The Great Pretend Economy

I spent a lot of this week sitting in meetings thinking the same uncomfortable thought: How much of what we call “work” is just really expensive pretending? Not because people are bad at their jobs. Because somewhere along the way we built entire org charts around motion, forwarding emails, updating spreadsheets, joining alignment calls, and calling it strategy. The more I sat with it this week, the more I realized AI isn’t changing work, it’s exposing what work had already become.

And once I saw it there, I started seeing it everywhere, especially in the way people talk.

Please don’t use “hot take” when you have a “hot take” on LinkedIn.

Everything on LinkedIn is a hot take. That’s like… the entire business model. Saying “hot take” is like saying, “I’m about to share an opinion”…on a platform built for opinions.

No kidding.

It doesn’t make it bolder, it doesn’t make it smarter. It just makes it obvious you’re trying too hard. And most of the time… it’s not even hot. It’s something everyone already agrees with, dressed up like it took courage to say.

Strong opinions don’t need a warning label, only soft ones do. So skip the announcement and just make the point.

Most corporate AI strategies suffer from the same need for labels over substance. They build committees to hide the fact that nobody knows how to actually ship.

Corporate AI has the same problem.

Stop building AI committees. You think that's transformation but it's not.

There are only three ways companies are actually approaching AI right now and two of them are broken.

The AI Committee Model

Looks smart, sounds strategic but does nothing. You’ve seen it:

What actually happens:

You don’t ship anything, you just talk about it. This model produces decks, not results.

The Free-for-All Model

Feels fast, looks scrappy but goes nowhere. Every team runs their own experiments:

What actually happens:

Everyone is “busy” but nothing moves the business. This is just expensive randomness.

The Execution Pod Model

Execution lives in the business, discipline lives in a thin platform layer. Here’s what actually need to happen: AI is not a department, it’s how the work gets done.

Each team runs real deployments tied to real numbers. Then you layer in a small central team, not to control anything, but to enable it. They don’t pick use cases, they don’t run pilots, and they don’t own outcomes. Their job is simple, make it fast and safe for the business to deploy AI that actually runs work.

Most companies are stuck in Model 1 pretending they’re in Model 3. They hired a Head of AI and called it transformation. It’s not. We gotta stop building AI committees and start replacing work.

Committees are designed to protect the status quo, not disrupt it. This is why you see massive "adoption" of tools like Claude but zero impact on the bottom line.

Claude lovers, if everyone’s more productive, why isn’t revenue up? I was on with a company yesterday that’s fully all-in on Anthropic Claude. It’s everywhere. The sales team lives in it, custom skills are built, MCPs are wired into everything, and agents are running around supposedly “doing work.”

Everyone feels more productive...but business hasn’t moved an inch.

What really got me…

One of their heaviest AI power users, the guy with all the workflows, skills, and custom agent setups, is their worst rep. Crazy. He has the best tools and the worst number.

Is this company alone? I don't think. This is the lie a lot of teams are telling themselves right now. They’re confusing activity with outcomes. Better emails, faster research, sharper summaries, more CRM updates, better competitive intel in seconds. Great.

Did anyone sell more? Because if revenue isn’t up and costs aren’t down, congratulations, you just bought a treadmill for your business. Everyone’s moving, nobody’s going anywhere. The dirty secret of AI inside most companies is this: time saved does not automatically become revenue created or costs cut.

Most teams just recycle that saved time into more internal nonsense. Unless your agents are doing one of two things:

…the magic wears off fast. Then leadership is sitting in a boardroom wondering why all this AI adoption somehow produced exactly zero business outcomes. Nobody gets paid for feeling productive, they get paid for outcomes.

The Productivity Paradox is real because most roles are optimized for noise. Marketing is the loudest department in the building, but they often aren't thinking about revenue.

Dear Marketing,

Stop calling this pipeline. You dumped a few hundred “leads” on us and expected a thank you. Most had no phone numbers. A big chunk were personal emails. We cleaned it and watched it fall apart.

What’s left? A handful of people who can actually buy. The rest are people who can’t say yes, won’t say yes, or shouldn’t have been there in the first place. So sales does what sales always does, fixes your mess.

And after all of that…we talk to two people. One doesn’t remember anything. The other doesn’t care.

And somehow this still shows up in a dashboard as “pipeline created.” No. This is fake pipeline. You’re generating spreadsheets. You’re not helping sales. If the person can’t buy, it’s not a lead. If the account isn’t real, it’s not pipeline. If it doesn’t convert, it doesn’t count.

Stop optimizing for volume, start owning revenue. Or stop pretending you do.

Kindly,

A very tired Sales Leader.

But it is not just a marketing problem. We are seeing an entire generation of workers training for roles that are functionally obsolete.

Dear SDR,

If your plan is simply to become an AE, you’re already playing an outdated game. That used to be the obvious ladder, I know, but that path alone is too small now.

The market is changing faster than most reps want to admit. AI is already taking pieces of prospecting, follow-up, CRM hygiene, research, and first-touch outreach. So if your entire plan is “become a closer,” you’re only learning one part of the machine. The future revenue leaders are not just the best cold callers or the best closers. They understand how revenue systems work.

The market does not need more people who can “work hard.” It needs operators who can create output without adding headcount. Most SDRs are still following the fantasy ladder:

SDR → AE → Manager → Director → VP

That ladder is cracking in real time:

The future CRO is not the best former rep. It’s the person who understands the entire revenue machine.

Or keep chasing the old title ladder and wonder why someone half as tenured passes you in two years.

Best,

A CRO who’s tired of watching reps train for jobs that are disappearing

The Empty Role pandemic doesn't stop at the SDR desk. It has spread to the post-sale world too. If you are sitting in a support queue waiting for tickets, you are sitting in a sinking boat.

Dear Customer Service Representative,

First, thank you. During COVID, you held the line. While everyone else talked about “customer experience” from a deck, you were the one taking the calls, calming people down, solving problems, and carrying brands through absolute chaos.

A lot of companies survived because people like you kept showing up. That work mattered. But the market that rewarded that work is no longer the same. Here’s the wake-up call: the career path you were sold is breaking.

For years, the ladder looked predictable: Rep → Senior Rep → Team Lead → Manager → Director

That used to make sense.

That ladder is cracking in real time.

The future is not built on who answered the most tickets. AI is already taking the repetitive work:

So if your entire plan is to become the next support manager by doing more of the same, you’re training for an org chart that may not exist. The future Head of Customer Experience won’t be the best queue clearer. It’ll be the person who understands the whole machine.

This is no longer a ticketing role, it’s becoming a systems role.

Or keep climbing the old ladder and wonder why someone with half your tenure passes you.

Best,

Someone who’d rather tell you the truth now than watch the market do it later

The truth is we have to stop training people for the middle. The middle is being automated.

The old SDR model isn't just broken. It’s dead. Most of you are still trying to hit 2026 targets using 2018 math. You think more reps plus more activity equals more pipeline. It doesn’t. It just creates more noise and more burn.

But Sales Development? It’s not disappearing. It’s evolving into something way more lethal.

The best companies I’m seeing aren’t hiring armies of SDRs anymore. They’re building pipeline machines. They’re hiring operators who can orchestrate humans and AI to drive actual revenue, not just "outreach."

I don't care about emails, I care about pipeline. Activity is not an achievement. I’ve scaled billion dollar companies. I’ve seen the brick wall and I've seen the joyride. This is the rewrite of work itself.

We are hosting the AISDR Summit on April 9 because the "way we've always done it" is hitting a dead end. This isn't a fluff session or a product demo. It’s 20 operators showing you the actual workflows that are scaling companies.

There are 2 paths. Rewriting the way you work or getting left behind. There is no middle ground.

See you there. No recycled playbooks. Just what’s actually working.

Register here: aisdrsummit.com

I’ve been sitting with this all week, and the truth is AI may not be the biggest story here. It just happens to be the thing rude enough to point at what work had already become. So much of corporate life has been built around looking busy, full calendars, status updates, follow-up meetings, forwarding the same thread to three different people and calling it collaboration. I’ve sat in enough rooms this week to realize that a lot of what we’ve normalized as “work” was really just motion with better branding.

AI isn’t just changing the way we work, it’s forcing us to be more honest about what was actually creating value in the first place

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.