Black Lake founder Yuxiang Zhou pitted an AI agent against his top sales coach. His most experienced salespeople chose the AI

Yuxiang Zhou, the founder of Black Lake Technologies, asked a simple but unnerving question: if an AI coach goes head-to-head with a top sales leader, who do the best salespeople trust? At his Shanghai startup, which sells AI agents to factories across Asia, seven of the company’s 10 most senior salespeople backed the machine.

The test came out of frustration with traditional CRM software. Zhou said it shrank a day of client talks into “a very subjective one paragraph,” then left a manager to stare at that summary and make sense of it. Black Lake responded by giving salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location, then feeding that material into an AI agent designed to act like a coach.

Zhou described the setup at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8 as a kind of reversal: “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 many of his decisions are already being made by agents, large language models, and his executives. But he also drew a hard line around what machines still can’t do. They’re “emotionless,” he said, and sales teams still need a human to keep them motivated.

The panel around Zhou kept coming back to the same point: the bottleneck is no longer just the software. Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at IDEO, argued that being first to market won’t create a durable edge if competitors can copy the idea almost immediately. She also said IDEO has moved beyond its old “T-shaped person” model and now thinks in terms of a “comb-shaped” person, someone with depth across several disciplines who can move between them.

James Arnett of Wipro framed the change in plainer management terms: leaders need to shift “from directing to orchestrating.” He said Wipro has already moved past asking how AI can save clients money and is now thinking about how to redesign what it sells from scratch. Zhou, meanwhile, is still waiting for what he called AI’s “Google moment,” and says it has not arrived yet. One place Black Lake is testing that future is a platform that turns a celebrity idea into manufactured merchandise, cutting the minimum order for custom collectibles from 10,000 pieces to 100.