Jason Lemkin: prediction

Transcript context

…What about phone calls? It's a great question and we should have hit it. Obviously, there's plenty of robocall and regulatory issues around it. Certainly a lot of startups are breaking the rules anyway. I would say this, listen, there's phone calls and there's even SMS. There's limits to how much SMS you can automate. A lot of old school businesses don't even check emails. I mean, you're working on the shop floor. So those are unanswered questions. People are breaking the rules. OpenAI still breaks the rules. Now it's licensing Disney content. It used to just borrow Disney content. We will see. So I don't know the answers to that. I think in Europe, it'll certainly be much lower than in the US, but startups are going to push the limits. They're going to push the limits on what we can do with AI calls, AI enhanced, whether a human's kind of on the line, but AI is doing all the work, maybe that's legal, right? Getting more consent for SMS than we typically get. So to think that the typical barriers to robocalling and SMS that startups aren't going to bend the rules in the age of AI, I'm dubious. But it's a good question. It's harder to do. The one thing I will add is, and it's a good objection to all of this, and I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too. But if you talk to the startups you'd invest in, Lenny, fewer of them are good at outbound phone calls than you'd think. We had many of the heads of revenue at Rippling, speak at SaaStr, the old CRO worked on my team and others. They were late to develop cold calling because we never did it back in the day. The CRO was on my team. So we had to bring in someone that had worked with Sam Blond at Brex who had done it. It is a real art to pick up the phone and close business. It is a specialized skill. And so if that's your specialized skill and there's no way for AI to benefit, so be it. But I don't think for most tech calls that that is as impactful as we pretend it is. I don't think most of the startups you and I work with and most of the folks listen to this do not close the majority of their revenue with cold human cold calls. It is a craft that works, but man, you got to be good at it. Yeah, this line somewhere that if you can close on a text message, AI can close it.…

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