S1E8: Agent Talk #8: Amos Bar-Joseph (Swan) - The 10M ARR per employee dream with AI

In our recent conversation with Amos Bar-Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Swan AI, he shared his radical vision for the future of business: autonomous companies achieving $10M ARR per employee through strategic AI implementation. Beyond the typical AI hype, Amos details a practical roadmap for companies looking to scale with minimal headcount.

Here are the key insights from our discussion:

The autonomous business revolution

* The next 5 years belong to SMBs: "We believe that the next five years are the year of the SMB, the year of the small business, small lean teams that are showing the world that using AI agents, you can reach massive scale, like never seen before."

* Rethinking business fundamentals: "It's about reimagining how humans and AI collaborate together, rethinking fundamentally the operating system of a business."

* The Swan Metric: Targeting $1M+ ARR per employee (with Swan pushing toward $10M) through strategic AI implementation.

Breaking the "throw bodies at problems" mindset

Amos said something that we think many founders have thought about: "The first instinct that the old playbook got you to do was throw bodies at the problem, right?".

But Amos does things a bit differently, and we like that a lot:

* Self-imposed constraints drive innovation: At Swan, they created the constraint that they "can't throw bodies at a problem" - forcing them to find more creative and intelligent solutions.

* “Ops Wizards”, not just more headcount: "Every team should have that ops wizard" who can bridge technical understanding with business orientation.

* Human-in-the-loop design: Always start with humans supervising AI and providing feedback to create "a self-learning system that takes your knowledge in a collaborative way."

The future of sales is human + AI, not AI replacing humans

When I asked about which parts of the sales cycle will be replaced by AI, Amos offered nuanced insight:

* It depends on ACV: "The higher the ACV, the tougher it is to replace any part of the sales cycle... When you look at $20 million deals, then you want a human in the loop."

* Low ACV should be marketing-driven: For $19/seat products, "from a unit economics standpoint, it doesn't make sense to do outbound."

* Sellers love winning, not prospecting: "Sellers love winning. And for that 1% that they are winning, they love that notion... It's the best moment of their day when they get that yes on the screen."

* The 100X seller: "The future of sales is first of all reimagining how sellers work with human and AI collaboration at the core. And it's more about finding the path to the 100X seller."

The three types of businesses in the AI revolution

According to Amos, businesses will fall into three categories across a spectrum:

* Biggest losers: "Those trying to automate their workforce, replace their workforce with digital workers. And they will be left behind."

* Partial winners: "Implementing AI agent tooling across their entire stack... but disparate solutions for different functions."

* True unicorns: "Lean teams that are building AI agents as their product, able to rally their entire agentic workforce around that specific agent."

Practical advice for outbound sales:

Amos had some pretty practical advice too: Move from “digital workers" to storytelling engines.

How?

* Goodbye sequences, hello relationships: "We never pitch with a hard CTA. Never... It's only about, look, something happened in your business. There's an event that is relevant to your day-to-day as a VP of sales."

* Non-deterministic outreach: "Swan looks at a timeline always, looks at what happened before, what is happening now, and will create a recommendation how to engage that lead."

* Monitoring relationships at scale: "What we're envisioning is a future where SWAN can monitor relationships, top of the funnel relationships with thousands of accounts in parallel."

What's your take? Are you seeing companies in your industry successfully implementing AI to scale without proportional headcount growth? 👇

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