SaaStr: Five AI Agent Vendors Pitched This Week, Only One Got Deployed — Forward Deployed Engineers Are the Differentiator

SaaStr·medium signal

SaaStr now runs four AI sales agents simultaneously (Agentforce, Artisan, Qualified, Monaco) and evaluates 20-30 vendor pitches weekly. The one vendor that got deployed this week did so because they assigned a real FDE who got the agent live in hours, not weeks. The article confirms no single agent does everything well — each specializes in a different part of the sales funnel — making orchestration the real bottleneck, not individual agent capability.