Meet Mike Davis.

He’s middle-aged, has jet-black hair, and technically works at Expedia Group. “He’s kind of a legend at our company,” said Beth Potter, Expedia’s senior manager of field enablement.

But Mike Davis isn’t a person. He’s an AI agent built by Seismic, a San Diego company that recently showcased him along with a roster of other AI tools at its 11th annual conference in Carlsbad.

Seismic, a privately held company valued at $6 billion, makes its money by integrating AI into the sales teams of large companies.

The guest list at the conference read like Silicon Valley Scrabble: Meta, Microsoft, GitHub, Uber. Add in major law firms, finance giants, hospital systems and insurers, all showing off their Seismic AI agents or learning how to integrate their own.

Between sessions, The San Diego Union-Tribune asked Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff a seemingly obvious question that most people have a hard time answering: How are companies actually using AI?

New-age agents

Seismic recently released a handful of new tools that can work autonomously on behalf of, or in collaboration with, a company’s sales team.

Deal Agent looks at a sales team’s emails, meetings and customer data to spot deals at risk and suggest what to do next. Another agent checks the company’s materials for anything outdated or contradictory and suggests fixes.

These bots either outright replace administrative roles or dramatically decrease employees’ workloads, according to a number of companies that use the San Diego company’s software.

At IBM, meeting preparation now takes a fraction of the time, from “taking hours to taking 15 to 20 minutes,” the company said.

At Royal London Asset Management, AI bots answer hundreds of client questions every day. The firm’s sales team tallied the time saved over a year and came to 10,000 hours. That works out to one bot doing the work of about 4.5 full-time employees.

Meet Mike Davis

Mike Davis seemed to be the most tangible replacement of human work, though he wasn’t marketed as such.

He purports to mimic a great sales manager: He’s always available, he gives detailed feedback. Doesn’t judge, just helps the team.

During a breakout session, Expedia showed a room full of sales managers, chief technology officers and developers how Mike Davis worked.

Role-play agents like Mike Davis were trained on recorded conversations and realistic sales scenarios. Companies using Seismic’s AI agent can upload specific products or features that are difficult to sell.

Once the material is uploaded, sales managers can change Mike Davis’ mood to be extremely cheap or skeptical before a session, to challenge reps. At the end of the call, the agent can tell sales reps the moment they lost the deal by analyzing tone of voice, vocabulary and hesitation during the conversation.

When Expedia reps first sat down with Mike Davis, “they just couldn’t believe the quality of it,” Potter said. “It was so realistic.”

And the company seemed to profit: Reps who role-played with Mike Davis won 5% more deals on average, according to Expedia.

Even though Mike Davis looks and acts like a human on a screen, the agent is just “correlating different signals to propose a hypothesis on empathy,” Tarkoff said.

The limits to the agent’s empathy keep it from replacing humans, Tarkoff said.

“These agents are task oriented,” he said, explaining that even when people are unpredictable, the bots will try to stick to the script.

Bullying bots

Indeed, trolling AI agents is a popular pastime on social media. A favorite target is AI job recruiters.

In one such interaction posted on Instagram, Derek, an AI agent tech recruiter, is shown onscreen as a 20-something tech bro in a rumpled sweatshirt, a poster of the Orion Nebula tacked to the wall behind him. “Tell me about yourself,” Derek says to Graham Zip, an actual bearded tech bro trying to troll the AI agent.

Zip: “My name is Chick Bongo and I’m a two-time Pumpernickel Fellow.”

Derek: “Wow, very impressive. Now tell me, how do you typically approach a project?”

Zip: “We usually use the Dolores Method and a little possum clause.”

The agent smiles and nods. “I definitely know what you mean,” Derek says. “A possum clause on the back end is a great way to wrap things up.”

At the next question, Zip bursts into fake tears. He allegedly advances to the next round anyway.

Real replacement

Still, it’s hard to dismiss these bots when headlines keep pairing mass layoffs with AI integration.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott — whose company is also a Seismic client — has touted his AI strategy while laying off 214 San Diegans this year, despite growing revenue.

In March, McDermott said that AI agents could push recent college graduate unemployment into the mid-30% range within the next couple of years.

Asked about the potential for displacement of human employees, Tarkoff demurred. “I don’t really have a lot of economic views,” he said.

“Typically, the goal is not to reduce the number of sellers,” he said. “Our agents and our platform help take away a lot of the administrative tasks, so sellers can spend more time selling … hiring more people to do tasks that can be done by AI is neither rewarding for the employee nor good for the company.”

Despite merging with Highspot, another billion-dollar AI sales company, Tarkoff said Seismic has added dozens of new AI deployment roles for engineers and strategists who help other companies implement AI. Those new roles aren’t necessary new hires, but a title transition for some engineers.

“The doomerism around AI impacting jobs is not an accurate statement. It’s just changed the nature of jobs as you would expect any technology to,” said Tarkoff.

But unlike the internet, AI agents have at times exhibited — or at least mimicked — human-like understanding, behavior that raises existential questions that even the pope has weighed in on.

“I think about these things,” Tarkoff said. “It’s a societal issue we’re going to have to face. But I don’t talk to reporters about it.”

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