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This is pretty basic for a sales agent. Most of this flow has been available as sales enablement tech for > 10 years through Salesforce & Hubspot plugins. Even

This is pretty basic for a sales agent. Most of this flow has been available as sales enablement tech for > 10 years through Salesforce & Hubspot plugins. 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. Operator did blow me away though. That is next level compared to Selenium and Puppeteer. While this sales agent feels very me-too.

swyx 2y ago
y'all dont seem to understand. openai has built the most consequential brand for being frontier in AI. the demand for new AI tooling at all levels is through the roof. Hubspot and Marketo (lets call them the OGs) can add AI all they want, OpenAI will at least get a foot in that door, and yeah they will never be as focused on this customer profile as the OGs, but they will 1) be good enough for many 2) be first to market on capabilities that the OGs will not be 3) have context that the OGs don't (while also true that the OGs have context OpenAI will never have). Even if this specific one flops, OpenAI has launched 2 agents in the first 2 months of this year. this is the 3rd. they're accelerating to a very exciting horizontal portfolio.
- deleted 2y ago
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- arnvald 2y ago
  IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added. What kind of big company will abandon Marketo because OpenAI launched an agent? OpenAI misses everything else that Marketo has, so they'll just wait a few months until Marketo adds the same feature
  - thirdacc 2y ago
    >IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added. this is under appreciated. I remember people declaring Perplexity.ai doomed when ChatGPT search came out. Yet Perplexity is doing better than ever, with a service that lets you search with any major LLM, even DeepSeek R1. Aidan McLaughlin, who now works for OpenAI, wrote a nice essay about this: https://aidanmclaughlin.notion.site/The-Zero-Day-Flaw-in-AI-Companies-b164d5eb97324a6d80252ee6b726d3eb https://aidanmclaughlin.notion.site/The-Zero-Day-Flaw-in-AI-...
DebtDeflation 2y ago
I'm a consultant and my team has been building interactive "sales agents" using tech like Google Dialogflow, Amazon Lex, and Microsoft Bot Famework/LUIS since circa 2018-2019. It does feel like we're reinventing the wheel with some of this stuff, except letting the LLM do things that used to be handled with deterministic logic in an orchestration layer. Given the current capabilities of the tech, I'd still prefer to do things the old way and only inject the LLM at the point in the workflow where I need to actually generate content, like for the email body. Rather than giving the LLM tools and telling it to "figure things out" and execute end to end.
signatoremo 2y ago
How much do those tools cost? And if they are gonna use OpenAI's tools anyway, adding a similarly capable sales agent at a fractional cost would be a win. It's the same story that has happened with phone camera. It's became capable enough, at much lower price, since everyone already has a phone, that standalone camera is a rare sight nowadays.

swyx 2y ago

y'all dont seem to understand. openai has built the most consequential brand for being frontier in AI. the demand for new AI tooling at all levels is through the roof. Hubspot and Marketo (lets call them the OGs) can add AI all they want, OpenAI will at least get a foot in that door, and yeah they will never be as focused on this customer profile as the OGs, but they will 1) be good enough for many 2) be first to market on capabilities that the OGs will not be 3) have context that the OGs don't (while also true that the OGs have context OpenAI will never have). Even if this specific one flops, OpenAI has launched 2 agents in the first 2 months of this year. this is the 3rd. they're accelerating to a very exciting horizontal portfolio.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
arnvald 2y ago
IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added. What kind of big company will abandon Marketo because OpenAI launched an agent? OpenAI misses everything else that Marketo has, so they'll just wait a few months until Marketo adds the same feature
- thirdacc 2y ago
  >IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added. this is under appreciated. I remember people declaring Perplexity.ai doomed when ChatGPT search came out. Yet Perplexity is doing better than ever, with a service that lets you search with any major LLM, even DeepSeek R1. Aidan McLaughlin, who now works for OpenAI, wrote a nice essay about this: https://aidanmclaughlin.notion.site/The-Zero-Day-Flaw-in-AI-Companies-b164d5eb97324a6d80252ee6b726d3eb https://aidanmclaughlin.notion.site/The-Zero-Day-Flaw-in-AI-...

DebtDeflation 2y ago

I'm a consultant and my team has been building interactive "sales agents" using tech like Google Dialogflow, Amazon Lex, and Microsoft Bot Famework/LUIS since circa 2018-2019. It does feel like we're reinventing the wheel with some of this stuff, except letting the LLM do things that used to be handled with deterministic logic in an orchestration layer. Given the current capabilities of the tech, I'd still prefer to do things the old way and only inject the LLM at the point in the workflow where I need to actually generate content, like for the email body. Rather than giving the LLM tools and telling it to "figure things out" and execute end to end.

signatoremo 2y ago

How much do those tools cost? And if they are gonna use OpenAI's tools anyway, adding a similarly capable sales agent at a fractional cost would be a win. It's the same story that has happened with phone camera. It's became capable enough, at much lower price, since everyone already has a phone, that standalone camera is a rare sight nowadays.