The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions


In Episode 2 of The Agents, Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, share the trials, tribulations, victories, and minor defeats of managing 20+ AI agents in production. With three humans and 20+ AI agents now driving more revenue and output than SaaStr did with 20+ FTEs in 2020, this weekly series goes deep on what's actually working, breaking, and changing in the agentic era.
This week's episode covers:
00:00 Welcome to The Agents Episode 2 01:00 Lazy Agents: How an AI agent silently deleted Amelia's session from the SaaStr Annual top 10 06:30 When agents blame the API: agentic accountability and the need for daily QA 09:00 The 60% Solution Problem: Why HubSpot's new AEO tool failed and got vibe coded better in 10 minutes 14:00 Figma Make vs. Replit, Lovable, and v0: Why no one will pay for "good enough" AI products 17:30 Classic Figma is now Grandpa Software: Production breakdowns and why Illustrator's agent is winning 21:00 Stealth Churn in Canva, ChatGPT, and beyond: The hidden metric every leader needs to watch 27:00 Why Claude Cowork created lock-in and killed ChatGPT usage for Amelia 30:00 Forward Deployed Engineers vs. Self-Serve: Why FDE light is the answer for SMB AI deployments 36:00 Vector breaks the agent freeze: How a 15-minute CEO-led deployment won SaaStr's business 40:00 The Agent API Test: Which APIs work best with AI agents (Salesforce wins, Marketo fails) 46:00 Resend, 11 Labs, and OpenRouter: The new gold standard for agent-friendly APIs 50:00 The Marketo collapse: When your marketing automation platform can't honor unsubscribes 55:00 Building an AI VP of Finance: Why collections is the next agent frontier at SaaStr 1:00:00 SaaStr Annual 2026 is three weeks away: May 12-14 in the SF Bay Area
Topics covered: AI agents, agent management, lazy agents, stealth churn, vibe coding, Replit, Lovable, v0, Figma Make, HubSpot AEO, Claude Cowork, forward deployed engineers, FDE, self-serve AI, Vector, Salesforce, Marketo, Resend, 11 Labs, agent APIs, AI VP of Finance, collections automation, SaaStr Annual 2026
SaaStr Annual 2026 | May 12-14 | Come learn how to build, deploy, and manage AI agents from the leaders at Salesforce, Replit, Vercel, Cloudflare, and more. Register at saastr.ai
Subscribe for weekly episodes of The Agents and the SaaStr Podcast.
#AIAgents #SaaS #SaaStr #AgenticAI #VibeCoding

SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This?


Welcome to The Agents, a new weekly series where Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, pull back the curtain on everything happening across SaaStr's live agentic stack. Every week, all the bumps, breakthroughs, and real talk from running 20+ AI agents in production.
In the debut episode: the meta question nobody talks about after you vibe code your first app, which is who actually maintains it? Amelia Lerutte and Jason Lemkin walk through three live examples from the week including a preview environment outage that stumped both the agents and the humans, micro hallucinations in their AI VP of Marketing that had it reporting 44% ahead of plan one morning and 11% the next, and a model regression in their pitch deck analyzer that nobody changed a line of code to cause. They also get into a story about Clay's agent steering them toward a 5x credit spend, why no lead left behind is the simplest and most important unlock of the entire agentic journey, what happened when Salesforce swapped Agent Force for Qualified on their homepage the day the acquisition closed, and how QB1, SaaStr's AI VP of Customer Success, caught sponsors uploading placeholder graphics to fake a print deadline.
If you're on the agentic journey or about to start, this is the show.

SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
Amelia and Jason walk through QB1, SaaStr's vibe-coded AI VP of Customer Success that started as a simple sponsor portal replacement and evolved into a fully agentic customer management system. The result: 70% fewer billable hours, 10x more customer engagement, and a hundred sponsors getting hyper-personalized weekly emails in minutes instead of days. They break down exactly how it was built, what broke, and how you can reverse-engineer it for your own business.
Slides linked here. 
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Hey everybody - we are just about 30 DAYS out from the biggest B2B and AI event of the year. SaaStr Annual is coming back to the SF Bay Area this May, and if you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for?
This is where the real deals get done. 68% VP-level and above. 36% CEOs and founders. 25% AI-first professionals. This isn't a conference, this is THE room where S-tier decision makers show up to figure out what's next.
But here's the deal: ticket prices go up FAST. Like, actually hundreds. Don't be that person who waits and then pays full price.
Lock in your spot TODAY. Go to podcast.saastrannual.com and use my exclusive discount for SaaStr AI SF 2026.
May is closer than you think. See you there.

SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint
In this episode, three revenue leaders at very different stages of AI adoption get real about what's actually working, what's embarrassingly broken, and why nobody should be doubling quota just yet.
Panelists:
Greg Beltzer — Chief Customer Officer, AgentForce (Salesforce)
Ashley Wilson — Co-founder, Momentum by Salesforce
Marchelle Mooney — VP of Sales, Mangomint
Amelia Lerutte - Chief AI Officer, SaaStr
They cover:
Why every company has leads they never followed up on (yes, even Salesforce)
The "chainsaw without the cover off" problem with AI tool rollouts
How Mangomint uses AI to fix terrible salon logos in minutes — and why it freaks customers out
Why Marchelle is not raising quota in 2026, even though she could
The real resistance to AI adoption (hint: it's not just the CIO)
How Momentum is using AI to democratize language for SDRs in Argentina
What retention looks like when AI is listening for slow-drip churn signals
Why your data is probably worse than you think — and what that means for agents
Key takeaway: AI won't magically fix your sales org. Your data has to be clean, your people need training, and you have to rethink workflows from first principles — not just bolt AI onto the old playbook.
Recorded live at SaaStr London.


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Hey everybody, the biggest B2B + AI event of the year will be back - SaaStr AI in the SF Bay Area, aka the SaaStr Annual, will be back in May 2026. 
 
With 68% VP-level and above, 36% CEOs and founders and a growing 25% AI-first professional, this is the very best of the best S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SaaStr each year.  
 
But here's the reality, folks: the longer you wait, the higher ticket prices can get. Early bird tickets are available now, but once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more so don't wait. 
 
Lock in your spot today by going to podcast.saastrannual.com to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.

What happens when you go all-in on AI tools in a completely remote organization at scale?
That's where Marchelle Mooney, VP of Sales at MangoMint, found herself. 
MangoMint is vertical SaaS for salons and spas with a ~$4K ACV and a five-day sales cycle. Not exactly the profile you'd expect to be running one of the most disciplined remote revenue organizations in SaaS. But Marchelle's team is closing in on a 7.2x ARR-to-OTE ratio, has increased win rates 7% in two quarters, and has given reps 16 hours back per month. All fully remote, all with lean headcount.
In this session, Marchelle breaks down the exact three-layer AI Rigor Stack she built to get there: the Clarity Layer, the Cadence Layer, and the Co-Pilot Layer. She also walks through the full tool stack (Notion, Slack, Salesforce, Snowflake, Sigma, Momentum) and how data flows automatically to reps without them ever hunting for a dashboard.
The core insight: the problem was never the tools. It was fragmentation. And the path to fixing it runs through subtraction, not addition.
If you're running a remote or hybrid revenue org and feel like you're running fast but not getting anywhere, this one's for you.

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Hey everybody - we are LESS THAN 60 DAYS out from the biggest B2B and AI event of the year. SaaStr Annual is coming back to the SF Bay Area this May, and if you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for?
This is where the real deals get done. 68% VP-level and above. 36% CEOs and founders. 25% AI-first professionals. This isn't a conference, this is THE room where S-tier decision makers show up to figure out what's next.
But here's the deal: ticket prices go up FAST. Like, actually hundreds. Don't be that person who waits and then pays full price.
Lock in your spot TODAY. Go to podcast.saastrannual.com and use my exclusive discount for SaaStr AI SF 2026.
May is closer than you think. See you there.