Udemy's cofounder said he's got a way to avoid hiring interns for 'painful and inefficient' work that one person can do

""Back then, our interns would manually scour YouTube and blogs to find potential instructors. They'd write custom outreach messages that I had to approve one by one," Biyani wrote. "It was painful and inefficient. I spent as much time training the interns as I got value from their work. But it worked, and we reached thousands of leads to get Udemy off the ground," he added."

""15 years later at Maven, we now have one person who is more productive than that entire team," Biyani said, adding that AI allowed the employee to "parse through millions of people and find the exact profile you're looking for." "She's as productive as that entire intern team (with less oversight from me)," Biyani continued."

""You can't just spin up ChatGPT, hit a button, and solve your prospecting problems. Someone needs to set up the tools, monitor its output, write copy, and train it to improve constantly," Biyani wrote. "It's like managing hundreds of interns simultaneously - extremely efficient but equally naive," he added."

Gagan Biyani previously relied on a team of six interns to manually scour YouTube and blogs and write custom outreach messages to find potential instructors for Udemy. That process proved painful and inefficient, with training time often equaling value gained, though it produced thousands of leads. At Maven, AI tools enable a single employee to parse millions of profiles and identify exact candidate matches with far less oversight. Effective AI prospecting requires tool setup, monitoring, copywriting, and ongoing training. The approach can deliver extreme efficiency but risks naive implementation if treated as a simple plug-and-play replacement for human management.

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