{"id":4486,"date":"2026-09-14T02:10:41","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T02:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=4486"},"modified":"2026-09-14T02:10:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T02:10:41","slug":"china-startup-black-lakes-ai-sales-coach-beat-its-most-experienced-leader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=4486","title":{"rendered":"China startup Black Lake&#8217;s AI sales coach beat its most experienced leader"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/55517429433_5987cd1724_o-e1789226262916.jpg?w=2048\" \/><\/p>\n<p>When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of Black Lake Technologies, pitted an AI sales coach against his company\u2019s most experienced sales leader, seven out of 10 of Black Lake\u2019s most senior salespeople voted for the machine\u2019s advice.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The experiment began when Zhou complained that his CRM software reduced a day of client conversations to \u201ca very subjective one paragraph, and then the leader sits back and reads this paragraph and analyzes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So his company, a Shanghai-based startup that supplies AI agents to factories across Asia, gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location. These conversations were fed into an AI agent trained to act like a coach.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cA lot of people use AI as a way to co-pilot the leadership, but I\u2019m trying to explore the way of me co-piloting the AI,\u201d Zhou said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. \u201cA lot of my decisions are now made by agents, large language models, and my executives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, human salespeople have their place. Agents are \u201cemotionless,\u201d Zhou noted, and sales teams still need to be motivated\u2014something only a person can do.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zhou was one of three panelists at the Forum discussing how a corporate executive\u2019s role needs to change if AI can handle reasoning and execution.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at design agency IDEO, speed isn\u2019t enough to build a moat against competition. Being the first to market, or even the first to follow some new innovation, won\u2019t be enough to create a \u201cdurable\u201d advantage. \u201cOnce you dream of something, your competitors could roll it out to market the next day, or two weeks later,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Carroll also updated IDEO\u2019s famous concept of the \u201cT-shaped person\u201d\u2014deep expertise in one discipline, popularized by former CEO Tim Brown\u2014with a new archetype: the \u201ccomb-shaped\u201d person, someone who is \u201calmost polymathic, someone who has depth of expertise across a series of disciplines and can fluidly move between them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">James Arnett, Wipro\u2019s managing director for Southeast Asia, Greater China, and South Korea, put the same shift in leadership terms: \u201cThe big shift is\u2026from directing to orchestrating.\u201d Wipro, he said, has moved \u201cway past\u201d the question of how AI can save clients money, and is now asking how to redesign what it offers from scratch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All panelists agreed that the constraint isn\u2019t technology, but people, whether that\u2019s employees, customers, or even executives themselves. \u201cA lot of the time, we can see that AI can do something\u2014but is the organization ready for it?\u201d Arnett said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Carroll added that \u201cwe can change technology all we want, but we need to move at the speed of trust\u2026 It\u2019s not just a question of what technology we can adopt and be done, but what\u2019s the trust journey we are designing in service of our bigger vision.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even Zhou, for all his experiments, is waiting for AI\u2019s true inflection point. \u201cI\u2019m still looking for the Google moment for AI,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it has happened yet.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In part to find that answer, Black Lake is testing a new platform that uses AI to turn an idea from a celebrity into manufactured merchandise that can cut the minimum order for custom collectibles from 10,000 pieces to 100.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI think the real Google moment should happen only when you restructure the industry rather than replace human beings,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#China #startup #Black #Lakes #sales #coach #beat #experienced #leader<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3362,2288,173,1741,7488,2125,7487,1552,1120,892],"class_list":["post-4486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-beat","tag-black","tag-china","tag-coach","tag-experienced","tag-fortune-leaders-forum","tag-lakes","tag-leader","tag-sales","tag-startup"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - 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