Every era of the GTM stack promised to make selling easier. Every era just moved the bottleneck.
- 2010
- CRMs and marketing automation became the standard.
- 2015
- Sequences became the default. The SDR role exploded.
- 2017
- Enrichment and call recordings told reps who to work and what to say.
- 2020
- Intent data. Signal obsession. ABM went mainstream.
- 2023
- Workflow automation.
- 2026
- The agentic year. Everyone is selling the AI SDR.
Here is my problem with most of them: they are expensive autocomplete. A sequence with a smarter send button. No defined engine. No human owner at the checkpoints that matter.
The teams getting real leverage from AI this year are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones with a defined engine and a human owner at every checkpoint.
Technology does the work. People still do the selling.