In the world of sales enablement, there's a quiet crisis happening. Reps are drowning in training sessions, role-plays, and enablement software that feels disconnected from their actual needs. Meanwhile, sales leaders are desperately trying to measure ROI on tools that promise results but often fall short.

Enter Replicate Labs, a company that's turning this paradigm on its head by creating AI sales coaching that feels genuinely human. Their secret weapon? Anam's Real-Time Personas.

We recently sat down with James Pursey, founder of Replicatelabs.ai, to understand how they're using Anam's technology to create something that sales reps don't just tolerate, but actually love.

The Problem with Traditional Sales Enablement

"Software is built for managers and forced on reps," James explained during our conversation. "The thing that closes deals is dashboards. How can I prove ROI? How can I justify this investment?"

This focus on manager-pleasing metrics leads to a fundamental disconnect. Sales reps find themselves bombarded with notifications, accountability mechanisms, and learning activities they didn't ask for. The experience feels mechanical, impersonal, and disconnected from their actual needs.

James noted a telling symptom: "Reps don't actually get their own analytics of how they're doing. Companies haven't even thought about that, they've only thought about the buyer."

The Coaching Solution

Replicate Labs recognized that what sales professionals truly crave isn't more software, it's more coaching. The kind of personalized, responsive guidance that helps them improve in ways that matter to them.

Their solution? An AI coach that, in James's words, "acts and operates exactly like an expert-level human coach." Their system works by meeting with reps face-to-face (literally), identifying areas for improvement, and building a fully customized coaching path over 2-3 weeks.

But to make this vision work, they needed something critical: an AI persona that felt real enough to create trust and connection.

Enter Anam's Real-Time Personas

"When we switched our focus to full coaching, we felt that first experience with video really enhances it," James shared. "If you hired an elite-level coach tomorrow, 100% of the time that first meeting is going to be either in person or over video chat. Trust is important. Visual is part of that."

This is where Anam's technology became a game-changer. But what exactly makes these AI personas feel so real?

Ben Carr, CTO and co-founder of Anam, explains that creating realistic personas requires solving multiple complex problems simultaneously:

"The challenge is you have to get it all right. If one part is lacking, then the whole experience is in the bin. And that's where the approach that we've taken at Anam, what we call full frame generation, comes in. Our AI models render the entire frame. Every pixel you see has gone through a neural network and is the output of one of our models."

This approach gives Anam complete control over expressivity, head motion, and all the subtle behaviors that make interactions feel natural. But the visual component is just one piece of the puzzle.

The Brain Behind the Face

While Anam excels at creating realistic visual representations, the "brain" of the persona is equally important, this is where the conversation capabilities come from.

"The best way to understand it is to think about the LLM being the brains, the TTS being the voice, and our foundational model being the interface," explains Caoimhe Murphy, co-founder of Anam. "Your ability to make the experience really good is driven by your system prompt. Your system prompt can have enough information in it. I can say you're talking to Josh, explaining about Ireland or Bernese Mountain Dogs, introduce yourself as Rachel... and you can make it really relevant."

Replicate Labs leverages this flexibility to create coaches with deep context about sales methodologies, business challenges, and coaching approaches, all while maintaining the natural, human-like interaction that builds trust.

Integration That Feels Magical

When Replicate Labs decided to incorporate Anam's technology, they expected a complex, time-consuming integration process. James recalled, "Alex, our CTO, had put down on his development brief two weeks to integrate it. I mentioned that in passing to Anam, and they were like, 'No, it should take like a day.'"

The result? "Literally the next day we had a functioning version."

This ease of integration allowed Replicate Labs to quickly transform their product offering and create something their customers immediately recognized as valuable.

The Magic Moment: From Skeptic to Champion

The real power of this approach becomes evident when you see how it transforms the sales process itself. James shared a particularly compelling story:

"We had a prospect who had this problem where the reps had basically turned against enablement. They were openly saying, 'We're spending too much time in training. We're not getting value from it.'"

Faced with this challenge, James asked the customer to bring their most negative rep to a demo call. The plan? If they could win over the biggest skeptic, everyone else would follow.

"Even when the call started, the video comes up and you see the surprise because we didn't tell him it was going to be video," James recounted. "There was this hesitancy as he went through the first couple of responses. And then the coach asked him quite an intelligent question that actually made him think for the first time."

The result was transformative. When asked what he thought of the experience, the rep literally struggled to speak, he was that impressed. "This guy ended up being almost a champion for us within the account, having been anti-enablement for a long time."

What Makes It Work: The Technical Details

Ben Carr explains that achieving this level of realism requires solving several key challenges:

Visual Fidelity

"There's three fundamental dimensions. First is image fidelity, how realistic does it look if you take a still frame? Second is the dynamics, how it looks in motion. And third is expressivity, all the eyebrow movement, eye movement, and other elements that make it engaging."

Voice Quality

"Voice is absolutely key to a compelling avatar or persona experience. You can have the best face generation models in the world, but if the voice falls flat, the whole experience falls flat."

Natural Pauses and Imperfections

"If you want to maximize realism, encourage adding little pauses in your system prompts. It sounds like a small, trivial thing, but it really does make a big difference to that immersion. You can actually forget you're talking to AI briefly because it's such a human thing to have flaws. When it sounds and looks too polished, that's also uncanny valley triggering."

Low Latency

"Latency's absolutely key. Users don't like it if they have to wait more than a second or two. But latency's difficult. Humans are actually incredibly good at responding quickly. We can respond in 200 milliseconds after someone has stopped speaking."

By solving these complex technical challenges, Anam has created personas that feel natural enough to build genuine trust, something critical for effective coaching.

The Business Impact: Beyond the Wow Factor

While the technology is impressive, what matters most is the business impact. For Replicate Labs, the addition of Anam's Real-Time Personas has transformed both their sales process and their customer results.

"When we showed this to people as a prototype before it was even ready, two of our customers tripled the size of their contract," James shared. "Their reason was they wanted to lock in the price based on the old product so that they could benefit from the new version when it came out."

This enthusiasm directly translates to measurable business outcomes:

• Decreased ramp times: New hires become productive faster
• Increased win rates: Improved sales performance
• Time savings for managers: More time for deal reviews and forecast stabilization
• Improved rep sentiment: Potentially leading to lower attrition

Perhaps most importantly, it's changed how Replicate Labs demonstrates their product. Instead of traditional SaaS demos, they now generate unique links for prospects and have actual end users try the product during sales calls.

"We basically killed SaaS demos," James said. "It's now a workshop every time."

The Future of Sales Coaching

What makes this approach so powerful isn't just the technology, it's the fundamental shift in how we think about sales enablement.

As James puts it: "This is not software. When we think of SaaS, we think of tons of navigation down the left, a nice interface on the right, and those email notifications that say, 'Haven't used me in 14 days, come on.' We keep trying to explain to people that's not what this is. We're giving you a coach."

The results speak for themselves. By creating AI personas that feel genuinely human, Replicate Labs isn't just making another sales tool, they're addressing the emotional toll that performance without practice creates for sales professionals.

Bringing Human Connection to Digital Coaching

What's most fascinating about this story isn't the sophisticated AI models or technical achievements, it's how technology is being used to bring more human connection to sales enablement, not less.

"I visited my grandmother," Ben Carr shared, explaining the inspiration behind Anam. "She spends quite a lot of her time on the sofa... and also talking to Alexa. The way she was talking to Alexa was a little bit different from the way we would talk to Alexa. She was kind of looking for a bit more of connection."

That fundamental human desire for connection, even with technology, is what's driving the success of both Anam and Replicate Labs. By creating AI personas that feel truly natural, they're enabling a kind of digital coaching that respects what sales professionals really need: not just another tool, but a trusted partner in their professional development.

In a world where technology often creates more distance between people, this approach is using advanced AI to create something that feels surprisingly human, and that might be the most innovative aspect of all.

Want to test your sales skills with one of our Real-Time sales coaches? Try it out for free in the Anam Lab today! 

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