Simple AI Upsells 30% Better Than Trained Reps

Why AI Voice Agents Are Outselling Humans

Cat and Zach, YC alumni who met while building internal software at Y Combinator, founded Simple AI after pivoting through two consumer ideas. Their current product — AI voice that sells — handles inbound sales calls end-to-end for major brands, with no human intervention.

The Omaha Steaks origin story: The CEO of Omaha Steaks discovered Simple AI through their consumer app and used it to prank call his COO. He immediately saw the business potential. "They realized this would completely change their business." The company 15x's its workforce every October for the holiday season — a logistically impossible hiring challenge that AI solves entirely.

Outperforming trained humans: Simple AI's agents upsell 30% better than full-time, year-round trained reps. "The magic of AI and software is we can selectively train on the best agents so that every single call you take is taken by your best agent." Instead of a bell curve of performance across a call center, every call gets the top performer.

Hyper-personalization at scale: The system adjusts voice, accent, and sales approach based on caller demographics and purchase history. "Based on where you're calling from, we know so much about your past experiences." They A/B test different upsell phrasings — discovering that "Lock in your savings today" dramatically outperforms straightforward discount descriptions.

Persistent customer memory: When a customer mentioned her husband doesn't eat chicken because of childhood farm experiences, Simple AI stored that preference. Next year, she'll never be offered chicken again — and will get personalized recommendations based on past orders. "Imagine how amazing that is if you called back a year later and they're like, I know you don't eat chicken, so I have this other thing for you."

5 Takeaways from Simple AI's YC Root Access Interview

• Revenue over cost savings — Simple AI focuses on increasing customer revenue by 20%, not reducing labor costs. When revenue goes up, nobody cares about saving money.
• Custom models for each customer — They fine-tune end-of-turn detection, transcription, and inference models per customer because demographics create genuinely different speech patterns.
• The "demo in a weekend" trap — You could build 80% of Simple AI in a weekend, but the remaining 20% — address transcription accuracy, AS400 integration, sub-600ms latency — is where the moat lives.
• Consumer pivots reveal B2B gold — Their consumer users literally asked to use the product for business. The Omaha Steaks deal came from a CEO's prank call.
• Unlimited patience beats speed — Unlike human call centers optimizing for average handle time, AI agents can spend time genuinely helping customers, leading to better experiences and higher upsell rates.

What AI Voice Sales Means for the Future of Work

Simple AI represents the most concrete example yet of AI agents generating measurable revenue increases — not just cost savings. When an AI agent consistently outperforms your best human sales rep by 30%, the question stops being "should we adopt AI?" and becomes "how fast can we deploy it?" For organizations with phone-based sales, this is the inflection point where AI moves from experimental to essential.