AI avatars are moving beyond text chat to multimodal interactions, including audio and visual product demos directly on the website. They handle initial discovery and qualification conversations that can last for many minutes. This provides sales reps with rich context, allowing them to transform their first human interaction into a closing call, collapsing the sales cycle.

Don't just replace human tasks with AI. Deploy AI agents to handle leads your sales team ignores, like small deals or low-scored prospects. This untapped segment, as SaaStr found with a 15% ticket revenue lift, represents significant growth potential by filling a gap in your GTM process that humans create themselves.

The problem with AI agents isn't getting them to work; it's managing their success. Once deployed, they operate 24/7, generating a high volume of responses and meetings. Your biggest challenge will shift from outreach capacity to your human team's ability to keep up with the AI's constant activity and output.

AI can analyze a customer's support history to predict their behavior. For instance, if a customer consistently calls about shipping delays, an AI agent can proactively contact them with an update before they reach out, transforming a reactive, negative interaction into a positive customer experience.

An advanced inbound AI agent does more than book meetings. By ingesting your website, tracking visitor behavior, and having contextual conversations, it provides the sales team with such deep pre-qualification that the initial discovery call becomes unnecessary, allowing reps to jump directly into problem-solving.

Stop thinking of sales, marketing, and support as separate functions with separate tools. AI agents are blurring these lines. A support interaction becomes a lead gen opportunity, and a marketing email can be sent by a 'sales' tool. Prepare for a unified go-to-market operational model.

A primary AI agent interacts with the customer. A secondary agent should then analyze the conversation transcripts to find patterns and uncover the true intent behind customer questions. This feedback loop provides deep insights that can be used to refine sales scripts, marketing messages, and the primary agent's programming.

The most significant near-term impact of voice AI will be in call centers. Rather than simply replacing agents, the technology will first elevate their effectiveness and productivity. Concurrently, voice bots will handle initial queries, solving the common pain point of long wait times and improving overall customer experience.

By building a custom AI agent for inbound lead qualification, Vercel reduced its inbound SDR team from ten people to one. The agent, which cost only $1,000 per year to run, maintained conversion rates while decreasing response time and number of touches needed.