Let’s talk AI.
Everyone’s chasing the same outcomes right now. More reach. More growth. More efficiency. So people go hunting for answers.
They collect advice. Frameworks. Playbooks. Confident takes from people who sound like they’ve already figured it out.
Most of it isn’t earned. It’s theory dressed up as experience.
You see the same thing inside companies adopting AI. Teams tweak surface behavior. Automate this. Speed up that. But nobody questions the system underneath. They just automate whatever already exists, even if it was broken to begin with.
Let’s get into it.
Sales Research is Busywork
We do it in sales all the time. We call sales research “diligence,” like it’s some strategic act. It’s not.
It usually looks like Googling the same company, guessing on labor and scope, messy notes from discovery or site walks, and a proposal thrown together at the last minute.
We pretend this work is strategic. In reality, sales research is repetitive, non-differentiating, and unfinished by default.
So a lot of teams ask: how do we help reps do this faster?
Wrong question.
The right one is more uncomfortable. Why does a human own this work at all?
Humans should own judgment, tradeoffs, pricing, risk, and relationships. That’s the part of the job that actually creates advantage.
They shouldn’t own research aggregation, context assembly, follow-ups, or proposal prep. That’s execution. And execution is now cheap.
Once you accept that, the design changes.
We didn’t build a bot. We built a Cloud Employee. A small system of agents that owns the middle of the deal end to end.
One agent builds the account story and risk signals.
One adds market, labor, and pricing context before the call.
One structures discovery so nothing gets missed.
One turns everything into a clean, decision-ready summary and proposal input.
No heroics. No scrambling. The work just shows up, done.
Yes, it’s faster. But that’s not the real win.
The real win is that reps stop babysitting execution. Decisions happen earlier. Ownership becomes clear again.
AI owns execution. Humans own outcomes.
That split actually scales.
Most teams are trying to modernize without redesigning. They layer AI on top of roles built for a different era, then wonder why it feels expensive, fragile, and awkward to operate.
The teams that win here won’t argue about tools. They’ll argue about ownership.
If you stripped away your org chart and rebuilt around outcomes instead of roles, the team you’d design wouldn’t look like the one you have today.
That gap is where real advantage gets built.
That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.
