Building Alice’s Brain: an AI Sales Rep that Learns Like a Human - Sherwood & Satwik, 11x
Jul 29, 2025 · 22:18
Sherwood Callaway and Satwik from 11x describe building 'Alice's brain' — a knowledge base that lets their AI sales development representative learn from seller materials as a human SDR would, using a full RAG pipeline. They outsourced parsing to vendors like LlamaParse (documents/images), Firecrawl (websites), and Cloud Glue (audio/video), converting resources into Markdown. Their chunking strategy splits on Markdown headers then sentences and tokens. Storage uses Pinecone vector database for similarity search, with bundled embedding models. For retrieval, they built a deep research agent with Letta that plans and executes context retrieval for email generation. A 3D UMAP visualization lets users inspect Alice's knowledge nodes. Key lessons: RAG is complex, get to production before benchmarking, and leverage vendors for expertise. Future plans include hybrid RAG with a graph database, hallucination tracking, and cost reduction.
