When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of Black Lake Technologies, pitted an AI sales coach against his company’s most experienced sales leader, seven out of 10 of Black Lake’s most senior salespeople voted for the machine’s advice. The experiment began when Zhou complained that his CRM software reduced a day of client conversations to “a very subjective one paragraph, and then the leader sits back and reads this paragraph and analyzes.” So his company, a Shanghai-based startup that supplies AI agents to factories across Asia, gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location. These conversations were fed into an…