesn't know anything. Wouldn't you rather just have a high quality conversation right there, right then, than drive them to a 20 something who can barely represent your business?

Wade Foster: So, okay, so you are, you know, replacing a lot of the traditional roles outside of the AE. Now with this like freed up capacity, what's next? How are you like, you know, where are you spending your like human capital, I guess, inside the company?

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah. We have a thing at One Mind that if you replace your own job, so I'm not here yet with the board, but I would love to get to the place. Just full transparency, we haven't fully papered this, but I would love to get to the point where we forward invest your equity or do something that allows you. If you fully replace your role, I'll find another role for you. Because if you're smart and capable, And then there's other things too. There's tons of things to do, like building the AI agents within. There are so many things that we can do ourselves to make us more AI-forward within our own organization and outside of even just using superhumans, but just building agents to do workflow and tasks and everything else that we need to do. So I just think it's a different job. And it takes a different skill set. It's a different skill set. So some of those people may not have jobs. I think we're hiring for people who are capable of all of it. So we're capable of making that transition, and that's something we look for as we're hiring right now. But I think the world is going to shift, and I think we're doing the world a disservice when we tell people that their jobs aren't going to be replaced because that's not the reality that we're moving towards.

Wade Foster: That's a real money where your mouth is move. I love it. I sort of feel similarly that The folks who figure out how to do this are creating immense value, immense value for customers, for the organization, et cetera. But there still is that like psychological safety, that fear, like it's easier for us to, humans feel like, We feel loss aversion much more strongly than we do opportunity gain. Even for someone who theoretically knows, I can go do that, there's that thing that holds them back. Having these little nudges where it's like, no, this is a good thing, this is a good thing, it helps people just keep developing their skills and pushing into areas where it's like, this is going to be way more valuable. Even though you're not doing this task anymore, the next task will be just as valuable as the next one. You can just repeatedly do that over time, and it's such a powerful, innovative cycle.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, we have to teach ourselves to use new things, right? And so anybody who doesn't have that curiosity mindset... I was in remedial classes. I don't tell this story often, but I'm happy to tell it. When I was young, I actually thought I was behind. We moved a lot. My parents were separated, and I lived in 22 houses before I was 18. So because I was going to a different school every year, the school thought I was than everyone else. And I believed it. I believed I was slower. I believed I was dumber than everyone else in the class. Like I couldn't do it. But it wasn't until I had people believe in me and it was later in life that I actually in my 20s where I... Somebody took a bet on me. And actually, that person passed away just recently. So it's hitting me hard hearing this right now as I say the story. But when I had that person take a bet on me and believe in me, I started to believe in myself. And so I was like, wait, I can do a lot more than I ever thought I was capable of. And I think that's true for everyone today. We can do and accomplish and have anything we ******* want in this world if we believe it with positive emotion and positive intention. And we truly believe it. But if you don't believe it and you put it out into the universe, it's actually going to backfire and do the opposite. So I think in this world, as we're moving from not having machines to having machines or carrying bricks on our back, this is the new revolution. And if you either can embrace it and try to figure it out and be a part of it, or you will be left behind. I think it's just really hard for me to hear people say, oh, well, no, it's not as going as fast as it is. And those of us like you and I who really know what's happening and are tapped in, I believe we do the humanity a disservice by saying anything other than the job as you know it today is gone.

Wade Foster: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. On this topic, you see a lot of your customers, prospects, One Mind itself are are thinking more ambitiously about what is possible here. What do you think is separating those companies and those teams and those individuals from the ones who aren't? And like, what is the 1% doing and how do the rest of us cultivate that mindset?

Amanda Kahlow: I mean, honestly, we're typically selling top down. So it's, you know, in an organization we're selling to the CRO or the CMO. And they have a mandate from the board or the CEO to say, you got to use AI. And I'm like, well, **** how do I use AI? I can put some copy editing tools in. I can do some. And then go to market specifically, what are the use cases they can do it? And I think they're looking. I think today is a unique time where you're not going to get fired for trying something today. I think five years ago, you might get fired for putting the wrong tool in place and it's not working. So I think there is a mandate to to try and to do things and be ahead of the curve. Because if you're not ahead, you're going to be left behind. But I do find, if I'm being completely honest, there are some of our, even our customers where people are lower in the organization that are blockers, that they get in and they see this as like, oh my gosh, this might be my job and the fear factor. makes them slow the project down, or not get us the content we need, or try to put it-- if you put the superhuman in a corner where nobody sees it, then it's not going to get an exposure, and it's not going to work. So those are real problems that we have to figure out and solve. And within that organization, I can't change that. But I think it's the executives at that company to make them feel comfortable that if they lean into this, they still have a job, and it just might look different.

Wade Foster: The executives you think that are doing a good job of fostering that culture and enabling this kind of experimental mindset, what are they doing differently?

Amanda Kahlow: Well, first of all, I don't think it's a matter of... I've seen a couple companies. I actually heard one company recently that had everyone go out and build agents and they built thousands and thousands of agents and half of them were all doing the same thing. And I'm like, Oh my God, that sounds really scary. What's cool about that, though, actually, I can speak out of both sides of my mouth on it. I love the experimentation in fostering curiosity of individuals, but they're not going to be production ready. So I think there's something beautiful that, go figure it out, go find a task that you're doing today, and create an agent to create something to do the task that you're doing. I think that's amazing. But are they ready to go into production and scale the organization? Probably not. It's probably not the ICs that are going to necessarily do it. Sometimes they will, and that's amazing. But I actually think the onus is on the executives to say, I heard Megan Eisenberg, who's the CMO of Samsara, recently said she went out and built her own AEO within their company. So they built the equivalent of Profound themselves. And it's amazing and it's working incredibly well. So I think there are places where you can build it yourself and do it. And then she's encouraging the people down below her organization and they have... I don't know how many she said. many agents, if you will, that they've built, and then they've bought some as well. So across the whole org and had to reset and like, Okay, we're going to figure this out. I'm going to make this a mandate as my team to figure this out together. But I don't think it's any one individual task. And I think that's sometimes where people fall down and say, Okay, go use AI in your day-to-day, and having them figure it out. Yeah, we all should know how to build an agent. I think we have to, as leaders, guide and say, what's the best thing for us? And do we build it ourselves or do we buy it? And there are places I think there's advantages to both.

Wade Foster: I think what we have seen on that experimentation front is the orgs that do do the, hey, we're going to get everybody to build their first AI workflow or their first AI agent or something like that. They raise the floor of what's possible inside the company. They may not necessarily raise the ceiling, but they raise the floor up meaningfully because now everyone in the company has this tactile feel for, oh, how do these things work? What's possible? What's not possible? And when you have that, the fear sort of fades into the background. It's not that it disappears, it's just you have a much more practical sense of what's going on here. And so you can see how you could go solve some problems, but you could also clearly see, oh, I'm still needed to help with this, this, and the other. And all of a sudden, it's just a much more, you're just problem solving versus fear mongering at that point in time where the narrative with AI is there's a lot of fear mongering going on.

Amanda Kahlow: 100%. And I'd rather embrace it and be a part of change than be left on the sidelines. Totally. So you could, yeah.

Wade Foster: So we talked about all these jobs changing. What are the new jobs that are arising? What are the new skill sets that you're seeing folks lean into?

Amanda Kahlow: One of my favorite things, I don't know what it's called, but having an internal job to manage all the AI across your organization, right? I'm hiring for that right now, so if anybody sees that, we're trying to figure out who that person is. Our CTO and our head of product and our head of customer success are right now, they have weekly meetings talking about all the agents and things that we need to build. I'm like, You guys need to do your jobs, and I need to find somebody to do this job across the whole org. I think that's super exciting. Obviously, the prompt engineering job, understanding, literally anyone can learn how to prompt engineer. I find it interesting that everybody has these engineering titles, though. Actually, I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. I was like the forward deploy engineer. I'm like, They're not really engineers. I don't think it's fair to the people who are engineers who have worked really hard to get that degree and understand. technology the way that they have. So I think it's kind of cute, but it's not what it is. And so let's call it something else that's incredibly valuable, but it's not an engineer. That's not what they're doing. So I don't buy into that. And I actually put my engineers on a pedestal. And even in today's world where you can do things very fast, I think they're one of the most valued, everyone's valued, but they're one of the most valued. you know, orgs within the company, of course, still in a world where you can do it fast.

Wade Foster: I like the, uh, I like the word builder. Like we're all building something like that to me feels much more representative of the work that is happening. And it is distinct from, you know, uh, like an AI, like a true, like, you know, machine learning engineer or something like that. Or that's a, that's a different skill set, uh, in a lot of ways.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, and they're creative too. What they're not giving themselves credit for is engineers are creative as well, but when you're actually building these, there's an art. It's a combination of art and science. There's an art to a lot of this, and that art, they're not giving themselves credit for the art that they're doing, which obviously I love art. I have my own art that I do, but I think that there's a value in that, and they're devaluing the creative side of us, and I think as a world where we go where agents and superhumans can do all the tasks and all the workflows, that side, the creative, art, softer skills are the ones that are going to be most valued.

Wade Foster: So you talked about this job of managing the agents. What does that practically look like for you all right now? And where do you think it's heading in the next six, 12 months, something like that?

Amanda Kahlow: I mean, right now, I think it's somebody who understands that the... It is somebody who has to understand the full organization right across because I think the agents have to talk to each other across functions. And so it's not just doing one task, but agents managing agents is the ultimate goal, right? So that like the handoff, the flows, the process, we're still trying to figure it out. Like I don't have all the answers and it's not, I think the moving again, moving away from these siloed disciplines is where the world is going. And I think it's exciting. If I were starting my career again, that's where I want to start. I want to understand the whole organization. I'm hiring a chief of staff right now who is going to have to have their hands in everything across each piece of the business. And I think it's similar. It's like a chief of staff for agents, if you will, for AI.

Wade Foster: Yeah, the thing we're seeing is the workflow looks a lot like a person who is reviewing the output of an agent And that's kind of the job. Day in and day out, you're looking at it, you're saying, yep, that looks good or no, not quite. And if it's no, not quite, well, what if we tried this or what if we tried that to try and get it to more consistently output thumbs up versus like, not quite. So you're kind of like managing these rubrics, managing the evaluations. And it really is like getting very good at just sort of holding a quality bar, knowing what that standard in rubric looks like, and then just tuning the engine over and over again.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, the AI slop that's out there is like incredible. Like I looked at something the other day and at first glance I was like, wow, this is ******* good. Then I like printed it out and I read it and I was like, oh.

Wade Foster: Do you prescribe to the dead internet theory?

Amanda Kahlow: I don't even know what that is. No. What is the dead internet theory?

Wade Foster: The dead internet theory is that if you go to any of these major social networks, the vast majority of content out there is written by an AI at this point in time. And so what's being written, what's being read is all AI is talking to AIs. It's not real.

Amanda Kahlow: I mean, that's what the world we're going to. Right now, we're building superhumans to talk to humans, but it's agent to agent. That's the future. And so we have to be building infrastructure and, you know, what those processes are when agents are talking to agents. And I can't even get my head around that sometimes. Like, **** is this going to work? Well, I think it's.

Wade Foster: Definitely, you know, we're definitely going to create a market for, you know, sort of like AI free, you know, content or AI free art. Like we're going to want that from humans. There will be a market for that.

Amanda Kahlow: All right. Well, then that's where I'll go sell my artwork.

Wade Foster: I mean, you know, it's the same thing as like AI is clearly way better than humans at chess, but chess has never been more popular than ever. And I think you'll, you know, you kind of see that across industries where like humans, we just, I don't know, like we like to see what is possible by us. And that doesn't mean that we still won't have AI and agents doing enormous amounts of economically productive work. But there still is a lot of places, I think, where humans have. We just like each other.

Amanda Kahlow: And what if we move to a world where we all don't have to work so hard to meet our basic needs? Like, OK, I'm not going to get into my politics, but Maslow's hierarchy of basic needs are met, like truly met across the world, where we can all do the things that actually feel good to us and give us joy and bring our elevation, our energy, bring our energy up to another level. That's a world I get really excited about. And if you and I want to create companies and do things, that gets us excited, we get to go do those things. Most people are in jobs that I would imagine they're not loving. They may tell themselves. Actually pushing back on a friend the other day, she's like, I love... I don't know what the industry was. And I was like, Really? What the **** do you love about that? That sounds awful and boring. No, I love this. I love what I'm doing. I'm like, I don't know. Do you love it? What do you love? So I love problem solving challenge. I love humans. I love people. I love managing people. I love like understanding and connecting. I'm a relationship person and a product person, but that's what I love. Not necessarily even building superhumans, right? Like I love that I get to build something that makes change. But what if everybody didn't have to work so hard?

Wade Foster: Well, I think you're probably right that that's the direction we're on. If you looked at our agrarian ancestors, I'm sure most of them probably weren't in love with farming. And if they looked at today's jobs by comparison, they'd go like, you all look like you're just having fun all day. You're a Twitch streamer, a YouTube. Is that a real job? That doesn't look real. But here it are, here it is. We have created economically useful jobs out of what would appear to our agrarian ancestors is just fun or nonsense at the end of the day. And so I do think that, you know, humans will just kind of continue to move up that abstraction layer and find new ways to, you know, take up our time in ways that are economically useful.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, well, I'll add, I'll tell the story of, so my oldest, I have two brothers. My oldest brother was, both of them were CEOs and entrepreneurs as well. I don't know, one of us should have ended up in jail if you look at our history. So we had an interesting childhood. My oldest brother was a CEO, and then he just dropped out of this world of capitalism and decided, I'm not in it anymore. I'm going to go be a Buddhist monk. He went and was a monk for a second, came back, and now he's a chaplain. What he does in his chaplaincy is he walks around, so he sits by people's bedsides when they're dying, when they have nobody else. And he walks around homeless camps and says, you need to talk to somebody. There is absolutely no money in that. He makes absolutely nothing, but he's doing God's work. So I think it's a shift, like we will shift the value of what our work is. And I think there'll be a value shift, hopefully. That's my hope in this new world is that his work will actually be valued.

Wade Foster: Yeah, I mean, clearly that is valuable work that he is doing. You were talking about yourself. You're like, I am a relationship person. I love to sort of do these things. And here you are changing the way that sales works. So what would you tell a 22-year-old who's like, I want to be in sales. I'm the same as you. I love relationships. I love sort of helping people solve problems. Where would you direct them?

Amanda Kahlow: I would direct them to focusing on your softer skills, right? So it's less about the process and the methodology. and the transfer of information and selling a product and talking about a product. Because I think all that transfer information is going to go to AI and go to agents, superhumans, what we call them. And it's more about creating connection to other humans. I think one of the valuable lessons I remember my dad told me when I went to college is like, I don't give a **** if you learn anything. Just learn how to connect to people. Learn how to have a conversation. from Ethiopia. And her family was royalty in Ethiopia. And she learned-- at five, she told me she had to go to parties and learn how to socially say hi to people and ask really intriguing questions that invoked curiosity. I thought that was fascinating. At that age, she was taught, this is how you show up, and this is how you engage people. So that's what I would teach them, is learn how to engage people and lean into what makes you human.

Wade Foster: So on the what makes you human part like it's it's pretty clear to me that resilience is one of those things that is going to be increasingly in high demand. And you have had an enormous amount of resilience, both in, you know, professional and in your personal life. Like, what do you think? You know, what do you think instilled that in you and how do we cultivate that in others?

Amanda Kahlow: As a mom of two young girls right now, I have a three and a five-year-old, I think about this all the time. So I believe I probably have had the modest success that I've had because of the trauma that I've had as a child. So I actually believe it's a trauma response that I am able to-- I love it when people tell me no. I love to be rejected. I'm like, I'm just going to use that as fuel to my fire. I have learned to-- if I feel something, I've learned I get it out, and then I'm over it. I've had to learn that in order to survive. There's a survival mechanism. But **** I don't want to have my kids have to go through any of the trauma. I mean, they have a very sheltered life. My oldest daughter is adopted. And if I look at the life that she would have had, her biological siblings, very different. One-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia with her mom who works at McDonald's. I would never want her to have to go through what I went through as a child. So I don't know. So the answer is, I don't know what the answer is, other than I try not to give my kids what they want. And I try to-- I'm a little bit of a tiger mommy. I don't actually believe in the gentle parenting. Not that you're asking me about my parenting styles here, but I also don't believe in anything abusive either. I don't know. I'm struggling with it every day. So if anyone has an answer, let me know. I'd love to.

Wade Foster: Well, I got a three or five year old girls too, so I'm figuring it out as we go too. Yeah, I think you're onto something where it's like, of course they're going to have maybe more than I did when I was growing up, but there's You can build resilience into them by teaching them they have to earn things, not having instant gratification and all this other stuff without, to your point, putting them through trauma at the same time. And so I have to believe that there's a healthier path to still instill those same skills.

Amanda Kahlow: I hope so. I mean, my one thing is for all my childcare, because of course I need a lot with the job I have. I always say to them, the number one thing that will get you fired is if I see my kid crying and you give them what they want. Do not ******* give them what they want when they're crying. I don't care how old they are, get it together, calm down, and ask me in a reasonable voice, but you are not going to throw a fit and get what you want. That is an instant no for me.

Wade Foster: Yeah. It's like, Hey, we're going to teach some skills here. These are teachable moments. Exactly. You know, you talked about, you know, this, like, you like hearing no, you use no as an edge. You know, where am I going with this? Like, I'm curious, you know, what is like a, what is a thing that you, where has that served you well? Like, where have you been like, oh, that actually helped and fueled this engine of curiosity, this like can-do attitude, and where do you feel like that, maybe it's held you back where you're like, I could have learned this in an easier way.

Amanda Kahlow: Well, I mean, so where that comes from for me is that as building a company and building a category, if you will, in the early days of Sixth Sense, I got no all the time when I was out fundraising. Today, as I share it with the market, I share what we're doing, we get no quite a bit. We get yes a lot. But I actually get worried if we get yes too much. The reason for it is I feel like we're too close to reality of where we are today. I don't think you create a category or create something new if you're just working in the bounds of what people are used to today. If I think about chatbots or something like that, somebody looks at us as a chatbot, That's not good. I don't want to be slightly better than-- I want to create something net new of changing how we're doing business, and how we're going to market, and how we're talking to our customers. And I think that category-defining companies are able to do that is that you have to get no because most people won't accept it because it's not in the confines of the playbooks that they know. So it is a point solution making something I'm doing today incrementally better, and I don't want that.

Wade Foster: So that's super interesting. Like this idea of hearing enough no to know that you're taking enough chances. Do you operationalize that somehow? Or is that just like a feeling that you have where you're like, you know, I feel like we're kind of, it's a little too easy right now. We need to push ourselves to the next, you know, customer's persona or whatever.

Amanda Kahlow: Yeah, I don't know how to operationalize it, other than I love hearing it. Or a salesperson, one of our reps will call me and be like, Oh, that was bad. I remember the early days, I brought on a head of sales when we were just at a million dollars in revenue, or a little bit before. And I remember when people would reject what we're doing. We're almost virtually kicking each other under the table, and she'd be like, Ah, we didn't get that one. I'm like, No, Katie, it's good. It's good. If everybody loves this, we're going to ******* fail. So we have to get these no's. These no's are important. And also they tell us something too. Why do they say no? So it helps us be better and how we can grow and create the best product that actually meets the needs of the market and where the market is. But I don't think you create anything big by getting yes from everyone. That just means you're like, Oh, you're slightly better and I get it. I don't want everybody to get it.

Wade Foster: Awesome, Amanda. Well, I think that is a fantastic place to end it. So for those of you out here and here know, use Amanda's wisdom. It's just fuel to go figure out how to make it better. And thanks, everyone, for listening to Agents of Scale this week. Amanda, it's been a pleasure.

Amanda Kahlow: It's been an absolute pleasure. I'll see you soon. Thank you.