Yuxiang Zhou: 7 of 10 senior salespeople chose AI coach's advice

Zhou's experiment at Black Lake began with a complaint familiar to many managers: his CRM software reduced a day of client conversations to 'a very subjective one paragraph' that a leader then read and analyzed. The fix was a pin that recorded salespeople's conversations and location, with the recordings fed into an AI agent trained to coach. The result — seven of 10 senior salespeople preferring the machine's advice — suggests that at least in this test, the AI's read on sales conversations was seen as more useful than the human leader's.

At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau, Zhou framed his approach as reversing the usual setup. '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. Yet he also noted that agents are 'emotionless' and that sales teams still need to be motivated by people — a limit on how far the delegation can go.

Other panelists described the same tension between what AI can do and whether organizations are ready. Becca Carroll of IDEO said speed alone isn't a durable advantage, and proposed a 'comb-shaped' person who can move between disciplines. James Arnett of Wipro said the shift is 'from directing to orchestrating,' and that the constraint isn't technology but people. Zhou, for his part, is still waiting for AI's true inflection point — a 'Google moment' he says should restructure an industry rather than replace humans. Whether Black Lake's order-size experiment points toward that moment, or whether trust remains the bottleneck, is likely to be the test.