On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Jason Ambrose of People.ai about what “agentic AI” actually means, why sales data is messier than most people think, and why blindly trusting large language models is a mistake.

People.ai has been around long enough to see multiple waves of enterprise software come and go. Now it’s repositioning itself squarely in the agent era.

Most CRM systems tell you what was entered. They don’t tell you what’s actually happening.

People.ai takes a different approach. Instead of relying on manual updates, their AI analyzes the communications that define modern sales, emails, Slack messages, meetings, chat transcripts. The system maps that activity to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

That sounds straightforward until you scale it up.

If you’re a startup selling to a small business, maybe one salesperson is talking to one buyer about one product. That’s simple. But when Microsoft sells to Verizon, you might have dozens of people on both sides, across legal, technical, procurement, and executive roles. Conversations happen everywhere. Mapping that complexity into a clean CRM record is hard.

That’s where People.ai claims it shines. It uses its own AI models, trained on billions of transactions, to reconstruct what’s really going on inside a sales organization.

What Is an Agent, Really?

We talked about the shift from chatbots to agents.

A chatbot answers a question. An agent has an objective.

Jason framed it in terms of business process automation. Old-school automation works when the logic is predictable. If this, then that. Stay inside one system, follow a defined workflow.

Agents step in when reasoning is required. They cut across systems. They pursue a goal. They have to decide what to do next.

But that only works if they’re plugged into real expertise.

Jason made a useful distinction. Public LLMs are trained on public data. Enterprise expertise lives in private systems. If you want an agent to act intelligently inside a company, it needs access to proprietary data. That’s a big trust ask. You’re effectively saying, “Let our AI read your emails.”

That’s not a small decision.

Avoiding “Build Trust With Stakeholders”

Anyone who has used a generic LLM for business advice has seen the problem. You ask for guidance and you get vague platitudes. “Build trust.” “Accelerate the deal.” “Engage the customer.”

That’s not actionable.

Jason argues that this is where expert agents come in. Instead of spitting out generalized advice, they ground recommendations in specific deal data. Who hasn’t responded in three weeks? Which technical blocker hasn’t been addressed? Where did the last conversation stall?

Without that grounding, AI defaults to corporate fortune-cookie language.

The Capital Markets Reality

We also touched on fundraising.

SaaS is being repriced. Public markets adjusted first, and private markets followed. Companies that once enjoyed premium multiples are now being reevaluated in light of AI disruption.

Capital is flowing into AI-native plays. If you look like “just another SaaS company,” you need a credible AI story. If you genuinely sit at the center of AI transformation, you’re in a stronger position.

People.ai is not currently raising, but Jason sees the shift clearly. The market is asking who is being disrupted by AI and who is using it to build something new.

Is AI Replacing Jobs?

It’s the obvious question.

Jason’s take was pragmatic. Technology changes work. It always has. He remembers the early days of the web and the anxiety that came with it. Some jobs disappear. Most jobs change.

His line stuck with me: people should work with people, and let AI do the rest.

Sales, at its core, is still about relationships. AI can summarize, surface risks, and suggest next steps. It can’t replace trust, empathy, or judgment. At least not yet.

If you’re in sales and you haven’t started using AI, Jason’s advice is simple.

Start.

Use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever tool you prefer. Have it rewrite emails. Summarize meeting notes. Draft follow-ups.

But don’t copy and paste.

He pointed out something many executives are quietly thinking: if you send a clearly AI-generated email without tailoring it, you’re signaling that you didn’t invest the time. And if you didn’t invest the time, why should the recipient?

AI can amplify your work. It can’t replace the part that makes you human.

People.ai is betting that the future of sales is agentic, cross-system, and grounded in real communications data. Not just dashboards, but reasoning systems that understand what’s actually happening inside complex deals.

Whether you buy that vision or not, one thing is clear. The next phase of enterprise AI won’t be about novelty. It will be about integration, trust, and measurable outcomes.

And that’s a much harder problem than writing clever emails.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Innovators show about amazing people doing very cool things. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Jason Ambrose from People.ai. It’s agentic and it’s for sales teams, but why don’t you add to that, Jason, welcome.

Jason Ambrose (00:24.482)

Yeah, thanks, John. So what People.ai does is our AI figures out what’s happening in a sales organization by looking at the communications between your field and your customers. So we analyze emails, chat transcripts, meetings, Slack messages, and the like to turn that beyond just the data to what’s actually happening. How does that

how do you find the answers of what’s happening in the organization? And we provide that either to humans or to agents. So that’s been our big shift this year is to realize that the stuff that we were doing for humans in CRM is also very relevant when you have agents trying to figure out what’s happening in sales.

John Biggs (01:04.094)

So let’s explain agents to folks who might not even understand what’s going on. So the idea originally was that you had a chat bot. You asked it something, and it responded to you. But now we’re talking about agents, which are supposed to be autonomous to a degree. So how do you guys describe those, and how do you use them?

Jason Ambrose (01:24.086)

Yeah. And hey, look, you know, I may not have everything right on this too, but at least the way that I think about it is maybe starting from a business process automation, right? So, you know, for, for periods of time when we had predictable workflows and we knew, you know, sort of if then else, there’s not thinking that happens there, but we could automate work if that had to happen.

John Biggs (01:28.188)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Ambrose (01:48.302)

In the case of agents, that now becomes something where they have some chain of thought, they have some reasoning. So they know they have an objective or a purpose that they’re trying to work through. They have to figure out how to get that done. So when there’s a little bit more, you know, thinking, reasoning that needs to happen to figure out how to get that objective, that suits an agent. What I think we’re seeing with customers is they’re figuring out how to unlock that for

work that needs to get done across a lot of different systems, right? So, know, BPA, business process automation, or what you have in your workflow tools that tends to say within the silo of a system from data to business roles to presentation layer to humans. When you start to cut across the systems, that’s where there’s been big opportunities for agents.

John Biggs (02:37.214)

So in this particular case, you guys are focusing on sales leads, that sort of thing. So you basically take every single data point that you have and say, this person, I don’t know, emailed you two weeks ago and also was tweeting this and is interested in this. So why don’t you give him a ring? Is that generally how it works, or what’s the?

Jason Ambrose (02:56.376)

That’s yeah, that’s really close. Yeah. I think the difference is, you know, let’s think about two different types of selling, right? you could be a startup and you’re selling to a small business. That’s, know, pretty much one buyer. So, you know, if you think about it in the context of CRM, you’ve got one salesperson. You’re selling to one buyer at one account and you’re selling one product that that is pretty simple to figure out, right? Where it gets more complicated is if you’re.

Microsoft selling to Verizon just to pick two big companies. You might have 30 or 40 people or more on the Microsoft side. You might have 30 or 40 people on the Verizon side answering different technical questions, having different conversations about different elements of your business relationship and how you match those activities to records in CRM that represent, you know, here’s a person that we’re talking to, here’s the account that we’re talking to.

you know, here’s the specific sales opportunity that becomes really hard to do properly. And that’s, that’s where we, that’s where we shine. And that’s where we have, you know, pretty large customers like Red Hat, Verizon as a customer and some others.

John Biggs (04:09.712)

Would you be able to still do this without AI? Would this exist if we didn’t have this kind of, I don’t know, synthesis, right?

Jason Ambrose (04:15.798)

It would be really difficult, right? So we have our own AI that’s applied to do the math to figure this out. And it’s learned from looking at billions of transactions over the years, right? The second piece, I think, is how you integrate or interface with other systems. So you mentioned the chat interface. So a human does want to do that, right? So we put this alongside sales opportunity record.

If you want to get the full story, you can ask the chat bot, are the risks in these deals or what’s happening in this account? Now with MCP, that same type of interaction can happen from an agent to our system. So the agent asks those questions and works through its own reasoning model to ask those things. So if you want these agents to be effective, you do need AI helping them on their side with the reasoning and ours on our side answering those questions so that they get to an answer that’s actionable.

The thing we see that happens a lot is if you just try to throw LLMs at what’s happening, it’ll say things like, you know, build trust with a stakeholder, right? Or, you know, accelerate this deal. Like that doesn’t really do anything for you, right?

John Biggs (05:26.078)

See, that’s a good question. mean, it feels like traditional AI is kind of elides over a lot of information, right? It kind of says like, it’ll give you like, what a good idea. Well, I think that by moving forward this way, you’re going to do X, Z. How do you avoid that sort of like ham handed optimism that usually pops out of these things?

Jason Ambrose (05:47.446)

Yeah, I think that that’s where you see the place for what I would call expert agents, right? So some people call those like the first agent. so I’ve heard the metaphor of like, it’s a really smart intern. It doesn’t really know much, but it’s smart and figures things out. Right. So you have to work with proprietary data to be able to find meaningful answers and working within the enterprise, having the trust where the enterprise will allow you to go.

find that information and turn it into something useful to those agents within the enterprise is the important complementary piece to all of those. The LLMs are working off of all the public information, but that expertise really sits in the private information. So how do I, as a customer, get comfortable with allowing somebody else’s AI to look through all that stuff? It’s a big ask from us. Let us go read all your emails and provide these answers. There’s a lot to do there.

John Biggs (06:37.992)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

John Biggs (06:45.192)

So how is it raising for an AI company right now? I mean, you guys have been around a little bit, so you’re probably not looking right now. is it easier? Have you noticed that it was easier than, I don’t know, some of your other ventures?

Jason Ambrose (06:58.006)

Yeah, so you’re right. So we’re not looking right now. But I guess what I would see in the capital markets is certainly everything going on with SaaS. The way that I look at it is the market was pricing in success with SaaS that it’s re-evaluating. And you start with public markets, and that carries down into ABC rounds. And that capital shifting to AI right now, a lot of that is going to the big players.

The capital markets are saying AI is posing risk to these businesses that had it baked in. So we have to reflect that on the valuations. And we want to see the opportunities to say, how do we invest in AI and the potential that could be there in that? So to the extent that you fit in the latter case, I think you’re having an easier time with raises. If you fit into the former case, you have to tell the story of how you’re going from looking like a SASCO to looking like.

John Biggs (07:45.884)

Interesting.

Jason Ambrose (07:57.269)

know, NAIA play in this world.

John Biggs (08:00.53)

I don’t think you guys have this problem, but what would you say to folks who are saying, I don’t know, this is replacing our jobs, they’re laying us off because of this, et cetera.

Jason Ambrose (08:11.47)

Yeah, I think it’s changing. It’s like anything else, right? And you know, when you haven’t, I remember I was there in the early days on the internet, you know, when the webs first started coming out, I was actually building computer networks and downloaded Mosaic out for the first time it came out. And there was a lot of anxiety about what might change or whether it was going to change. think there was more skepticism back then of it’s this just a fad, is it really going to happen? But, you you think about people who were pushing around inter office mail, you know,

That went away, Print stuff that you were publishing. It’s not that the activities went away. It’s that they changed in the way that they were done. So I think it’s going to be simpler, similar, but also simpler in the sense, we talk about, I have this phrase, we want people to work with people in AI to do the rest, right? We’re not made to sit there and look at browsers and look at spreadsheets. We’re made to socialize and communicate. And that’s the stuff that I think.

particularly in the sales organization, we will keep doing and do more of. So in that sense, I think it will be better now. Can you say that AI is replacing or changing these jobs?

I guess to some extent that that’s a viewpoint that some people have, but I think there are some macro trends that are also behind it.

John Biggs (09:33.342)

What would you tell a, I don’t know, sales professional right now who needs to know a little bit about AI, isn’t using you guys, just what should they start looking at? What should they start trying to understand?

Jason Ambrose (09:46.382)

The biggest thing is just start using it. Just start working with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, pick your tool. Start thinking about and starting with, how can it help me rewrite some emails? How can it help me summarize some information I’m getting? That’s the easy stuff that you can do with the LLM. And you’ll get a sense of what it’s good at and what it’s not good at doing. But I think with that, what everybody

marketers and sellers need to be conscious of is make sure you’re not copy and pasting and just sending out what the LLMs are telling you. Your job and your uniqueness is going to be tailoring it and understanding what the customer wants to hear. mean, you know, as a CEO, I get so many emails that, you know, it’s clear that it was just straight pass through of what came out of Tat GPT. And my view is like, look, if you can’t spend the time,

thinking about what I want to hear in this email, why should I give you the time to respond? understanding that it can help you, but also you need to still put in the work to tailor the message is the best path for you to navigate this if you’re just starting on that, figuring out AI and what it means for your journey.

John Biggs (11:03.878)

So the website is people.ai. People should just go on and try to get a demo.

Jason Ambrose (11:07.598)

Yeah.

Jason Ambrose (11:11.182)

Yeah, well, come check out the content. We have some demo streams where you can get a sense of what the product does. If you want to tailor it some more, understand how we can apply directly for you, fill out the form, give us a call, and we’ll help you out.

John Biggs (11:13.628)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (11:25.726)

All right, perfect. Well, thank you, Jason. It’s been fascinating. right, this has been The Innovators. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next episode.

Jason Ambrose (11:29.1)

Yeah, sounds good, John.