AI Agent · Google · Fortune Technology
Black Lake founder Yuxiang Zhou pitted an AI agent against his top sales coach
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But he’s still waiting for the “Google moment” in AI.
Key facts
- When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of Black Lake Technologies, pitted an AI sales coach against his company’s most experienced sales leader, seven out of 10 of Black Lake’s most senior salespeople voted
- In part to find that answer, Black Lake is testing a new platform that uses AI to turn an idea from a celebrity into manufactured merchandise that can cut the minimum order for custom collectibles
- A lot of people use AI as a way to co-pilot the leadership, but I’m trying to explore the way of me co-piloting the AI,” Zhou said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8
- For Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at design agency IDEO, speed isn’t enough to build a moat against competition
Summary
When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of Black Lake Technologies, pitted an AI sales coach against his company’s most experienced sales leader, seven out of 10 of Black Lake’s most senior salespeople voted for the machine’s advice. The experiment began when Zhou complained that his CRM software reduced a day of client conversations to “a subjective one paragraph, and then the leader sits back and reads this paragraph and analyzes.” So his company, a Shanghai-based startup that supplies AI agents to factories across Asia, gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location. “A lot of people use AI as a way to co-pilot the leadership, but I’m trying to explore the way of me co-piloting the AI,” Zhou said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. Still, human salespeople have their place.