We just added 2 new team members
Without actually hiring...
Divya Puri
April 25, 2026
Read time: 5 minutes
Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 2,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.
Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.
We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.
Succession
Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)
Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services
Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients
Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma
Harrison recently added 2 new members to the Succession team.
They don’t sit at a desk, they don’t join our Monday meetings, and technically they don’t exist as people… but over the past few weeks, they’ve been handling tasks, and have had a noticeable impact on the daily operations of the company.
Without further ado… meet Emma and Neo, our 2 new full-time agent employees!
Emma - CMO
Neo - Chief of staff
When I first found out we hired 2 AI agents, I must admit, I was excited but also a little worried. How on earth am I supposed to directly compete with AI! In this newsletter, I’ll explain what they actually do, how Harrison built them, and what it’s like to work alongside them. Spoiler alert, I love both Emma and Neo + my job is safe.
Why 5 became 7
The easiest way to understand why they exist is to start with the problem.
We’re a team of five, and we carry a lot of clients (blessed). Not to mention the continuous improvement of our internal systems. I’m serious, we add a new technical thing every day. So when we have small interruptions like someone asking a quick question, then having to pause what you’re doing to help, that really eats into our time. Managing brand awareness and marketing activities is something all of us in the team commit to doing but also is a massive time-sink.
This is what Emma and Neo were built to absorb.
They’re not there to replace us or take over the work that requires judgement that only a human can actually make. They were built to make our lives easier, to take care of the parts of the day that slow everything down so we can spend more of our time on client work and on improving the systems we run.
The Hiring Process
Most people treat AI like a chatbot with a longer memory. That’s usually where things fall apart. Harrison approached this more like bringing in two new hires and running a full onboarding. Here’s a quick summary of what he did.
First, they’re connected to the actual systems we use. Not a sandbox or a test environment, the real tools that the team relies on every day.
Emma has access to things like Google Analytics, Search Console, our content library, Linear (our project management tool), and our marketing database.
Neo is familiar with how our campaign infrastructure works, including the way tools like Bison, Clay, HeyReach, and our internal review systems connect.
Second, they’ve been given a proper knowledge base. This is the part that’s easy to skip, and usually the reason these kinds of setups don’t work.
Emma really understands our ICP, our positioning and the way each team member in Succession actually writes.
Neo understands how our systems are structured, what tends to go wrong, and how we’ve solved similar issues in the past.
Third, they’re tightly scoped.They’re not general assistants trying to do everything, and that focus is what makes them reliable in their specific areas.
Emma is a marketing teammate.
Neo is an internal support teammate. The shift was noticeable once they were connected to real systems.
With all these things in place, they stopped feeling like tools and started behaving more like teammates you could actually rely on for specific types of work. I totally understand that this may sound hard to comprehend, but it’s true. They really feel like part of the team!
About Emma
Emma’s role is pretty straightforward: she handles a large part of our marketing activities.
That includes things like keyword research, structuring content, identifying gaps in what we’re publishing, drafting blog posts, LinkedIn content etc. She also supports campaign work by helping pull together performance data and flagging what’s worth testing.
Where she’s been particularly useful is in the operational work that used to take up way too much time. Tasks like rebuilding our Google Tag Manager setup or migrating our blog from a subdomain to the main domain. Things like that would normally take a full day, not it’s done in an hour or so with hardly any continuous input from us.
The real advantage isn’t just speed, though. It’s consistency. She doesn’t lose context between tasks, she doesn’t get pulled into meetings, and she can pick things up exactly where they were left off without needing a reset.
About Neo
Neo plays a different role, and he’s the one I’ve relied on most heavily in practice.
His job is to understand how our internal systems work at a level where he can help troubleshoot issues when something doesn’t work as expected.
Before Neo, if I ran into a problem in my day-to-day process, I had 2 options. I would spend time digging through logs and scripts myself, and if I could’;t solve the issue, I’d pester Harrison. P.S. Harrison if you’re reading this, take this as a public apology.
Both options came with a cost, either I lost time or someone else did.
Now, when I have an issue I simply send a DM to Neo. I describe what’s happened, and he helps narrow down possible causes, points me to the right places to check, and helps me work towards a solution. In almost every case, Neo has helped me solve every issue and so I’ve not had to ask someone else for help meaning they have 1 less headache to deal with and also can focus on other pressing tasks.
Respecting Our Boundaries
It’s really important to be clear about what Emma and Neo don’t do. They don’t have full control over anything that goes out externally, and there is always a human in the loop.
For example, with LinkedIn content, the ideas still come from us. Emma can suggest angles, but more often than not, the direction comes from us gauging what’s happening in the market that week. Once the idea is set, she helps with drafting and structure. After that, the review, refinement, and final output always sit with us.
The same applies to Neo. He helps troubleshoot and guide the process, but the decisions about what to fix and how to approach it remain ours. He won’t implement anything without our authorization.
All of this leads to something really important… the real hires (us human folk) can spend less time troubleshooting issues and drafting content, which honestly we see as admin work in our jobs. We can reinvest that freed-up time into applying our expertise across strategy, decision-making and sales strategy to expand our client base.
Immediate Changes
The biggest shift has been the impact of relying on these team members on the daily.
When it’s easy and quick to get answers, you end up asking more questions. When you ask more questions, you unblock yourself faster. And when that happens across the whole team, it leads to fewer interruptions and more sustained periods of focused work.
Now there are still limitations. Emma and Neo can only be as good as the context you feed them. Sometimes they’re wrong. It’s funny as when they are wrong they say it in such a confident manner I end up checking myself. But all of this shows how incredibly important it is to keep a human at every key decision point.
As a team, we interrupt each other less which has made a real difference to how much deep work gets done. At the same time, less time is spent on execution-heavy tasks, which means more time is available for thinking, planning, and improving the way we operate.
This is a different way of working, but so far, I think it’s a better one. Hopefully this sparks some creativity for your own organization. Feel free to reach out to anyone from the Succession team if you’re interested in building agents to look after certain areas of your business but need guidance on where to get started.
Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.
Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.
Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.