Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform (ASAP) that automates busywork so reps can concentrate on the human a part of selling. Prior to founding Nooks, Dan held machine learning roles at corporations like Scale AI and Cerebras Systems and studied AI at Stanford.
Are you able to walk us through the journey of founding Nooks? What inspired you to begin the corporate, and the way did the concept evolve over time?
My cofounders, Rohan Suri, Nikhil Cheerla, and I were close friends from Stanford. All of us studied AI and did research together. In the course of the pandemic, we began hacking around with “virtual office” ideas. It gave the look of the proper time—everyone was distant, and collaboration tools were becoming essential. We were particularly excited concerning the idea of constructing the virtual office “smart”. At all times-on collaboration generates a lot data and engagement, and we saw a chance to leverage that to automate work and help people recover at their jobs.
We noticed that sales teams, particularly SDR teams, were our most engaged users. They’re inherently social, and being early of their careers, they benefited quite a bit from the tighter collaboration these tools enabled. Spending more time with them, we saw how much of their time was spent on tasks that AI could easily handle—writing emails, researching prospects, updating CRMs. It made us wonder: would AI eventually replace these roles?
However the deeper we got, the more we realized how human the SDR job is. It’s not nearly tasks; it’s about understanding people, constructing relationships, and adapting in real-time. That’s when it clicked. AI wasn’t here to switch them—it could empower them.
For me personally, I’ve at all times been fascinated by human-AI interactions. Constructing a product that enhances what people do, fairly than replacing them, felt fulfilling. Sales became this natural extension of our virtual office idea, and with the market opportunity aligned perfectly with our interests, Nooks was born.
The pivot from a distant collaboration platform to an AI-driven sales assistant was a daring move. What were the important thing indicators that convinced you it was the proper decision?
Not only was there huge demand for Nooks from sales teams, but there was also an infinite market opportunity, impact, and really interesting human-centered AI problems to unravel.
Over the past few years, foundation model corporations like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have competed to push the boundaries of intelligence with LLMs. But the sensible applications to unravel real business problems remain under-developed.
Sales is one among the most important opportunities for AI to rework thousands and thousands of jobs. Within the U.S. alone, there are ~3 million inside sales reps, spending much of their time on repetitive tasks. These activities are time-consuming and distract from higher-leverage actions. Now that AI can automate much of this busywork, it’s change into clear that AI will transform the role of the sales rep. AI-powered teams will give you the chance to sell orders of magnitude more effectively than traditional teams. Leading corporations know that this sort of investment in sales is most corporations’ key lever for growth.
We not only built conviction out there, but we also found the applied AI problems in sales particularly interesting. Unlike domains like support or compliance, where tasks are more deterministic, sales is about dynamic, high-stakes human interactions. Success relies on nuanced engagement: identifying the proper stakeholders, earning trust, and persuading buyers of a product’s value. This complexity makes AI “assistants” the best application for sales, amplifying human efforts fairly than attempting to switch them.
Nooks has transformed sales processes with tools like AI Dialing Assistants and Prospecting Assistants. What makes your technology stand out within the crowded AI sales assistant market?
The sales AI space is super crowded with latest entrants day by day. And sales reps already use dozens of sales tools of their every day workflows—CRMs, email platforms, LinkedIn, prospecting databases, enablement tools, and more. No one wants just one other AI sales tool so it’s really essential we’re intentional about standing above the noise.
- Fast, tangible ROI. Most AI sales tools don’t work or don’t deliver clear results. In a two-week trial of Nooks, we’ll double your meetings booked per rep. Demonstrating our worth up-front has helped us stand out against other tools which are little greater than a cool demo. We power 70%+ of sales pipeline for among the world’s fastest-growing corporations like Deel, Webflow, Verkada and Fivetran.
- Sales reps love Nooks. Historically SDRs & BDRs haven’t gotten much love from software tools and infrequently don’t command the budget. But things are changing, and end-users are empowered to assist shape buying decisions. We’ve been very intentional about constructing for the rep, our end-user. Nooks gives reps superpowers whereas other tools can feel like a chore to make use of. The common rep spends 3hrs/day using Nooks. And we’re at the highest of the leaderboard in review sites like G2.
- Human-first. We’ve began with human-centered tasks like calling since it’s essential that, as technology progresses, customers use your product increasingly. Other corporations that start with things like email or research will find that sales reps use those products less and fewer over time because these sales tasks might be mostly automated with AI. We’re excited to construct human-AI hybrids that may out-pace one of the best human reps and out-smart one of the best pure AI sales agents.
Could you share more concerning the role AI plays in optimizing sales teams’ efficiency? For instance, how does your AI Parallel Dialer skip common pain points like answering machines or spam?
Sales is each an art and a science. With Nooks, human reps master the art—constructing relationships, empathizing with customer challenges, and crafting creative solutions—while AI helps with the science. Nooks assistants analyze every entry within the CRM, scour the net for relevant insights, and handle repetitive tasks like placing calls, writing emails, and updating records.
For instance, think concerning the typical process for making a call: looking up a prospect’s number, performing some pre-call research, dialing, and infrequently reaching voicemail or no answer. Multiply that by dozens of calls every day, and it quickly becomes a significant time sink.
AI transforms this process by automating the tedious parts. It could dial multiple lines directly, leave voicemails routinely, and connect reps immediately when a live prospect answers. This lets sellers focus their energy on conversations, not manual tasks.
When a prospect does answer, AI goes a step further by providing relevant research and context, enabling reps to have more impactful discussions. The consequence? More meaningful conversations that drive pipeline growth.
Training bots and call scoring are intriguing. How does Nooks ensure these tools are accurate and truly useful for sales reps and managers?
Call scoring and training bots are shaping how sales teams reinforce and scale best practices. Traditionally, managers needed to sift through call recordings, selectively scoring and identifying areas for improvement—a time-consuming process that left reps with limited feedback and growth opportunities.
AI changes the sport by analyzing every call and correlating performance with success metrics. It provides scalable, comprehensive feedback for all reps, ensuring consistent improvement across the team. Managers can customize scoring criteria, specializing in key stages or objections within the sales process to align with their strategy.
Training bots take this further by utilizing real-world call data to simulate conversations with prospects. These bots discover winning behaviors and challenges, allowing reps to practice unlimited role plays based on real scenarios. Managers can fine-tune these simulations so as to add complexity or goal specific objections, creating tailored training experiences.
Nooks enables managers to audit and optimize each training bots and call scoring to make sure accuracy. Combining AI’s scalability with manager-driven customization, sales teams can elevate their coaching and training programs to drive higher outcomes at scale.
What advancements in AI and machine learning do you foresee playing a vital role in Nooks’ future development?
Advancements in AI like improvements in reasoning, speech models, and browsing models comparable to Anthropic’s computer-use and OpenAI’s upcoming “Operator” model are an enormous profit to Nooks since we’ve got the richest data and highest user engagement on the top-of-funnel. Improved intelligence means we are able to cut out more busywork more quickly and our assistants are capable of develop a deeper understanding of shoppers’ sales processes.
However it’s really remarkable what AI models can already do today. And the sensible applications of this intelligence to unravel real business problems are still catching up. We’ve got quite a lot of exciting product updates planned that may feel futuristic to reps, but don’t really require model intelligence beyond what we have already got today.
We’re particularly excited to construct AI workflows that span across our AI assistants, helping them work together seamlessly and eliminate the necessity for reps to act as “human glue” manually connecting disparate tools. This may help bridge intelligence and workflow gaps across today’s fragmented tool stacks.
The sales industry is valued at $3 trillion, and legacy players like Salesforce dominate the space. How does Nooks plan to carve out a bigger share of this market?
We’ve got tight integrations with platforms like Salesforce. They’re incredible for CRM and managing deal pipelines, but they don’t solve the day-to-day challenges reps face within the trenches of selling. That’s where we are available in. On this latest world of AI, replacing legacy tools isn’t very exciting. The true opportunity lies in redefining people’s jobs.
AI-driven tools often face skepticism about replacing human roles. How do you address concerns about automation replacing jobs versus enhancing human productivity?
Sales is fundamentally a human-centered challenge. Unlike other domains starting to leverage pure AI agents—comparable to support, coding, or legal—the output of a sales rep isn’t an easy, deterministic task. Somewhat, it’s a fancy, dynamic human interaction.
In lots of other AI domains, the “consumer” is actively in search of the outcomes. For instance, a customer asking for support or an engineer is producing code. In sales, nonetheless, the customer is the buyer. They’re probably not actively seeking to be sold to and their inboxes are already flooded with AI-generated outreach. Consequently, being human stands out.
Sales AI must concentrate on amplifying human creativity and trust. Thus, the best AI applications for sales are “assistants” that empower humans fairly than AI “agents” attempting to switch them. AI-assisted reps will out-pace one of the best human reps and can out-smart one of the best pure AI sales agents.
Looking ahead, where do you see Nooks in five years? What larger impact do you hope it’s going to have on the sales industry?
There are thousands and thousands of sales reps within the US and their jobs are about to evolve. Nooks is poised to steer this transformation. Automating the “busywork” and enabling reps to concentrate on what they do best—constructing relationships and driving top-line growth—we envision leaner, AI-powered teams achieving orders of magnitude more effectiveness than traditional teams. AI assistants will change into indispensable, similar to top sales reps, because they won’t just support the sales process—they’ll be executing it.
On this future, AI-powered sales teams won’t only deliver unprecedented growth for his or her corporations but in addition set a better bar for what sales can achieve as a discipline. Beyond productivity gains, we hope to empower sales reps to deliver more value to their customers.