Gong's Amit Bendov on Powering Your Company Brain

Gong's Amit Bendov on Powering Your Company Brain

Amit Bendov started Gong on a bet most people thought was backwards: the truth about a deal does not live in the CRM, it lives in the conversation. A decade and $500M+ in ARR later, that idea looks obvious. He has built one of the most AI-native companies in enterprise software on it. And yet he is the guy telling everyone to be careful. Not "use AI less," he is emphatic that you should use it a lot, but don't believe the hype, and don't automate the parts that need a human. No autonomous AI SDRs ("BS," in his words). Do not cut headcount and call it an AI strategy. What is left for people, he argues, is judgment, taste, and accountability. In this episode of Agents of Scale, Wade Foster and Amit cover: - Why the CRM was always "a source of a truth," not the source of truth, and why he hasn't logged into one in years - The "company brain": how Gong now writes its own battle cards, onboarding, and marketing content from real won and lost deals instead of hypotheticals - Why he calls autonomous AI SDRs "BS," and exactly where AI should stop in the sales process - The layoff trap: why "we cut half the company because of AI" is often "not the whole truth" - How the SDR, CSM, and AE roles merge back into one AI-armed, full-cycle seller, and what made them split in the first place - Why AI is a work revolution, not an IT revolution, and why "our enemy is drudgery and ignorance, not the CRM" - The 75% problem: most reps spend a fraction of their time actually selling, and what happens when you halve the waste - Why data is the moat, not the models, and why capturing everything compliantly is the genuinely hard part - Surviving the 2023 "sales tech winter," being declared dead, and ten straight quarters of re-acceleration since This is a conversation about what a revenue org actually looks like when AI absorbs the busywork, and why the most AI-bullish person in the room is also the most careful about where he points it.

Veed's Sabba Keynejad: 99% of Companies Shouldn't Build Their Own AI Model

Sabba Keynejad, co-founder and CEO of Veed.io, says 99% of companies shouldn't build their own AI model. Veed did it anyway. Sabba joins Wade Foster and Dan Slagen (SVP Marketing at Zapier) on Agents of Scale for a grounded conversation about the state of video AI. Why it's still 2-3 years behind LLMs. Why Veed built Fabric 1.0 despite every reason not to. And what most companies get wrong about AI video, YouTube, and creativity itself. In this episode: - Why video AI is 2-3 years behind LLMs - Why 99% of companies shouldn't build their own model - The "backed into a corner" Fabric 1.0 story - Why AI slop is a creation problem, not a technology problem - The 0.5-second rule for video retention - Why SaaS companies are sleeping on YouTube - How AI lowers the barrier to creativity without replacing creators Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and builders turning AI from experiment into infrastructure.

Brand Is Back: Guy Yalif on Marketing in the Agent Era

Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, joins Wade Foster on Agents of Scale to discuss what that means for marketers, how the playbook is changing, and why your SEO team is already your AEO team. Guy's point: AEO is a natural evolution of SEO, not a replacement. But the work is real. Content shifts from keywords to questions. Authority shifts from backlinks to consensus in plain text. Brand and PR are back because LLMs look for what shows up consistently. And agents are not here to read your site, they are here to take action. In this episode: * Why LLM traffic converts 6x better (and why it is not a blip) * The four shifts from SEO to AEO * Why brand is back in the AEO era * Google's WebMCP spec: when agents stop reading and start doing * Brand guidelines as AI guardrails, not static PDFs * Guy's six-level AI maturity model for marketing teams * Individual AI vs. institutional AI: why individual wins don't automatically scale Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and builders turning AI from experiment into infrastructure.

Lovable's Ryan Meadows on the New GTM Playbook

Ryan Meadows joins Wade Foster and Dan Slagen on Agents of Scale to talk about how his revenue org is being rebuilt from the ground up: no traditional BDR team, AI-assisted outbound, customer feedback shipped in minutes, and creativity as the new hiring signal. Ryan's point: when your product lets almost anyone build software, you can't run the old playbook. You have to throw away 70-80% of it. AI handles account ID and outreach. Humans handle quality, creativity, deployment, and change management. And pace becomes the only operating metric that matters. In this episode: - Why Lovable hasn't hired a traditional BDR team - The AI BDR workflow: human-in-loop → approval rate → autonomous - The 80% admin problem that turned Ryan into a Lovable customer - Hiring for creativity over function - Feedback to shipped feature in minutes - Enterprise adoption: governance, permissions, and the "co-founder" framing - Why executives moving into AI companies need to drop the old playbook - "Everything is pace" as the operating question Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and builders turning AI from experiment into infrastructure.

Eric Ries on Vibe Coding and Building Incorruptible Companies

Fifteen years after The Lean Startup, Eric Ries is watching a new generation of founders rediscover and stress-test the core ideas behind build-measure-learn. AI has made the build step radically faster. Code that used to take weeks can now appear in minutes. But Eric's warning is sharp: when building gets cheaper, measurement and learning become the new bottlenecks. Teams that use AI to close the learning loop are flying. Teams that use AI to outsource their judgment are building what he calls "slop factories." In this episode, Wade and Eric cover: * Why the Lean Startup feels more relevant, not less, in the AI era * The difference between vibe coding and engineering * Why LLMs can become dopamine machines that make you feel more productive than you are * How to use AI to learn instead of outsourcing your learning to the machine * Why token maxing is the wrong metric — and validated learning is still the right one * How AI may collapse old functional silos between product, design, engineering, and marketing * Why most founders have never read their corporate charter — and why that matters * Eric's new book Incorruptible, and how governance becomes the art of organizational soul craft * The Costco hot dog story, Cloudflare's free encryption decision, and why "harder is easier" Check out Eric's brand new book Incorruptible: https://incorruptible.co [https://incorruptible.co/]