Black Lake founder pitted an AI sales coach against his most experienced leader — 7 of 10 senior salespeople chose the AI

Black Lake Technologies founder Yuxiang Zhou ran an internal test that put an AI sales coach up against his company's most experienced sales leader. Seven out of 10 of Black Lake's most senior salespeople voted for the machine's advice rather than the human leader's judgment, Fortune reported on Sept. 13.

The experiment began with a complaint. Zhou said his CRM software reduced a full day of client conversations to 'a very subjective one paragraph,' which the leader then read and analyzed. To bypass that loss of signal, his Shanghai-based startup — which supplies AI agents to factories across Asia — gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location, and fed those conversations into an AI agent trained to act like a coach.

Zhou described the test at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. '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,' he said. He added that many of his decisions are now made by agents, large language models and his executives together.

He does not think people can simply step aside, though. Agents are 'emotionless,' Zhou noted, and sales teams still need to be motivated — something only a person can do. That marks the boundary of the experiment: the AI can give better advice, but organizing people and getting them to act still falls to a human manager.

Two other panelists described the same shift from different angles. Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at design agency IDEO, argued that speed is not enough to build a moat: being first to market, or first to follow an innovation, will not create a durable advantage. 'Once you dream of something, your competitors could roll it out to market the next day,' or two weeks later, she said. Carroll also updated IDEO's famous idea of the T-shaped person into a new archetype she called the comb-shaped person — someone 'almost polymathic, someone who has depth of expertise across a series of disciplines and can fluidly move between them.'

James Arnett, Wipro's managing director for Southeast Asia, Greater China and South Korea, put the same change in leadership terms: 'The big shift is from directing to orchestrating.' Wipro, he said, 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 agreed the real constraint is not technology but people — employees, customers, even executives. 'A lot of the time, we can see that AI can do something — but is the organization ready for it?' Arnett said. Carroll added: 'We can change technology all we want, but we need to move at the speed of trust. It's not just a question of what technology we can adopt and be done, but what's the trust journey we are designing in service of our bigger vision.'

Even Zhou, for all his experiments, is waiting for AI's true inflection point. 'I'm still looking for the Google moment for AI,' he said. 'I don't think it has happened yet.' For teams trying to deploy AI agents inside a business, the case offers something directly reusable: put the machine's recommendations and the most experienced human's recommendations side by side, let frontline staff vote blind, and use their choices to test whether an agent has actually cleared the bar for usefulness.