Make no mistake: the AI era is about displacement

Make no mistake: the AI era is about displacement

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If your company could replace you and/or your team with AI, they would. They just would.

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Your PE/VC firm's ideal business is one that plugs into a computer and works on autopilot.

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How'd we get here, and where are we going?

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✅ The Predictable Revenue Era (2011 - 2020)

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This movement fundamentally rewired how we build pipeline in SaaS. Split sales into two parts: Hunters (SDRs + AEs) and Farmers (AMs)

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Henry Ford meets SaaS.

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Buyers picked up their desk phones. And email wasn't a complete disaster (yet).

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This model assumed you could always hire more reps, buy more data, send more emails, make more phone calls, etc. It assumed that buyer attention was unlimited.

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Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

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✅ The Sales Engagement Gold Rush (2016 - 2022)

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The Predictable Revenue era gave birth to an entirely new category of software: Sales Engagement Platforms.

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Salesloft and Outreach were the two category leaders, both valued at billions of dollars by 2021. This is where the industry collectively shot itself in the foot.

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Sales engagement became the biggest “we do that too!” movement of all time in SaaS.

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By 2024, ZoomInfo, Gong, Clari, HubSpot, Salesforce, and every other big player added sequencing to their product suite. And it led to Google, Microsoft, and Apple investing millions to protect their users from spam. Advanced email filtering, call screening, you name it.

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The irony was painful: the tools designed to make outbound easier made it exponentially harder.

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✅ The Great Correction (2022 - 2023)

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2020 hits, the world presses a giant pause button. But everyone went remote overnight and needed tools to support WFH.

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That party ended fast. By 2022, VC/PE funding tightened up, and the growth-at-all-costs era was over. Efficiency became the new religion.

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I watched it happen in real time. Two of our biggest clients announced layoffs the same week.

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✅ The AI Era (2023 - Present)

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The old playbook was broken, and AI showed up promising to fix everything. My therapist and sales assistant all in one platform? LFG!

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But it started with empty promises. No one was replacing SDRs with AI. And the output (cold emails mostly) was mediocre at best.

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Fast forward to today…SDR teams are legit being laid off. Companies are handing off their inbound leads to AI agents. And it’s going to be brutal for a few more years.

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~~~

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A correction will happen. It always does. And this one's going to happen fast.

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Sure, interacting with a human-like chatbots when I visit your website is cool…right now. But the luster will wear off.

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People will get sick and tired of being bombarded with AI spam.

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The best thing you can do right now is master the unscalable:

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- Personalized videos

- In-person visits

- Direct mail campaigns

- Experiencing the brand first-hand

- Ghost writing emails for your execs

- VC intros

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Outbound is broken, but it ain't dead.