OpenAI Sales Agent Demo

I get excited when I see things like this, even if they're simple because I think I can build a business on top of it. However, in complex tasks and real-life cases, it's successful in very few instances. I can't trust its stability. This makes me feel like I've been deceived. I believe agents will be used for tasks that require very little intelligence and constant repetition. It's actually an assistant in situations like this demo. I want to use agents everywhere, but they're not successful in their outputs. GPT-4 is still being used at large scales. I don't know what the situation is with high-level usage of models that do reasoning like o1 through APIs, I haven't tried it. I tried Deepseek, and I encountered stability issues with Deepseek APIs. Besides, R1 doesn't have function calls.

This is pretty basic for a sales agent. Most of this flow has been available as sales enablement tech for &gt; 10 years through Salesforce &amp; Hubspot plugins.<p>Even Marketo could automatically place a call to a live warm agent with enriched information within 1 minute of a lead form being filled out on a website in 2010.<p>Operator did blow me away though. That is next level compared to Selenium and Puppeteer. While this sales agent feels very me-too.

I am quite confident that this is basically a scam which won&#x27;t work for at least 95% of businesses. Colin Fraser had a very nice demonstration that Deep Research can&#x27;t keep track of NBA teams: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;colin_fraser&#x2F;status&#x2F;1887020255781752949#m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;colin_fraser&#x2F;status&#x2F;1887020255781752949#...</a><p>So how exactly is a similar technology supposed to work with the highly specific details of an individual business? If the sales agent only has, say, 90% accuracy at reporting prices or product information, then it&#x27;s unusable. I would guess it&#x27;s actually much worse than 90%, even considering improvements in RAG benchmarks.<p>Maybe OpenAI figured it out and I will eat crow. But I suspect this presentation is marketed towards AI investors rather than sales executives. Investors are happy to pay for fun sci-fi stories about the future of AI, whereas salespeople actually need to sell something in the present.

Have you ever wanted an AI slop plugin for your CRM? This seems really strange because it&#x27;s obviously a good feature, if leads come in you definitely do want to be able to automatically get information on that prospect. Perhaps a call out to a linkedin API or some data broker who curates a reliable and detailed list of technical data on companies in your industry. There&#x27;s clearly value in that. But what if instead of that useful reliable data, you put AI slop in there.<p>What Net Promoter Score impact will I have by having the first message I send to a prospective customer be AI slop?<p>I totally understand you want to AI slop loads of work, but the first interaction with a customer I would think would be a key time that you don&#x27;t want to prioritize cost cutting?

Optimistic outlook: Fake busywork jobs will not exist by 2030.<p>Pessimistic outlook: Fake busywork jobs will not exist by 2030.

We&#x27;ve been through this, folks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theautopian.com&#x2F;chevy-dealers-ai-chatbot-allegedly-recommended-fords-gave-free-access-to-chatgpt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theautopian.com&#x2F;chevy-dealers-ai-chatbot-alleged...</a>

My company does AI Sales Lead Follow-up, and doing this ethically and effectively is a much more complicated problem than they suggest here.<p>Examples... What time zone should we be following up in or offering times in What salesperson should be assigned (aka whose calendar are we using) Does the prospect ask a question in the form, do you trust an AI to answer that question? Do you need to place a phone call? Do you need to send a text (B2C) How are you gonna do risk management (aka removing people who don&#x27;t want more contact) How does this interface with the existing systems Are you going to let users change the prompts, how, what happens when they make a mistake<p>Many of these are messy sequential problems where solving each one reveals two more, and trial and error is the only way to get it right.<p>Which brings up the ultimate question, do you want someone to train their AI system on your sales leads?

This isn&#x27;t as big of a breakthrough as it looks like, and I&#x27;m not sure who this is for.<p>There is already a heap of automation and tooling for inbound lead gen that ISRs use along with tools to easily research people&#x2F;companies&#x2F;org charts&#x2F;etc.<p>Plug-ins for Salesforce also exist that do much of this once new leads are entered into the tenant (and they&#x27;re also investing big dollars to AI-ify that flow).<p>Finally, inbound is a low-quality funnel compared to connecting through relationships or qualified leads from conferences and the like, so while, yes, this &quot;could&quot; augment a $45k&#x2F;yr ISR role, inbound lead gen&#x2F;lead qual is only a small part of what ISRs do.

Soon, we will need a tarpit for robot calls.

Impressive demonstration, that’s clearly a huge help to sales folks. But I’ve already been ignoring a lot of the automated CRM emails that get sent out because they lack any sort of personal touch or interest, and I recognize it’s just an automated email to get me through their pipeline. Is this going to help with that sentiment?

Honestly, that demo was pretty weak.<p>If 2025 is really going to be the “year of agents”, then they need to do better than this.

everything that is demonstrated can already easily be done via API calls without any special foundation model, right?

Are they demoing API capabilities, or moving up the stack due to low moat for foundation models?

Hubspot does most of this already?

Meh, pretty basic. Most SaaS businesses have something like this in place already.<p>Closing inbound leads is relatively easy, since they&#x27;ve already shown active interest... The challenge I&#x27;m struggling with is (cold) lead generation: finding leads (and how to contact them) that match well with the service you&#x27;re offering.<p>There are a lot of dubious scraping tools and B2B lead databases, but I feel like it should now be relatively easy to build a reliable web crawler &amp; lead generator ... Does anyone know state of the art open source tools or services for this?

anyone care to provide another link where I can read about this? Twitter&#x2F;X is blocked and I have no intentions to unblock it.

Prompt injection is unsolved. the end.