Speaker: Kaveh Rostampor, CEO, Planhat
Session Content: Kaveh opens with the data behind the anxiety: roughly 40% of leaders surveyed by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum expect AI to shrink headcount, yet the average company now runs 118 applications, up from 80 in 2020. Departments exist because humans need to specialize, hand off and sleep; agents don't. So the point-agent model of a sales agent, a renewals agent and a support agent, each seeing only part of the customer, will give way to a single commercial "brain" that holds memory, context and history, with agents running on top and commercial operators steering them.
His advice for staying relevant has three parts.
First, know your customers better than any system can: build trust, take them to lunch, and automate the long tail so you have time for the accounts that matter.
Second, build your own workforce: the 10x leverage engineers get from AI is now available to commercial roles, so set up agents and alerts across the lifecycle.
Third, learn the whole business, not just your function, so you can be the operator who does with one or two people and software what used to take five.
Note that there are no session slides for this presentation.
