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.

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.

Instead of fully automating conversations and risking sounding robotic, use AI to provide real-time suggestions and prompts to a human sales rep. This scales expertise and consistency without sacrificing the human touch needed to close deals.

Avoid using AI to create sales outreach from scratch ('black pen'). Instead, use it as an editor ('red pen'). Apply the 10-80-10 rule: 10% human-led prompting, 80% AI-driven task execution, and a final 10% human refinement. This maintains quality while boosting efficiency.

Outbound AI tools fail without dedicated human oversight. Qualified found success by having a person manage the AI agent daily, ensuring its personalized emails are better than a human's. The secret is treating the AI as a tool to be managed, not an autonomous replacement.

AI's power is not in creating successful strategies from scratch, but in scaling your existing best practices. An AI agent cannot make a broken process work. First, identify what messaging and campaigns are effective, then use AI to execute them at a near-infinite scale, 24/7.

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.

An unexpected benefit of setting up an AI system is that it forces you to review customer interaction playbooks. Companies often discover their official scripts and processes are outdated, leading to crucial updates that improve both the AI's performance and the human team's effectiveness.

Many companies fail with AI prospecting because their outputs are generic. The key to success isn't the AI tool but the quality of the data fed into it and relentless prompt iteration. It took the speakers six months—not six weeks—to outperform traditional methods, highlighting the need for patience and deep customization with sales team feedback.