When a $45K AI Agent Is the Wrong Tool
Salesforce quoted a client $45K for an AI agent they didn't need. Here's why I built the conventional solution instead — and made it AI-ready anyway.
When you use AI as a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's how a company I work with ended up staring at a $45,000 quote from Salesforce — for an AI agent to do a job that didn't need one.
Salesforce is incentivized to sell AI. So they do. I'm incentivized to deliver business value, so companies refer me to their peers. Those two incentives don't always point the same way.
Eric Lovgren, lovgren.ai
Follow the incentives
Salesforce is an example of AI-first. That's good for Salesforce. It isn't always good for you. When AI is the product you're paid to sell, AI becomes the answer to every question — even the questions that already have a simpler, cheaper answer.
I'm customer-first. Always. We get paid to make your business work better, and the way that business grows is by referral — which only happens when the last recommendation actually paid off. So I'll tell you when the expensive tool is the wrong tool.
| AI-first (Salesforce today) | Customer-first (how we work) | |
|---|---|---|
| What drives the recommendation | Selling more AI | Solving your actual problem |
| Default tool | An AI agent | The simplest thing that works |
| Who comes out ahead | The vendor | You |
The $45,000 email
Here's the use case Salesforce priced at $45,000: an AI agent to field inbound leads and send them a first email. Field the lead. Send the email. That was the whole job.
So we asked a few questions.
- How do the leads come in? From your website. Okay — that's Web-to-Case, native to Salesforce.
- Who handles them? One person on your team. Okay — that's a Lead Assignment Rule.
- How do you want to customize the first email? You don't. Okay — that's an email template, plus a small flow to send it automatically or hand your rep a single click.
$45K
Quoted for AI you don't need
3
Native features that do the job
$0
Extra AI licensing required
Sometimes the right move is to pick up the traditional Salesforce hammer, hit the actual nail, and move on to the use cases that are genuinely more interesting. So that's what we did.
Built simple, built AI-ready
Choosing the conventional solution doesn't mean closing the door on AI. We built this one so the door stays open: the day your needs actually call for it — more volume, smarter routing, real personalization — the AI path is already wired in and the foundation is there to carry it.
You get the simple, low-cost solution today and the option to grow into AI tomorrow — without paying $45,000 up front for a maybe.
Wondering if you're being sold a hammer?
If someone's put a big number in front of you for AI, it's worth a second opinion on whether the job actually needs it. Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell.
No Pitch, Just Possibilities.