Shawn Olson 🇸🇪

We just crossed $100M in AI agent ARR in under 24 months. Not because of a viral launch or AI hype. But because of a crazy bet we made in 2023. At the end of 2023, over 60k local businesses were using @PodiumHQ to centralize their leads and customer communication into one platform. It’s a great product. Customers convert more leads and make more money with it. But one reality became impossible to ignore: Our customers’ biggest constraint isn’t software. It’s staffing. → 75% annual turnover → 30% of leads come after hours → Every missed call can be $20,000+ in lost revenue Business owners don’t care about software. They care about making money. And the best software in the world doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough people to run it. So we built Jerry, the perfect user of our own platform. Not a chatbot. An AI employee that uses Podium to: - Qualify and schedule every lead - Handle objections and follow up - Learn through natural-language coaching - Work 24/7 Demos are easy. Real AI employees are not. To work in the real world, AI has to think, act, understand context, and use tools. It has to handle thousands of edge cases every day. It has to be coachable. Like a human. That leap is enormous. Agents aren’t a feature. They’re the foundation. That’s why we rebuilt Podium as an AI-first system of agents. Today: - 10,000+ AI agents live in production - AI now outperforms humans in many jobs - $100M+ in AI agent ARR, and accelerating This is still day one. The future isn’t software. It's AI employees that do the work and unlock growth for businesses. We’re early in building what we believe will become the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for the $3T SMB market. We’ve seen 300% year-over-year AI revenue growth and we’re just getting started.