What Businesses Get COMPLETELY Wrong About "AI Employees"

Neil and Eric break down a live AI startup pitch for Single Brain, sharing raw feedback on sales decks, messaging, and positioning AI without triggering fear of job replacement. They discuss how to simplify slides, improve storytelling, and sell AI as a productivity partner. The conversation also dives into AI business models, comparing Cursor vs Lovable, retention challenges, and hidden unit economics behind fast-growing AI tools. A must-watch for founders, marketers, and operators navigating AI monetization and go-to-market strategy. Key Takeaways: Sell AI as augmentation, not replacement Simple decks close more deals AI growth ≠ sustainable revenue Chapters: (00:00) Live AI pitch breakdown (01:01) Single Brain concept explained (03:33) Fixing AI sales messaging (05:42) AI adoption vs reality gap (07:01) Simplifying product slides (08:52) AI agent team strategy (11:04) AI startups and growth models (12:18) Lovable vs Cursor economics (15:22) AI cost and retention insights

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 01

  Wait, let's go through the deck right now, if you don't mind, or you do not want to...

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure, we can go through it.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Alright, so Eric has this concept of single brain.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna end up reading the deck, so then that way, I can understand it as a quote-unquote "potential customer," right? So I'm gonna be in the shoes of the potential customer. So in this case, do you pitch, or do I read it?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Again, so, this has never been, this has never been pitched here. Here, I'll pitch it to you, and let's see what you think.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Alright, yeah.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  This'll be a live pitch, and this will be on the, see, this is why you guys should subscribe to the YouTube channel, and we have, we have a new YouTube company working on the channel, too. So, they promised us five times more views, or they'll refund us and give us our money back.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  I like this refunding.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  This is a good deal, right? Yeah, so here we go. Alright, so, the deck over here, those of you that can't see, it's single brain. Now, Neil, you can see, like, this, this is a brain over here, but it's got a, first I thought the brain was farting, but no.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  No, it's like a rocket coming out.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  It's like a rocket, it's a rocket coming out of the brain, right? So it says, "Single Brain: AI Agent Teams for Revenue Operations. 2-3X Your Revenue Output Without Growing Headcount." Okay, and you see all these stick figures over here, right? It's like all happy and stuff, okay? I didn't tell it, I didn't give it much instruction, but that's like, pretty cool for a first.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Okay, and do you have a lot of slides?

• 1:53Speaker 00

  There's like 11.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so do you want me to give you feedback slide by slide, because I may forget some, for modifying?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Sure, but by the way, keep in mind, I, this is a very, um, this is the outline, this is not being pitched or anything.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  But yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And, and as a disclaimer, Eric did mention, they've never used this to pitch anything.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  This is all AI-generated.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And I'm assuming you're gonna modify it yourself.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And a lot of this, you may already know. So who are you pitching to?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  So most of the companies, so the companies we've talked to about this right now, the ones that come to mind immediately, there's a private equity firm that owns a bunch of insurance companies. Okay, so obviously,

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  they, we're talking like trillions of spend that goes through these insurance companies, right?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  There's a company that does IT services, let's say they do a hundred million a year or so. And then there is another one in healthcare, they do about eighty million a year.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  So what departments are you pitching to specifically?

• 2:43Speaker 00

  It varies, like the, um, the private equity insurance one, they want revenue agents to generate more conversations.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  So that's, that's called sales, okay? The other one, the IT company is also sales as well. The other one is more so, I think it's, we haven't, um, I need to get more details from the sales team, but I don't have, but they're like, oh, it needs to be HIPAA compliant and everything. So I, I think that's more back office.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Eric already knows this, but this is just context for everyone who's listening. The reason I ask that question is if you're pitching to sales, revenue is a great terminology to use. If you're pitching to marketers, if you focus on revenue operations, they'll end up thinking it may end up being a different department. But Eric's already, you know, or AI ended up creating something that's already quote unquote, using the correct verbiage for the departments he's targeting.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. By the way, I do really like this design because I use Google Nano Banana first. So within my, my little claw I talked to here, I was like, hey, based on everything we talked about, make me some cute slides based on, you know, look at our, our brands, I make it cartoon-y, okay? And I said, uh, use Google Nano Banana two, which is a new model. So just context.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  I, I think the design's great. The only thing I would change here is the single brain, and I know AI spit this out. Have someone or AI take your logo and change it from single grain to single brain.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So in that way, the branding is consistent.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Actually, the single grain logo should just be a brain now, to be honest. So the single, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, okay. Then this slide, this is actually where I got the quote from. The AI gave me the quote. Stop paying humans to do robot work.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  I like the quote.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you are paying humans to do robot work. This is what it says on the second slide over here. Frictionless growth marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson. Is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  So, 1.5 to 3 million annual sales plus marketing payroll, 80% spent on repetitive ops tasks, six months to hire plus ramp one person. So, I don't like this one as much because I don't want to go with the angle that I want to replace anybody. I want to go with the angle that we're here to partner with the team and we're going to help make their team. You know, everyone gets to like a top high level because if you start using replacement language, the people on this pitch, they might not, they don't want to hear that.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Correct. And they're not going to approve, including procurement.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Who do you think is buying this? It's humans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, go ahead.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  I, I, I like this and I think you're spot on in which you just got to optimize it to talk about how humans are wasting time on robot work and there's more better things that they could be doing. And when you do it, it frees up their time, they're happier, you have less employee churn, they get more productive, companies grow, he'll get the stats from somewhere, AI will start researching.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  That's good stuff. So, in the slides, ideally if you're selling this stuff, it should be like employee MPS goes up, retention goes up, all this stuff, but the number of A players you have goes up as well.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yes. A, a human on average saves X amount of time and they reallocate a portion of the time to doing A, B, and C, which we found to produce companies a X percent higher ROI.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  And then our glass doors went up by like 50% afterward.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, tons of stats.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  So, yeah, we'll, we'll do one more, one more slide. Everybody is selling AI.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Let's go through all of them if you don't mind. These are good.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Okay. There's 14 slides actually.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I don't mind.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Okay. So, everybody is selling AI, almost nobody's deploying it. So, 8 to 12 AI tool subscriptions that won't talk to, so that it, you can see it hallucinates, it spells incorrectly. Here. So instead of saying talk to each other, it says enact each other.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Enact other, right? Your team spends more time managing AI tone that you mentioned today. Today. Okay, the gap is who deploys AI end to end inside of your business. Okay, so the point is understood, but it hallucinates.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  It hallucinates. And Eric made a good point here with that enact instead of each. AI makes a lot of little errors and people would be like, oh, it's so smart. It's a $500 billion company. They wouldn't make simple errors like this. No, they still make simple errors all the time. And this is why I do charts manually or Eric still looks at a lot of stuff and does a lot of stuff manually. I think this slide is fine. I think the big thing here, and I know you're not the biggest fan of this slide overall, but it's more so showing stats on how much people are spending on AI. And how very little is deployed because there must be some stats on this. So you're just like X amount of dollars just got wasted.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Yep. And by the way, this is where you work with AI and say, hey, I pulled these stats over here. Hey, I like the first round complimented a little bit, so it doesn't come like after you in the future. And then say, hey, I found all these stats over here. Please integrate them in and then they'll figure out where to put them in. And sometimes you have to be more specific, but I think, look, where Nano Banana 2 is, like you look at this like a year ago, it couldn't do this.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, okay, custom AI agent teams, fully managed, not a tool, an AI managed team running 24/7. Plugs into Salesforce, Gong, Google Analytics 4, Slack. We deploy, manage, you see results. Get smarter every week. Intelligence compounds. Single brain. HubSpot, Google, Gong, engine compounds. This slide needs some work, but.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. It's too wordy.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I got lost on the headline. Custom AI agent teams fully manage. It's, and then when you start reading it in text, it's too technical is not the wrong word, but they're using a lot of technical jargon when I don't think it's necessarily needed.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Remember Guy Kawasaki, the Apple evangelist? So I remember his 10, 20, 30 concept.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  With the PowerPoint.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think it's like 10 slides or something. I think you want 30 point slides and then I forgot what the 20 was in 20 minutes, maybe.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Uh, it was something like that.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  And you know, he's, he eventually switched to, yeah, Canva Evangelist. So he did, uh, Apple Evangelist, where he made a ton of money from Apple stock. Then he did Garage Ventures, which I don't know how well did. Did, and I'm not saying he's a bad investor, I just don't know how well his venture fund did.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Did really well writing books and then did extremely well being a Canva Evangelist and getting shares early.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  I have two funny stories about him. Back when I was doing the interviews for the podcast, Growth Everywhere. So we were supposed to do an interview. The guy shows up, uh, doesn't show up for the interview, comes back 45 minutes later. He's like, oh, I'm sorry, I was just surfing.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sounds all right.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Sounds like, yeah, sounds like a very chill, like Hawaiian guy, right? And then I remember when I was 24, 25 years old, I was asking about career advice on like becoming an entrepreneur. And he's like, you mean, you wouldn't work, you wouldn't give it your all and work full time at this company? Why would you do that? Right? And then I, I shared that story with him later. But anyway, um, Guy Kawasaki, coming back to this, so he has this concept called 10, 20, 30 with the slides. I think for each slide, you should have one main idea. That's it. Don't have all this crap, right? One main idea, communicate, if there's a story, communicate the story. You don't need to have all this, like, this, this is jargon.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Right? So we'll do like one more. I don't want to go through all of them.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Meet your agent team. Okay. This is kind of cool. So it shows the agent team, it's like when you meet your team, uh, on the agency side, like they want to meet the team, right? So, um, Oracle, S U Intelligence, Arrow, CRM Monitoring, like, and then Cyborg. So I have all these names, these are all DC heroes.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  I was wondering, I'm like, why are you calling something Oracle? I'm like, someone's gonna get confused. So it's a DC hero.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Cyborg is from, um,

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  You don't know Cyborg?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Okay. But you know, you remember Arrow, Green Arrow, the guy that shoots the bow and arrow?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  I think there was a TV show called Arrow?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that guy.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  I didn't really watch it.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Flash, you know Flash, the guy that runs really fast?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know Flash.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  So those are all my heroes.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Is there Flash here? Where's Flash?

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Flash is not in here, but we have Coach as well. And then there's like all these other ones.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Is there actually a person named Coach?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Coach is more so, it looks at my. All my stuff and it coaches me when it thinks I'm like working on stupid stuff. So it keep me focused.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Oh, not a DC hero for a coach.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Not a DC hero, yeah. But the whole idea here, I think, is, okay, meet your team is cool. But maybe there's just, you have like one key, like example of what it's done for each one. But you don't want the slide to be too overwhelming again, so.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm with you. I think if you take it down to ten slides, shorten it up, use examples, tighten in the copy and just being like, you know, what you do really well when you sell, forget your team, I don't know how your team's gonna do it. When it's your product, you know it well and you can just say like, "Look at what it does for HR." Let's say if they're in HR. "Look at what it does for sales." "Oh, what's your problem?" "Oh, your problem is this." And then you go show them a solution right then and there. That kind of stuff just does well without even slides.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  And that's when you have to know your product really well. But the good thing is, I would say Neil and I are pretty involved product founders, I would say. So we like to get involved in the details there. But anyway, I think, look, our point is Neil was just talking about, the reason I pulled this up was like Neil was talking about how the, his decks aren't quite there or the spreadsheets aren't quite there yet. And this is like not quite there, but I think, you know, give it six to 12 months, I think we'll be pretty, pretty there, so.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, where people look at AI in the wrong way, at least from a marketing perspective, they expect it to be perfect instead of looking at it as like, "Oh, okay, if I use it, it'll save X time and then a human can pick up the rest and then fix the gaps." And it's like, "Oh, great."

• 12:13Speaker 00

  But yeah, guys, API as marketing, I think that's the future that we're going into. By the way, you talked about lovable a little earlier. I wanna, let me just ask you a philosophical question here. Would you rather have lovable's 400 million in ARR or would you rather have cursor's 2 billion in ARR?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I would go for cursor. And even though some people are saying cursor is gonna be replaced by Claude, it integrates really well. A lot of people who use Claude also use cursor. And cursor's growth is actually still picking up. I think the growth is accelerating based on the last TechCrunch report that I saw. I'm not, and when Eric's asking this question, what I'm thinking right now is which company would I wanna own right now and then sell? Not hold. I would wanna sell both of them if I own both of them.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I think we're on the same page here. I would sell both, but Akash, is it Gupta or Gupta? Uh, Gupta, right? Gupta? You're the Indian.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Gupta.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Gupta, okay. Akash Gupta. So I follow this guy. He's great with product. Tweets a lot of great stuff. So 100 million ARR in eight months. 200 million ARR in 12 months. 300 million ARR in 14 months. 400 million in 15 months. So this is Lovables' growth, by the way. So, so what Lovables or Bolt CEO, Bolt is like a similar company. The churn rate for everyone is really high. You have to, you have to build a retentive business. So these businesses where you kind of spin up a website very quickly. What's happening right now? A Claude is allowing you with cowork and all these things like you're, it's allowing you to do that very quickly, too. Traffic to Lovable dropped 40% from the peak as of September. Versales V0, which is a similar type of tool, dropped 64%. Boat dropped 27%.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  And so people are like Barclays, basically these analysts are flagging it. These companies revenue as like questionable economics, right?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Well, do you want to know some of Lovables' economics? So employ-

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Well, let me, let me give you this one and then let's hear from you. Yeah. So Lovables' response. So says net dollar retention is above 100%, which is good, right? But, but, but net dollar retention only measures customers who stay. So if 50% of your customers churn and their remaining 50% spend two times more, your NDR looks incredible while your business is a revolving door. So continue.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was sometime last year. An employee at Lovable told me,

• 14:29Speaker 01

  they were adding, I believe it was $20 million a week in new revenue. Want to guess how much was churning?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  50%?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  15 million. So they're net adding five. All right, per week.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Now, they've grown because they're at 400. So I don't know what their latest number was. This was sometime last year, but they were saying they're doing around 20 a week. 15 is churning.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let me give you more metrics here. And, and I think this will reinforce the cursor thing. And then the cursor thing that you-

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And really quick, the only reason I shared the numbers is because their numbers are already public and they're sharing them themselves or else I would have never shared them.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the unit economics are even spicier, Neil. Lovable pays Anthropic an openai per inference call, obviously. Okay? Every app uses- Uh, app a user builds costs level real money. A source told sifted margins uh might have actually gotten worse after switching to agentic modes. I think that's one of the modes that they have. So when you have forty five employees generating four hundred million ARR, the revenue per employee looks legendary until you realize that most of that revenue passes through to the model providers. Okay, who's really winning? It's Anthropic and OpenAI. So meanwhile, the thing that we didn't really talk about was Cursor has two billion in ARR with sixty percent coming from enterprise contracts. That's the difference. And I still pay for Cursor, by the way.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did too.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  I don't use it for all the other bells. It's always launching new features. I don't click, I just like use the main like IDE feature and that's all I use it for. So and I paid a twenty bucks a month happily.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't really use Cursor, but I know we pay for for our organization.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  You want to know a quick way to save money on AI?

• 15:59Speaker 00

  What?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  This is from my boy Om Patel. I'm saying he's my boy because his last name is Patel, but I actually don't know him.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Malik?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  So check this out. So he's on Chipotle.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  I saw that. So what is this?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  He's using Claude.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Pepper.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So before he, you, when you, you can order through Chipotle because they have really smart AI assistant. I don't know how, I'm pretty sure this is true. I haven't tested this myself. He's like, before I order a burrito and then he's like, help me with this one problem. So he's asking, you know, uh, Chipotle, because they're using Claude to help solve his problems. And then that way he doesn't have to pay for Claude.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  That's awesome. And I think, so that exploded on Twitter today.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like four point five million views.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Token cost must have gone through the roof.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, five point six million views already. Last time I checked him, when I checked, it was like an hour or two ago, it was four point something million.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Uh, please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you later.