Don't expect an AI agent to invent a successful sales process. First, have your human team identify and document what works—effective emails, scripts, and objection handling. Then, train the AI on this proven playbook to execute it flawlessly and at scale. The AI is a scaling tool, not a strategist from day one.

Integrate AI agents directly into core workflows like Slack and institutionalize them as the "first line of response." By tagging the agent on every new bug, crash, or request, it provides an initial analysis or pull request that humans can then review, edit, or build upon.

Instead of replacing top performers, AI should be used to do work humans physically cannot. Salesforce targeted a backlog of 100 million 'orphan leads,' using an AI agent to work through 8,000 dormant leads in three weeks. This generated $500,000 in pipeline that would have otherwise been zero.

AI is not a 'set and forget' solution. An agent's effectiveness directly correlates with the amount of time humans invest in training, iteration, and providing fresh context. Performance will ebb and flow with human oversight, with the best results coming from consistent, hands-on management.

Unlike older sales tools, AI agents shouldn't be handed to individual SDRs to manage. This approach leads to failure. Instead, centralize the strategy: a core team must own agent training, contact routing, and performance tuning to ensure a consistent and effective GTM motion across the entire organization.

Don't fear deploying a specialized, multi-agent customer experience. Even if a customer interacts with several different AI agents, it's superior to being bounced between human agents who lose context. Each AI agent can retain the full conversation history, providing a more coherent and efficient experience.

To prevent constant interruptions from automated tasks, schedule recurring AI agents to align with your work week. For example, receive competitive research on Fridays before planning and support summaries on Mondays before the team meeting. This integrates agent output into your natural workflow.

You can't delegate AI tool implementation to your sales team or a generalist RevOps person. Success requires a dedicated, technical owner in-house—a 'GTM engineer' or 'AI nerd.' This person must be capable of building complex campaigns and working closely with the vendor's team to train and deploy the agent effectively.

Adopt a 'more intelligent, more human' framework. For every process made more intelligent through AI automation, strategically reinvest the freed-up human capacity into higher-touch, more personalized customer activities. This creates a balanced system that enhances both efficiency and relationships.