Building Alice’s Brain: an AI Sales Rep that Learns Like a Human - Sherwood & Satwik, 11x скачать в хорошем качестве

Building Alice’s Brain: an AI Sales Rep that Learns Like a Human - Sherwood & Satwik, 11x

AI agents are becoming essential tools for teams of all sizes and industries - but training them to become experts in your product, business, and customerbase remains a challenge. What if onboarding a digital worker was as simple as uploading your pitch deck? At 11x, we built Alice, an AI SDR that writes outbound emails with the nuance and context of a top-performing human sales rep - because she learns like one too! In this talk, we'll share how we built a knowledge base that allows 11x customers to "train" Alice on their internal materials: PDFs, websites, call recordings, and more. We'll talk through the ingestion pipeline in detail, discuss storage/retrieval technologies and their tradeoffs, and explain how Alice uses the knowledge base to drive high-performance email outreach at scale. About Sherwood Callaway Sherwood Callaway is an emerging leader in the world of AI startups and AI product development. He currently serves as the first engineering manager at 11x, a series B AI startup backed by Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz, where he oversees technical work on "Alice", an AI sales rep that outperforms top human SDRs. Alice is an advanced agentic AI working in production and at scale. Under Sherwood’s leadership, the system grew from initial prototype to handling over 1 million prospect interactions per month across 300+ customers, leveraging partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and LangChain while maintaining consistent performance and reliability. Alice is now generating eight figures in ARR. Sherwood joined 11x in 2024 through the acquisition of his YC-backed startup, Opkit, where he built and commercialized one of the first-ever AI phone calling solutions for a specific industry vertical (healthcare). Prior to Opkit, he was the second infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he designed, built, and scaled the production infrastructure that supported Brex’s application and engineering org through hypergrowth. He currently lives in San Francisco, CA. About Satwik Singh Satwik Singh is a core builder and emerging technical leader in the rapidly evolving field of applied AI and agentic systems. As a Member of Technical Staff at 11x AI, Satwik is at the forefront of developing "Alice", an AI sales representative that operates autonomously at scale—transforming how modern GTM teams work. At 11x, Satwik has architected and delivered several of the company's most critical agent capabilities. He led the creation of the Knowledge Base Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Deep Research pipeline, which powers Alice's ability to reason over complex product information and tailor responses with high fidelity: a first-of-its-kind system in the GTM agent space. He has also worked across systems to handle the credits ledger, and engineered the Sourcing Agent that autonomously crafts campaigns. Satwik has been instrumental in shaping the technical foundation of Alice's intelligence and reliability. Prior to 11x, Satwik was a software engineer at Meta, where he worked on Generative AI products within the Core Ads organization and contributed to infrastructure across Reality Labs. His work helped ship first-generation GenAI creative enhancements for Feed Ads—driving significant revenue gains at scale. Satwik's unique strength lies in his ability to move seamlessly between infrastructure, AI product, and agent behavior—designing systems that are production-ready, high-impact, and aligned with real business outcomes. With deep hands-on experience and a vision for what Agentic AI can become, he's helping define the next era of intelligent software. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter