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
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