Black Lake Technologies founder Yuxiang Zhou said he pitted an AI sales coach against his company’s most experienced sales leader, and seven out of 10 of Black Lake’s most senior salespeople voted for the machine’s advice.
The Shanghai-based startup supplies AI agents to factories across Asia. Zhou said the test started after he complained that his CRM software turned a day of client conversations into 'a very subjective one paragraph, and then the leader sits back and reads this paragraph and analyzes.'
To change that process, Black Lake gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location. Those conversations were then fed into an AI agent trained to act like a coach.
'A lot of people use AI as a way to co-pilot the leadership, but I’m trying to explore the way of me co-piloting the AI,' Zhou said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. He added: 'A lot of my decisions are now made by agents, large language models, and my executives.'
Zhou still said human salespeople matter because agents are 'emotionless' and teams still need motivation, which only a person can provide.
The panel in Macau centered on a larger corporate shift. Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at design agency IDEO, said speed alone will not create a 'durable' advantage. She said that once a company dreams up something, competitors can roll it out 'the next day, or two weeks later.'
Carroll said IDEO’s old 'T-shaped person' idea should be replaced with a 'comb-shaped' person: someone with depth across several disciplines who can move between them fluidly.
James Arnett, managing director for Southeast Asia, Greater China, and South Korea at Wipro, said the big shift in leadership is 'from directing to orchestrating.' He said Wipro has moved 'way past' the question of how AI can save clients money and is now asking how to redesign what it offers from scratch.
All three panelists said the real constraint is not the technology itself, but people, including employees, customers, and executives. Arnett asked whether 'the organization ready for it' if AI can do something. Carroll said companies must move 'at the speed of trust.'
Zhou said he is still looking for 'the Google moment for AI' and does not think it has happened yet. Black Lake is also testing a new platform that uses AI to turn an idea from a celebrity into manufactured merchandise and cut the minimum order for custom collectibles from 10,000 pieces to 100.
The numbers come first. A sales team voting 7-3 for an AI coach is not just a novelty; it is a warning shot for every manager who thinks software is only a back-office tool. Capital rewards clear rules, and if AI can reorganize sales, leadership and even product design, the firms that adapt fastest will set the pace while everyone else explains the old model.