I did an open AMA at SaaStr London last week, a classic part of each SaaStr AI event. But this one was different. It was urgency to the max.
The room was packed with founders, CROs, and marketers who all seemed to be wrestling with the same existential questions: Is inbound dead? Is the GTM playbook broken? Will AI agents replace my entire team? Should I just give up and become a forward deployed engineer?
Most of the anxiety I’m seeing in the market right now is based on a false narrative. A dangerous “woe is me” narrative that’s been accelerating since late 2023. And I think it’s time to get honest about what’s actually happening—and what you need to do about it.
The “Woe Is Me” Narrative Is Killing Your Growth
Let me start with the question everyone’s asking: “Is inbound dead? My traffic is down 50% in the last 12 months.”
Here’s my honest response: Woe is you. Your SEO is harder. Woe is you. You don’t have as many leads as you had during a lockdown during a global pandemic. Poor you.
This leads to a narrative that I think is quite dangerous: that the go-to-market playbook is broken and doesn’t work anymore.
It’s just not true.
Yes, the playbook that some folks are running from 2021 doesn’t work as well today. But here’s what I say: the plays all work. Webinars, inbound, outbound, leftbound, rightbound—it all still works.
The Same CROs, CMOs, Etc. Are Running the Hottest AI Companies
Here’s what’s fascinating: if you look at the hottest AI companies right now, you’ll see a cast of characters from the 2010s. B2B leaders you know from SaaStr 2017 and 2018 are running today’s AI rockets.
Vercel (just raised at $10B): Their COO? She was the Chief Business Officer at Stripe.
Replit (0 to $250M this year in vibe coding): Their CRO? He’s from ZoomInfo.
Bolt (one of the vibe coding leaders at $60M): Head of sales? He was on our old SaaStr sales team.
That wouldn’t be possible if the plays don’t work. These leaders are using different tools. They’re using more AI things. But it’s the same playbook. Same demos. Same everything.
The biggest real difference? There’s just so much demand. Tools like Cursor, Replit, Lovable, 11 Labs—they’re so disruptive that everyone is in market simultaneously. 11 Labs went from almost nothing to $300M this year. Bolt has so much inbound they can’t service it. At $60M ARR, Brian has maybe four people on his sales team. How many of thousands of leads can they follow up on?
“They’re all classic B2B sales reps—just instead of calling every lead and trying to convince them their fungible product is the exact same as another product, they have insane demand and are servicing it. But it’s the same playbook.”
The AI Budget Paradox: Record Spending, Record Cuts
Here’s the thing that can feel like a paradox but isn’t:
According to Gartner, overall enterprise software is going to grow the fastest it ever has—15% a year at $400 billion. It’s never grown this fast ever. But of that 15%:
Almost half is taken up by price increases from existing vendors (everyone’s raising prices)
About half of the remaining half is new AI budget
That means if you’re not one of the vendors getting price increases or new AI budget, everyone else has to get cut.
Vendor count is getting stable or shrinking to make room for new AI offerings and price increases from select vendors. CIOs have gone around the room and said: “Give me an app. Give up an app. You want to add a couple AI apps next year? I’ll find you budget—but you got to give up two. You have 100 marketing tools? Maybe 96 is enough.”
I just got an investor update yesterday from a pretty successful company at mid-eight figures in revenue. They had $1.5 million in churn last month. From happy customers. No CSAT issues, no other problems. They literally said: “We’re cutting apps next year. We’re an attachment to CRM and we got cut.”
The CEO failed because they didn’t get above the cut line. It was great to have, but not mission critical. And it got cut to make room for an AI app.
Our SEO Is Down 8%. But Our Traffic Is Up 50%.
Is SEO dead? Let me give you our real numbers.
At SaaStr, our blog is like our core—it’s home base. Our blog traffic was fairly flat for about four years. Going into this year, our SEO is down 8%. Not 50%, but 8% for real.
But here’s the thing: our traffic is up 50%. We will end this year at saastr.com with twice as many readers as last year, even though our SEO is down.
Why? Because people all want to read about AI GTM content. They don’t want to read about classic SaaStr themes about CS teams and CROs unless there’s an AI angle. But because we have some of the best AI GTM agent content out there, people are just devouring it.
Meanwhile, G2 says their SEO is down 30-40% or more. So if that’s your only play and you haven’t changed your product or GTM since 2021, yes—it’s probably going to feel 8-50% harder.
You’ve got to find your tailwind. That’s your job right now.
AI SDRs Didn’t Work Until Claude 4. Now They Do.
Someone asked me about AI SDRs: “You said they didn’t work, but now they do. Can you elaborate?”
Really, none of these SDR products worked before Claude 4.1 Sonnet or Claude 4 this year. Replit didn’t work. Lovable didn’t work. Base44 didn’t work. They were out there—they just weren’t very good.
Then the magical moment when Claude 4 came out and everything was kind of magical.
Look at Gamma—they do AI presentations. Founded in 2020. It was five years to $1M, and then 1 to $80M this year. Replit was founded almost 10 years ago. It was 10 years to $1M, then $1 to $250M. It’s not a coincidence that all of these apps took off January, February, March of this year. That’s when the LLMs got better.
If you had a bad experience with almost any AI LLM GTM product before March of this year, write it off. It was a different time. Different LLMs. Different world.
The Two Failure Modes of AI Agents
I’ve identified two main failure modes for AI agent deployments:
Failure Mode #1: Pre-Claude 4 LLMs
If you bought overhyped GTM SDR tools before February/March/April of this year, they just didn’t work well. The LLMs weren’t good enough.
I was with the CEO of Qualified—they’ve been trying to use AI to qualify inbound leads since 2019. I asked him: “This really took off around February or March this year, right?” He said: “Yeah, that’s when it finally actually worked after 5 years.”
Failure Mode #2: “Just Turn It On”
The second failure mode: so many folks just told someone on their team to deploy it, or hired an agency that didn’t know what they’re doing.
We were on a call with a global technology leader—pretty AI-forward, impressive company—and they said: “We’re thinking about buying our first AI SDR. We’re just going to buy it and hand it to our SDRs and have them figure it out.”
It’s not going to work. You’ve got to train it. You’ve got to train it for a month. You’ve got to train it every day. You’ve got to iterate the onboarding.
I’d say 80% of the conversations Amelia and I have are a version of this: “I bought a tool and I have no leads. I bought a tool and I have a lot of leads, but I didn’t connect it to my leads. It didn’t magically work.”
The Right Way to Deploy AI Agents
Here’s the captain obvious thing for any AI SDR, BDR, even AI AEs, CSMs:
First, you’ve got to have it work in the real world with humans. Figure out what actually closes deals.
Then you tell the AI what worked. There’s no magical prompt. The prompt is: “Here’s the script that I use with a customer that I closed.”
Then you iterate that prompt.
Then you hook it up to data—Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake—and have it ingest the data to keep working with that prompt to make it better.
Read every email it sends. Read every response it ingests. Some will be dumb. Some will be wrong. You say: “Hey, that was wrong. SaaStr AI London is not December 4th.” Do it every day for about a month. The mistakes start to go away.
“If you can’t sell it yourself, the AI can’t sell it for you. It’s that simple.”
The #1 Skill for 2026: Become an Agent Deployment Expert
Someone asked about the most important skill to build for 2026. Here’s my answer:
Right now, if you are world-class at Agent Force or Clay or Qualified or Artisan—pick two or three leaders with decent revenue that people have heard of—and you go through the deployment yourself, you do the training, you onboard it, you get it working in your company, and you can point to the metrics…
You will be infinitely hireable for the next 18 months because only like 2% of marketers have those skills.
Become the expert in deploying agents. It doesn’t need to mean you know every agent or even needs to be technical, but you need to:
Pick a few leaders and deploy them yourself (not tell someone on your team to do it)
Watch it, iterate it, train it, iterate every day
Spend a week non-stop deploying it, then work on it every single day for a month
You will learn so much and become infinitely deployable.
The Benioff Insight: Deliver Insane Value Before They Pay
On the first podcast that Mark Benioff did with us earlier this year, I asked him what he thought of Palantir. He said: “I’m jealous of how much they charge.” Pretty funny—they charge more than Salesforce does.
But what he said next was even better: “I wish everyone at Salesforce could go live before they even pay.”
Think about this. The way we used to buy B2B software for years: I need a CRM. Your friends use it. You saw it at your last company. You talk to a sales rep that could answer six questions. You’d buy it. And if you’re lucky, by the end of the year, you might deploy it.
In the old days, you might have customers that were new for year two that never even deployed in year one. That doesn’t fly today.
Mark’s point was: “I know I can’t deliver this today—it’s not feasible—but the technology is there. I wish every single customer would be live on Agent Force before they gave me a dollar.”
Get as close to that today as you can for your customer.
When you look at the companies that explode—Cursor, Gamma—think about how much value you get in the free program. Think about how much value you get in the first month. What can you do with AI to provide that much value to customers before they even pay you?
If you provide insane value with an agent before they pay you, they’re going to be kind of happy to pay you—rather than the sucker bet we all made for two decades: “I think it works. Someone gave me a demo. The demo kind of works. I can’t use it myself, but I need that.” And then half the time it’s a horror story.
Your Moats Are Shrinking From Years to Months
Someone asked: “Some AI experts say that with AGI in two-three years, SaaS will be dead because you can literally just talk to OpenAI and say ‘write code that does that.’ What do you think?”
Listen, if you’d asked me six months ago, I’d say the odds that’s true are zero. That’s ChatGPT nonsense. You cannot reproduce the amount of workflows, corner cases, and complexity that complex B2B software does.
But you can chip away at it.
I’ve vibe-coded 11 apps in 90 days that have been used 800,000 times. I haven’t stolen revenue from anybody, but that’s a bit of an existential threat to somebody, isn’t it?
And the agent has gotten so much better. When I built my first app on Replit 170 days ago, it blew up. It deleted my database. Those posts went viral on Reddit. We got death threats from Redditors. Millions of views.
Now? When Replit launched V3 about 45 days ago, there’s multiple agents that talk to each other and check the work. Before it deleted my data, now it has an architect. When there’s a tough problem, it doesn’t just go off the rails—it says: “Hold on, I’m not sure. I’m going to call in another agent.” They bring in help on security. Now they have a design specialist.
Don’t underestimate the rate at which this stuff is getting better.
Competitive Edges Are Now Measured in Months
When I started in SaaS, you’d build something slick and you’d have about 12-18 months until you were copied by a startup. Then you’d have like 5 years until a big company copied you.
When we launched EchoSign, DocuSign (now an $18B company) only worked in Windows and was partially web-based. We had like 18 months before they decided to copy us. Then it took 5-6 years for Adobe to decide to copy it. Then Google just launched a clone last year—like a decade later.
Not too recently, I invested in a startup I love. Incredibly powerful. Within two weeks, they had four clones. And then a massive company is building a clone that’ll be out this year.
It’s not that we’re going to rebuild Workday and Salesforce and Oracle. But our competitive edges are going to be measured in months when they used to be years. And that compounds.
Look at Google—they just launched a Replit/Lovable clone. Replit gets to $250M in one year, of course Google’s going to clone it. It used to take everything 5-7-10 years to get to $100M. No one would even bother to compete.
“I don’t want to be one of these guys on X saying the only moat is speed and working 996. But there’s a lot of truth in it. If you don’t like it, you might go into terminal decay.”
The Pager Duty Warning: Two Times Revenue at $500M ARR
I wrote up PagerDuty today. It got about 500,000 views on X and LinkedIn.
PagerDuty missed its last quarter. They just crossed $500M in ARR. They’re worth $1 billion. Two times revenue.
Their customer count is flat—15,000-something customers for four years. DataDog came out with a clone. Atlassian’s product is better. Startups are better. They just didn’t move fast enough.
And I think it’s only going to accelerate. Everyone will build clones faster. It took DataDog 15 years to decide to do this. It might take them 8 months to do it next time. And 90 days the time after that.
Value Selling Is Dead Without Product Expertise
Someone asked about value selling: “Why is it so hard for sales teams to speak the language of CFOs?”
Let me be honest in the age of AI: Most sales reps have no idea how to sell value.
You cannot sell value unless you’re a product expert. Most sales folks want to talk with a war sheet, a tear sheet. They know six things. You cannot sell value if you’re not a product expert.
We were with an AI leader the other day. They closed a seven-figure deal while we were there. The solution architect left the sales team behind. Closed it without them. Didn’t want to talk to the sales team. Sales team didn’t know the product. They added no value.
Value-based selling means providing value. You cannot provide value in the age of AI if you do not know the product cold. Ideally, how to deploy it, how to get it going, how to deploy real value—not just having a valuation calculator on your website that says 18 months down the road the product will work.
“The worst sales rep you can hire today is the one that tells you they’re a ‘great people person.’ Who cares? I want an AI SDR deployed in 30 days. I want it to get me this amount of quota. I want to do this workflow. The rep who says ‘Oh, it sounds good, yeah, we can do that’—it’s not going to work.”
AI is not going to replace the AE the way it is already replacing the SDR, support, and customer success. But it is going to replace a lot of AEs that don’t know the product cold.
I really think 70-80% of the sales executives I’ve worked with over the last five or six years don’t know their product cold. If you look back at your top couple sales reps—whatever era, pre-AI, doesn’t matter—the top ones weren’t just good schmoozers. They knew the product cold. I call them “sales magicians,” but they’re not magical. They just know how every nook and cranny works.
We’re just not going to tolerate mediocre sales reps in the age of AI. We’re going to buy from somebody else.
Sales, Marketing & Support Are Converging Into One Agent
Something fascinating is happening in e-commerce that’s relevant to everyone: In the space of just a year, three categories of B2B e-commerce have all combined—sales, marketing, and support.
Think about it: when you go to a shopping cart, when you want to buy a new phone, what might you be doing? You might be buying (that’s sales). It might have a problem (that’s support). Or you might be interested but not ready today (that’s marketing).
Those used to be different apps. In e-commerce, you had Klaviyo for marketing, Gorgias for support, separate apps for remarketing. About a year ago, you’d go to e-commerce sites and they’d have five different agents: “Talk here for support, talk here for marketing…”
Now they’ve all combined because AI can easily understand: Is this a sales call? Is this marketing? Is this remarketing? Is this support? Is this customer success?
In most B2B, we’re still running multiple apps. But that’s not going to last. People don’t want 28 agents on your website. They just want one agent to solve their problems.
At SaaStr, we’ve gone from one to 20 AI agents ourselves this year. But it’s at the edge of too many—not only for us to process and manage business process change, but when you go to saastr.com or SaaStr Annual, we don’t want you to see 11 AI agents either.
These discrete walls between categories—AI is going to break them down because we just want to talk with one agent as customers, prospects, and users.
Outbound Still Works. Here’s Why.
Someone asked about outbound: What’s changed? What stayed the same?
From our AI outbound: geometrically more volume, same results. By training the AI with the best scripts and ideas that humans did, we basically saw the same results—in some cases a little worse, some cases a little better—but same as humans for the most part with much higher productivity.
Outbound isn’t dead. And if you’ve never been a buyer at a big company, you don’t get outbound.
Let me tell you a story. Back in the day at Dreamforce, a guy from Success Factors (a large SaaS company SAP bought) turned to me on a panel and said: “Yeah, I bought your product, Jason.” I said: “Wow, great. Why?” He said: “Well, it was the end of the quarter, our fax machines were broken, and you said you’d figured out e-signatures and I needed that problem solved today. I bought 300 seats.”
One of his top problems at a given time. High ROI. Immediate value proposition. He read a cold email from a company at $2M ARR.
I asked Yamini at SaaStr Annual this year: “Do you read your cold emails?” She said: “I read them every day. Email is the best. Even today—it’s the best thing in the world. Everyone reads it. It’s an open medium.”
Your job with outbound is to solve one of the top three problems of your buyer.
Whether it’s CEO, SVP, VP—if it’s a top three problem, you’re going to get a meeting. Whether it’s a top three pain point or a top three initiative. AI SDR, BDR, Agent Force, Artisan, Qualified—I don’t actually know if this is a top three problem for a lot of buyers, but I know it’s a top three thing on their mind. Everyone wants to figure out how to do an AI SDR.
If you’re in the top three, you’re going to see super high open rates if you have a differentiated product and crystal clear value proposition. This has not changed in the age of AI.
The Enterprise Budget Reality: VP Slush Funds
Let me tell you how it really works in big companies. When I was a VP at Adobe, there were three types of budget: unbudgeted, discretionary, and budgeted.
Budgeted money: Big dollars but really hard to get. Multi-million dollar contracts that often take 1-3-5 years of discussing and planning until you close the deal. Maybe get a pilot.
Discretionary/Slush budget: I was the most junior VP of all 40-50 VPs. Even I had a $500K slush budget. Today it might be a million bucks. Everyone had more.
What was my slush budget for? My top three needs that I just couldn’t get elsewhere in the organization or elsewhere budgeted through the CFO.
If you solved one of my three needs sitting in my corner tower office and it was some fraction of that $500K-$1M—I had budget. I didn’t even care. It’s use it or lose it in big companies.
I didn’t have one more dollar than that. And I didn’t care about my eighth problem. I just didn’t care. But selfishly, if you solved one of my problems, I had half a million to a million bucks to buy.
Those are the budgets you’re fighting for. They haven’t changed in the age of AI, but our priorities have changed.
It was really hard for me to get a million dollar piece of software—it probably would have taken me years as the new VP. But I had almost a million bucks in aggregate to spend on whatever I needed to get the hundreds of folks that worked for me to solve their problems. I could do that in a week or two. That was up until that line, and then I was tapped out for the year.
The Bottom Line
Stop with the “woe is me” narrative. Stop saying the GTM playbook is broken. The plays all work. The same players from 2017-2018 are running the hottest AI companies—that wouldn’t be possible if the playbook was broken.
What’s changed:
AI agents actually work now (post-Claude 4)
Moats are shrinking from years to months
You need to deliver value before you get paid
Product expertise is mandatory for sales
Multiple agent categories are converging into one
CIOs are cutting apps to make room for AI
Your job right now is to find your tailwind. There is AI budget. There is AI budget for new vendors at the CIO level. If you have something that truly changes the game for efficiency—if you can truly replace lots of humans with your agent—your customers are going to want to meet with you and they’re going to want to buy.
But if you’re running the exact same playbook as 2022, nothing’s changed, you’re an attachment that’s nice to have but not mission critical…
You’re going to get cut.
This post is based on the SaaStr London 2025 AMA. Join us at SaaStr AI Annual 2026 in May for more sessions on AI GTM, agent deployment, and the future of B2B SaaS.
