Legion Analytics is looking to make your sales team more productive with the help of artificial intelligence.
We covered the startup last year when it was part of Y Combinator’s fellowship program and offered to help companies find sales leads. CEO Jamasen Rodriguez told me that the company’s vision has expanded — it’s not just focused on lead generation anymore, but rather becoming “a full-stack sales company.” And part of that vision involves automating the mundane parts of the sales process.
Bots are a pretty trendy topic right now, and Legion Analytics’ claim of using natural language and machine learning technology is pretty familiar, too. What’s different, according to Rodriguez, is the way the company’s technology can analyze text and “understand the sales meaning of that text.”
The idea isn’t to replace salespeople entirely, but rather to free them from a lot of the more time-consuming back-and-forth over email of answering basic questions and scheduling demos. That, in turn, should allow a single sales rep to pursue many more leads at one time.
In fact, Rodriguez said his company has already been using the A.I.  sales rep (which it calls Kylie) to promote its own products. How human does Kylie sound? Well, Rodriguez said the technology even understands rudimentary small talk — if you mention a child’s soccer game, Kylie will ask about the game later on. And he said one of the prospects actually started flirting with her.

That also brings up another question: Should potential customers be told that they’re interacting with a bot? Rodriguez said the goal is to be as human-like as possible, so you probably don’t want to spill the beans right away. At the same time, he has told customers the truth about Kylie later on — after all, it’s kind of a selling point for his company. He suggested that each company using Kylie will probably want to make that decision on their own.
Rodriguez is now looking to test out Kylie with a variety of companies and industries. If you’re interested, you can sign up here.
