Hello There:

Last July, authors Zeya Yang, Marc Andrusko, and Angela Strange at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) wrote an insightful blog post entitled “‘Death of a Salesforce’: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech.”

The post begins with an insightful statement of fact:

In its post, a16z offers a market map, “AI Applications in Sales,” listing 72 companies participating in this segment. And it’s all fresh faces and new names — not one of the group of 72 is a legacy player. No HubSpot, no LinkedIn Sales Navigator, no MailChimp, no Pipedrive, no Salesforce and no Zoho.

With over 14,000 digital marketing tools flooding the market, it’s telling that the biggest names in marketing have gone quiet on AI.

With some editorial tinkering by yours truly, the landscape, according to a16z, looks as follows:

• Intelligent prospecting – Dubbed “the lifeblood” of any sales force, pipeline building is the most obvious AI sales application. a16z cites New York-based Clay, an AI research agent that generates lead lists for sellers. Clay scored a $4 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital and has now raised a total of $102 million. Another company that adds valuable context when chasing a deal is Mexico-based Naro Technologies, which parses sellers’ emails and surfaces relevant company documentation to respond to buyer questions.

• Agentic workers – a16z holds its portfolio company 11x up as an example of an AI sales development representative (SDR) capable of booking meetings with prospects. 11x has no “Pricing” page, so it’s aimed at the enterprise market. However, this segment includes several other tools, including Ava from San Francisco-based Artisan AI, Sparkbase’s Cara from Netherlands-based AI Workforce B.V, and Persana from San Francisco-based Persana AI, which has raised $2.3 million led by Y Combinator. Read on to learn more about these tools.

• CRM automation – Day acts as a Zoom assistant, joining seller conversations with customers to capture context and refresh its knowledge base. It then summarizes insights on customer “pages” that can be accessed by the sales team and other company members. In the enterprise segment, People.ai’s SalesAI product offers a unified data model that can span multiple CRMs to automate such sales activities as account planning and content generation.

The greatest opportunity lies in the agentic workers layer, although we don’t see why this can’t be rolled up into a single solution offering intelligent prospecting, SDR agents, CRM, and analytics.

Artisan AI Ava

Our initial exploration of this field involved trialing Ava from Artisan in early 2024. To use Ava, however, required “warming-up” a separate domain because its AI agent outreach technique is considered spammy.

We asked company Founder & CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack whether this setup was still required, but we did not receive a response. At the time, Artisan was charging somewhere between $200 and $400 per month for Ava. The company has since adopted a “Request Pricing” model.

Constant Closer

The newest entry is from West Hollywood, Calif.-based Constant Closer. Company Founder and CEO Jun Loayza tells me that customers are “seeing incremental sales that their current email marketing campaign, on MailChimp, Klaviyo, or ActiveCampaign, just can’t convert.”

Persana AI

Co-founded by LinkedIn veterans Rush Shahani and Sriya Maram, Persana AI’s $2.3M seed funding round attracted investors such as Y Combinator, Race Capital, and Stage 2 Capital. Unlike the competition, Persana offers a lower cost of entry, with its $85/mo. Starter plan.

Sparkbase Cara

We also reached out to via email and Slack to AI Workforce B.V. Co-Founder & CEO Jan De Wulf but have yet to hear back. Its sales agent, dubbed Cara, uses sources like LinkedIn, Apollo, CRM data, and CSV files to reach out to prospects. Sparkbase costs $197/mo. for 3,500 AI research tasks or $247/mo. for 7,500 tasks.

All this activity can only mean one thing. The era of the telemarketing representative is rapidly drawing to a close.

Thanks for reading,

In every issue, we feature a trend chosen from our Trendscape 2024 list of top trends. We hope you enjoy this new resource.

Ed.: On the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pew Research released a study showing how divided a nation we have become due to a disease that killed some 2 million Americans left and right. The lasting impression made by this sudden infection vaulted Covid to the 15th spot on the Trendscape 2024 list.

15. Covid

The masks have come off, but the scars remain. Half a decade after COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill, Americans still can’t agree on what hit them. Pew Research’s latest survey exposes a nation united by experience but divided by political interpretation. While everyone lived through the same storm, we still tell ourselves different versions of how the clouds gathered and who was really steering the ship.

The most striking finding is the deep and persistent partisan divide in how Americans view COVID-19. These divisions affect perceptions of the virus’ severity, the necessity of preventative measures, vaccine attitudes, and retrospective evaluations of pandemic responses.

Continue reading on Ubertrends…

The Jacobyte is Back! 😂 

Ed.: Meet The Jacobyte — an irreverent and sharp-tongued columnist who delivers an unfiltered mix of innuendo, rumors, and biting satire.

🤖 HOW INHUMANE! Jaco has learned that Humane abruptly shut down its Ai Pin service with just 10 days’ notice:

Can you say, “What’s wrong with this picture?” little boys and girls? 😵‍💫 This for a $700 device with a $24/month service charge! But Jaco is very relieved to learn that after February 28, Ai Pin users will still be able to check their battery level! Will wonders never cease? 😍

🙈 Of course, who else but HP would be dumb enough to fork over $116 million for a company headed up by someone described by an Apple insider as “an utter fraud.” Then again, he might fit right in with a culture that immediately disables your paid-for printer when you cancel your ink subscription. 🤬

🙉 Speaking of pinheads, Jaco has just one question! Is Apple AI boss John Giannandrea still employed?!? It has been like, what, 13 years since that totally poopy Siri debuted. And the asshat can still not deliver an improved Siri on time?

According to Bloomberg, the long-promised improvements for Siri are facing “engineering problems and software bugs,” which is threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The only engineering problem Jaco sees is a lack of coding logic at Apple:

if Giannandrea = employed: 
    print(“Pink Slip”)

🙈 Clay, the folks that promise “100+ premium data sources and AI research agents in one platform,” spent all last week hyping the crap out of a “special event” where they were going to announce “a sweet surprise for you.” Turns out the sweet surprise was a “community equity offering” to address nagging “can I invest?” questions from customers and partners. After Clay raised $102 million from Sequoia and Meritech, Jaco thinks, why do they need that? 🙄

🪙 Stay tuned for a special event next week to announce “Triple C” — the Clay Crypto Coin, which will allow all you suckers to line our pockets for a good cause! 😂

🤣 Kudos to The New Yorker’s Brendan Loper, who perfectly summed up this past week with this “hands in the cookie jar” cartoon:

🎯 Remember, The Jacobyte digs rumors, particularly when it concerns people in high places, or just high people! 🤩

Send your rumors, tips and contributions to: [email protected].