Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For ft Agency CEO Elias Torres

Elias Torres argues businesses are sabotaging AI adoption through imperfection anxiety, and outlines why Agency is building autonomous back-end customer experience instead of another AI SDR.

• Businesses demand AI then reject it because they expect database-style perfect accuracy from a broad, probabilistic system.
• Torres built a chatbot at IBM in 1999; Agency is his third company, targeting $1B revenue with fewer than 100 employees.
• Agency deliberately ignored the AI SDR wave and targeted post-sale, back-end customer experience, where Torres sees deeper pain.
• Klaviyo (Andrew Bialecki) was an early Agency customer: AI acting as expert CSM across all customer accounts simultaneously.
• Drift peaked above $1B valuation but Torres says it failed to scale because it only solved the first touchpoint, not the full customer journey.
• Any AI workflow that still requires a human to open a chat box is, in Torres’s words, dead on arrival.
• Agency has 50+ customers; Torres is deliberately not chasing revenue yet, prioritizing obsessive product-market fit over growth.
• Torres’s core thesis: most business processes exist only because the technology to replace them didn’t exist — AI makes them unnecessary, but deprogramming takes time.

2025-09-23 · Watch on YouTube