Anis Bennaceur is the co-founder and CEO of Attention, an AI revenue platform for sales teams. It captures sales conversations, fills every CRM field and tells reps, managers, leaders and RevOps what to do next. Attention is a Series B startup with about 70 employees, and its customers include Scale AI, Lovable and Bamboo HR. Anis joined us in Episode 45 (June 5, 2026).
Anis started Attention after a bootstrapped company where every deal mattered (08:29). The first product was a real-time coach that told sellers what to say during calls. Within a few weeks of launch, users stopped caring about it, and buyers would not pay for it.
Coaching is a vitamin. People wanna buy painkillers, and the biggest painkiller was actually filling the CRM.
— Anis Bennaceur, Episode 45
So Attention flipped: record calls, auto-fill Salesforce (later HubSpot too) and write follow-up emails. Anis noticed he used that version several times a day himself. Over time it added emails, chat and Slack messages as inputs, and in 2024 it began pushing insights to wherever people work, such as Slack, CRM and email reports. Today a proactive section lists each rep's next best actions.
And I noticed something really interesting, right, which was the people who were actually spending the most money on AI on Cursor were either the bottom engineers or some of the top engineers and no one in the middle.
— Anis Bennaceur, Episode 45
The reality is in lot of cases, workflows, just deterministic workflows tend to work as well, if not better, than stochastic agents.
— Anis Bennaceur, Episode 45
Jordan agreed with that last point (24:57): he starts with an agent SDK, then usually ends up with step-by-step LLM API calls.
Anis had just open-sourced a dialed-down version of Attention's sales coaching stack, which scores one conversation at a time. Sam built the next step on top of it (01:57): a Monte Carlo pipeline forecast dashboard. On fake data, it ran 10,000 trials to compare an AI forecast of $1.17M with a CRM commit of $1.44M. It also had deal-risk drill-downs, a live call scorecard (67 out of 100) and macro scenarios.
Anis said Attention had never tried Monte Carlo forecasting and liked that the result landed fairly close to the commit. His notes: use sales terms like commit, best case and at risk; the feedback text read as AI-written; and the real value is the next move, such as drafting outreach to an unreached decision maker on an at-risk deal. More on our AI in sales page.
Anis Bennaceur is the co-founder and CEO of Attention, a Series B startup with about 70 employees. He previously founded a bootstrapped company, where he says the CRM was never filled. He joined Built This Week in Episode 45 in June 2026.
Attention captures calls, emails and messages, fills every field in the CRM rather than just writing a summary, drafts follow-ups and surfaces proactive next best actions for reps, managers, leaders and RevOps teams. Customers include Scale AI, Lovable and Bamboo HR.
Anis said users stopped caring about real-time coaching within a few weeks and buyers would not pay for it. Someone told him coaching is a vitamin while filling the CRM is the painkiller, so Attention pivoted to auto-filling the CRM.
Anis caps most employees at a few hundred dollars on top of their normal Claude usage, gives his top people unlimited spend, and approves extra requests himself or with his co-founder.
Anis said deterministic workflows often work as well as or better than agents, without the heavy inference cost. Jordan agreed, saying he usually ends up with step-by-step LLM API calls instead of an agent SDK.
