AI-Powered Seller

Sam Altman’s AI Sales Bombshell: Did OpenAI just replace SDRs for good?

• Jake Dunlap & Kevin (KD) Dorsey • Season 1 • Episode 12

Share episode

AI isn’t just assisting sellers anymore. It’s stepping into the process in ways that were only theorized about before.

What happens when AI isn’t just assisting sellers but running full inbound sales motions on its own?

That’s the reality OpenAI just put in front of us: an AI-powered B2B sales agent that can take on researching leads, qualifying them, and booking meetings without any human involvement.

This episode will deep dive into Sam Altman’s announcement of OpenAI’s B2B sales agents with Jake’s unfiltered reaction to all that these new tools are bringing to the table. Discover what AI agents mean for the future of sales teams, the roles most at risk, and how AI is reshaping inbound sales.

OpenAI’s latest announcement and why highlighting B2B sales is a major shift
How AI-driven sales agents work and what tasks they’re already automating
The growing gap between companies adopting AI and those falling behind
What sales teams should be doing now to stay ahead of AI-driven automation

Whether you’re an SDR, AE, or leadership, this is news you can’t afford to ignore. No speculation, no hypotheticals. It’s happening right now.

AI IMPACT Report: https://bit.ly/ai-impact-assessment-report


Join the AI-Powered Seller Newsletter:  https://bit.ly/ai-powered-seller-newsletter 

Sign up for Custom GPTs: https://link.meetjourney.ai/aff_ad?campaign_id=4859&aff_id=2751&source=Jake-KD-Podcast&hostNameId=24435 

Connect with Jake: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/ 

Speaker 1:

All right, episode number seven AI-powered seller. Let's go as the kids say. So I'm excited for today's episode pretty big time here. Sam Altman, if you don't know, released a video that kind of broke parts of the internet around B2B sales in particular. So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna break down the video for you. I'm gonna give you my hot take on what it means, basically that, hey, they're already developing B2B agents that can enrich email and do a whole bunch of things in real time. I'll also talk about other types of agents that you need to know about. I call them productivity agents, right? You've heard me talk about these discovery prep, research, et cetera. I'm going to keep talking about them until every single seller is using these things, right? So today's episode is's gonna be a quick one, but I promise you're gonna get insight into where things are going and then, at the end, I'm gonna get very tactical on some ways that you can carve out time to make sure that you are. You are not doing, you know, five to ten hours worth of work a week, right? You are instead using AI agents to do the work for you. So make sure to stick around to the end and we'll get to that.

Speaker 1:

So, without further ado, let's jump in and talk about AI agents. Okay, so many of you may have seen it. It is, we've been talking about it. I've been talking about it. You know, if you go to meet journeyai, for example, we've been building it. We're talking about sales agents, but we've got some landmark stuff happening, folks, and again, we'll play the video for everybody as well too. So if you're listening along, don't worry, you'll have the audio or you can go check out the video on YouTube.

Speaker 1:

If you are not aware, mr Sam Altman, head of OpenAI in Tokyo, released a video, and this video highlighted a B2B sales agent. Out of all the use cases that he chose to highlight, he highlighted a B2B, a series of B2B agents that are able to handle inbound, and when I say handle, I mean handle. We're talking all the stuff that marketers and salespeople hate quick, fast inbound. And again it's email. I'm going to talk about some other trends here for you, but this is big.

Speaker 1:

It can basically look at the lead. It can then use publicly available information to enrich the lead Baller, right, so you're not paying for all those credits and then it can engage with the lead right, it can answer questions back and forth and you basically are creating these kind of series of agents that can do a lot of the mundane tasks that especially a lot of inbound reps or people are doing today. So today's episode, I'm going to dive into this use case, but I'm going to talk about others that you guys really need to be aware of. So stick around and we're going to jump into it now. So first let's listen to this video live let's start with something we know sales.

Speaker 2:

Here we have a sales contact form where someone is trying to reach out to OpenAI to learn about ChatGPT Enterprise. Now we know how this usually works. Someone submits this form, it goes into a system and then a team of people.

Speaker 1:

Look, I think we've all seen this right your classic form fill. Somebody fills out a form as a part of this.

Speaker 2:

And this can take hours or days and feel like a slow process for your buyers. What could it look like if you had agents inside of your workforce working for you right now? So first we'll submit the lead here and we'll come over to our system. Here you can see what a virtual teammate, a virtual sales associate. There you go.

Speaker 1:

So imagine this there's no hey marketers out there. How much do you love leads being followed up with immediately?

Speaker 2:

You'll see that the agent is picking up work for you already to try to help this lead. The account email came in and already it's doing what a sales associate might do on their own and researching that lead, figuring out the industry, the revenue, title and other information.

Speaker 1:

There you go, no costs, just all publicly available information. Watch out Zoom info.

Speaker 2:

Now, in this case, the agent was able to see that this is a really good prospect. Openai wants to buy OpenAI, so we think they're a good customer and so we're going to get the calendar availability.

Speaker 1:

Sam's got jokes. Oh, look at this, boom, get calendar availability. Okay, imagine, okay, this is literally an agent, my friends, that goes and gets the calendar availability too. Boom, grab the lead. Boom, enrich the lead. Boom, look at calendar availability and listen.

Speaker 2:

No big deal. It's right in Japanese. All right, y'all. Applications for this are endless. If you start to look around your organization, think about all the small tasks that people on your teams do and the ways those add up.

Speaker 1:

All right, y'all, let me know in the comments what you think. What do you think this means for sellers out there, right? So you've got now an agent and we're pairing this. There's actually a company I'm a really big fan of called Mega AI. Shout out to those guys in the voice world. I'll do an episode. I created a voice clone. If I haven't already, I'll drop the phone number. You can call me if you want to learn about the discovery process. That's the first one I picked. But imagine a world where these agents I've got this version of OpenAI, then I've got my voice clone agent that's doing the phone follow-up, and let me tell you what's so powerful about these.

Speaker 1:

So a lot of you might look at this, and so you know again, throughout today's episode I'm going to talk about this use case. I'm going to talk about a couple others in terms of, you know, if I'm in sales, what are the things I want to be on top of to make sure I'm, you know, staying ahead of the game. So why this is such a big deal, like the idea of look, auto enrichment we're doing that today. Auto booking a calendar we're doing that today. Translate in real time we're getting there, you know, doing phone follow ups or some chat we're getting there. Let me tell you what the real big deal is. And this is a, this is an email version. I'm going to talk about the voice version when you can imagine how you pair these two together. Not only is the voice or the email able to just do things in real time right and kind of engage in real time, they also have an infinite knowledge base. And let me tell you some weird, weird, weird, weird stuff.

Speaker 1:

Actually, you know what? Next week's episode I'm going to do a little mini episode on creating my own voice agent. So for those of you who don't know, I created a voice agent. You can interact with it. Ask it anything about the discovery process. But what blew my mind about this type of inbound follow-up in particular was this voice agent knew everything about every industry. So my product leader he thought it would be funny. You know he knows about all these different you know other technologies. I don't. He's like. So you know, I'm really concerned that you don't really understand my industry. You know, tell me about kind of advancements in minimal coding and blah, blah, blah. And I want you to get specific in, like what the discovery process would look like and it just started going. It started saying stuff and you know what. We'll play the recording in next week's episode. I'll maybe give a little. We'll give a little tease to it here, so you can hear it.

Speaker 4:

That sounds great. I'm wondering if you can help me with something else, though, and the thing I need help with is I'm trying to figure out how to write the Fibonacci in a Pythonic function. So can you write me a Python function that recursively generates the Fibonacci sequence up to I don't know 30?

Speaker 3:

digits Certainly. To write a Python function that recursively generates the Fibonacci sequence up to the 30th term, you can use the following code Python def Fibonacci n if n e8, 1, return an else. Return Fibonacci in 1 plus Fibonacci N If N E81,. Return an else. Return Fibonacci N1 plus Fibonacci N2 to generate the Fibonacci sequence up to the 30th term for I in range 30. Print Fibonacci I.

Speaker 1:

I started talking I I say I my voice clone started talking about Fibonacci, numbers and like all this stuff, and like it was smart and it was able to take all my best practices around what goes into good discovery and marry it with an infinite database, that is you know. You know chat GBTs, llm and just really do a lot of cool stuff in real time. And so you know, for me, if you think about inbound, think about yourself as a buyer, you think about you come inbound. Well, what does that probably mean? Well, it probably means I already kind of know what I want. It kind of already knows that I, you know, I probably know a little bit about the problem that you solve and might even work with your competitor. So when I come inbound, do you think I want to get qualified? Do you think I want to hop on a call with somebody who knows absolutely nothing? And when I ask any product related questions, they're like that's a great question, let me get my AE on the phone. The answer is hell, no. Nobody wants to interact with somebody who can't add value in the equation. My friends, this is the world that we're moving to. You know we've got some other episodes coming up where we're going to go deep on. You know skills for tomorrow. But I think for a lot of you, think about that. Think about that concept of inbound leads. If you can't add tremendous value and you're just booking appointments, literally, if you're an inbound rep, or if you're a company and you have inbound people that are just doing this, gone, hit me up. We're already doing this for companies. We're implementing these technologies, we're implementing voice, we're implementing these. People prefer these. And then they can always say, oh, do you want to talk to someone? Live real, quick, great. And then we got to make sure we pair them up with someone who can add value. So, my friends, these types of agents, I want to kind of put agents into two buckets for everybody.

Speaker 1:

First I'll talk about productivity agents, and this is where we're going to spend a bulk of today's episode. Productivity agents are like what we've built at Scaled with our custom GPTs or meetjourneyai and what these productivity are. They're built for roles and they go and do tasks for you. They will do your account research. They will do call prep. They will help you scenario plan. They will help you scenario plan. They'll help you to put together an account plan. These things that might take five, 10, 15 hours, they can do in an hour and a half three hours right Of you interacting with it. So these productivity based agents are made for people to interact, to automate the mundane part of their jobs. It's just like how, when Google came about, maybe you know, john used to like to go to the library and so now John doesn't have to go to the library anymore, john can just go Google things. Now that's what these agents do for you.

Speaker 1:

And then we've got these automation agents, which is really the next frontier, which is like, okay, I get this part, but like, should people just be doing this at all? Like, is there really a value? And again, like an incremental value. You know, of course, maybe you could say there's 5%, 10%, but is there incremental value in doing things? So, like, inbound lead engagement is a really great one for me.

Speaker 1:

What about working with our customers? These automation agents? What about the ability to run a live conversation on a new product release with one of your clients, at scale customized to their use case? There's an agent, we can build an agent for that. We can build an automation agent for that. So there's a lot of these things where it's you know update, you know basic engagement, where, yeah, we're entering this new world, where you know we can start to take some of this off of people's plate, which is fine, like who wants to follow up with an inbound lead. Anyway, it's not like there's this rich conversation that anybody's expecting as a part of it.

Speaker 1:

So, for a lot of you out there, I want you to think about these two use cases. Obviously, if you listen to the show or you watch the show AI Powered Seller now you've probably heard us talk me and KD, or me and others talk about the future and what's happening as well too, but this is a big deal. This, you know. This is one of the first times, I think, that a company like OpenAI has highlighted a B2B sales use case, which is pretty eye-opening. So, for a lot of organizations out there, again, what you want to think about is step one, and I'll kind of walk you through our process. So we have a process at Scaled. You know we really are leading the charge on AI-enabled revenue transformation Art is what we're calling it and there's a real simple process. And for all of you sales reps, my AI-powered sellers, my sellers out there you need to do this for yourself, because it's the exact same.

Speaker 1:

Step one is assess. You need to break down the things that you're doing in your day-to-day and you need to say should I be doing this, could AI do this for me? And then, if you listen to this show, we give you 9,000 different things that it can take off your plate. But identify those areas. They could be research, they could be repetitive tasks that you're doing over and over again. But you have to assess for your role. We're going to have a lot of content come out around this on the website. When that does, I'll update the show. In the meantime, you can always DM me on LinkedIn, drop a comment if you're watching on YouTube like learn more, and I'll send you over kind of this self-assessment process that we're working on when it's live.

Speaker 1:

So you have to just assess your role. Then you have to score lift. Okay, if I can get rid of this thing, how big of an impact it's gonna have. Well, this thing looks big, this thing looks kind of big, et cetera. So, once you understand that this idea of assess, score, execute right and that kind of comes in our AI impact report that we do for companies, but you can do it for yourself too. You know what. Maybe we'll publish a flavor of this for everybody in the episode. You know what we're going to do, that, we're going to do that. So, team, make sure we get everyone. I'm going to I'll publish a flavor of the report to just get your guys' juices flowing in terms of what's possible and what you can actually look to potentially review with some recommendations. So remind me, we'll put a version of the impact report in the show notes for everybody. Take a look at that. Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear it in the comments as well, of course. If you're getting value, make sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast channel. Or if you're on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel. So I think that this should be exciting.

Speaker 1:

So for a lot of sellers out there, think about the productivity stuff. Gosh, if I could use custom GPTs or Meet Journey AI to solve these problems for me, like heck, yeah, I can just go and have, like I can spend my time going deep and learning this AI stuff and being a better industry expert All deep and learning this AI stuff and, you know, being a better industry expert, all those things right as a part of this. So that, to me, is a really big piece. And then the next step I think about are these automations. You know, for you as a rep, there are actually things that you can do right. And again it goes back to like once you assess the use cases, type those into Google, type those into ChatGPT right, even me, sometimes I still say Google right, instead of saying like, no, go to chat GPT first. But even you can go and say, hey, I'm trying to find an automated tool that can do this, this and this. What should I do? And I really feel like sellers. I want you to think about this.

Speaker 1:

Your companies are behind. They are behind. We're working with companies that have 400 sellers and they're like yeah, we deployed co-pilot. It's like dude, come on. Dude, come on, those are not custom GPTs. Just so you guys know, if you have Copilot, you do not have custom GPTs. You've got like a generic AI that's a replacement for chat GPT, a mediocre replacement that IT and security picked because they think it's safe. I'm sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but that's the reality of what it is. It's not that it's bad, it's better than nothing, but it's not customized to your workflows to save you significant time, which is where custom GBTs come in. So I would be investing time right. If I was a rep, I'd be starting to think about wow gosh, this is so exciting, I can take this off my plate, that off my plate, et cetera. But you know these things are coming and so, like all in other episodes, you know, make sure to check out if you guys haven't bought the book yet. Innovative Seller right here. You know, take a look at the book.

Speaker 1:

I talk about a lot of these concepts and you know things that you can do as a rep. One of the things I talk about is called I call it the 80-15-5 principle, which is, you know, 80% of your time you're invested in that 15 five type work. So for everyone out there, I want to make sure you know in your calendar, make sure you've got time blocked to learn more about this type of stuff, to watch videos like this, to listen to the podcast or watch it on YouTube, because this is the future and where we're going, so real cool video. It's exciting to see OpenAI going down this route. We're at the beginning of this. So for a lot of you out there, productivity how's it going to make me easier, my life easier today.

Speaker 1:

And then automation. Are there ways that there's certain technologies that can automate it? All of you, as sellers, can do this stuff on your own. You do not need your company's permission. You're not uploading proprietary data. Don't go and upload a Salesforce report and say Jake said it was safe, it is probably not that big of a deal, but I don't want to get in trouble from the compliance department of somebody who said well, jake Dunlap said ABC. So that's this week's episode. I just wanted to do a quick, my hot take on automations and also talk a little bit about productivity agents too, which I think are equally as important, and make sure that you guys are staying on top of the what's the latest and greatest, as always. So thanks for tuning in everyone. Another episode, numero 7, siete in the books. So thanks for joining. Make sure, if you haven't already, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast channels. If you're on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe as well too, and we will see you on the next episode of AI Powered S.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jake Dunlap

Co-host