We are currently drowning in "enterprise readiness" while our actual customer experience is starving. We buy tools to save time but then we spend all our time managing the tools. We have reached a point where the plumbing of our CRM and the logic of our routing are more important to leadership than the actual conversation happening with a buyer.
Most organizations are treating AI like just another piece of software to be integrated and permissioned until it is harmless and useless. They are terrified of letting an agent actually talk to a human because they are obsessed with the back end. But while you are debating custom objects in a conference room, your leads are rotting and your prospects are getting annoyed by your scheduling links. It is time to stop optimizing the pipes and start looking at what is actually coming out of the faucet.
Stop Obsessing Over the Plumbing
One of the biggest mistakes companies are making with AI right now: They spend so much time worrying about plumbing they never actually test whether the AI works.
Every AI pilot turns into:
routing
permissioning
workflows
edge cases
attribution
custom objects
admin meetings
19 people debating process
And after three months, nobody has answered the only question that mattered:
“Do customers actually like interacting with the AI?” That’s it. That’s the test.
Not whether the AI perfectly updates 37 Salesforce fields
Not whether routing logic is flawless
Not whether RevOps feels warm and fuzzy
Can the AI actually engage buyers? Can it answer questions? Can it qualify?
Can it book meetings? Can it move pipeline?
Half these companies don’t even realize they spent the entire pilot testing whether a vendor can integrate with Salesforce. Not whether AI can actually increase revenue or decrease costs.
The funniest part?
Most of the time you could test the core experience in two weeks with a Google Doc and an AI Agent.
Instead companies disappear into “enterprise readiness” meetings for six months and learn absolutely nothing.
Once you stop worrying about the plumbing, you can actually look at the leaks. The biggest leak in almost every company is the one right under your nose: the people who are actually trying to talk to you.
Read the full edition here.
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.
