Get Operationally AI First Or Get Left Behind (No Hype)
AI isn't just another buzzword to appease venture capitalists; it is fundamentally exposing the deep-seated flaws in traditional volume-based go-to-market strategies. Nick Zicket argues that true AI integration is not about using ChatGPT to write slightly better cold emails. Instead, it requires reimagining the entire end-to-end operational workflow, breaking down the silos between marketing ops, RevOps, and frontline sales to build automated, highly contextual outreach systems. The most successful companies in this new era will be those that embrace 'signal-based' selling at a profound level. Rather than tracking superficial, commoditized metrics like executive job changes, elite teams are seeking out complex, publicly available data—such as SEC Edgar database filings for stock purchase programs. By using AI to parse these deep signals and delivering comprehensive, problem-solving resources right at the moment of need, organizations can become the definitive authority on the very pain point they are addressing. Looking forward, founders and GTM leaders must prepare for a radical shift in team structures and buying behaviors. Operational AI will drive such massive efficiency that traditional BDR and AE headcounts will likely be slashed. The future points toward 'agentic arbitrage,' where your company's automated sales agents negotiate directly with a buyer's automated procurement agents, making deep operational AI literacy non-negotiable for modern founders.
Discussed in this episode
- How AI is exposing the foundational flaws of volume-based marketing and outdated GTM motions.
- The ongoing disconnect between go-to-market program leadership and operational engineers when implementing Martech tools.
- Why superficial buying signals like job changes offer zero competitive advantage because everyone has access to them.
- Using deep, complex public signals—like SEC database filings—to trigger highly contextual, value-driven outreach.
- How creating comprehensive meta-analyses around niche signals establishes a company as the ultimate market authority.
- The absolute necessity for founders to become operationally AI-first using no-code workflow tools like N8N and Relay.app.
- The coming reality of massive sales team reductions and the rise of hyper-efficient, highly profitable micro-teams.
- The concept of 'agentic arbitrage' where AI procurement agents will negotiate directly with AI sales agents.
Episode highlights
- — The failure of cold outbound and lazy founders
- — How AI exposes long-standing GTM flaws
- — The marketing automation volume trap
- — The disconnect between operations and GTM leadership
- — Defining a true signal-based strategy
- — The SEC Edgar database signal example
- — Ignoring VC pressure to build operationally AI-first
- — HubSpot vs Salesforce in true AI adoption
- — The coming reality of shrinking sales headcounts
- — The future of agentic arbitrage and procurement
- — Tracking homepage messaging as a universal signal
Key takeaways
- Stop optimizing isolated activities instead of funnels.
- True GTM alpha requires deep, complex signals.
- Operational AI workflows beat superficial product features.
- Expect massive headcount reductions across frontline sales.
- Track prospect homepage messaging for universal insights.
Transcript
You're not optimizing a funnel you're not you're optimizing a specific activity. And what's creating the opportunity for the rep to send a better email. Cold outbound doesn't work, you can't cold email is dead, no one picks up the phone. iOS 26, you know, with call screening is going to kill cold calls.
And if you're lazy, you're going to suck as a founder. I don't care if you get venture cash or not. It's like, you got to go learn how to be operationally AI first. Welcome back to another episode of The Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue reimagined.
Today's guest is Nick Zicket, founder of smoke signals and one of the sharpest voices calling out the nonsense and there's a lot of nonsense, smoke signals in the world of go-to market AI. His background spans SAS growth, sales leadership, and advising GTM teams and now, he's on a mission to help companies stop chasing the hype and start building real signal driven strategies that could cut through the noise. This episode's going to be about clarity, what's real, what's not, and how go-to market leaders can actually use AI to win. Hint, it is not asking chat GPT to write your cold outbound email.
Nick, welcome to the show, man. Oh. Thank you very much. I love all of that.
I should I should just package that up. Listen, we we say all the time. You could take it, package it, reuse it, make it your walk-on. We'll add some music behind it.
It'll be a good day. It's beautiful. Yeah, one of my favorite humans on the planet is this guy Annie Mat and and Annie's a huge fan of LinkedIn voice notes and uh I'm going to clip that and send it to him and be like, here buddy, here's one. Andy from Whispered?
Yeah, yes, sir. I love that guy. Yeah. Andy's a good friend of mine.
He's a good human. Great human. We just had Yeah, we just had Oh, good. Oh, good, oh good, oh good.
Well, that Makes me feel even better about myself. See, full full circle. Now now you know you're you're on a real show. If Andy came at at least we know it's a real.
You guys were before it was just two dudes sending you an invite saying, hey, do you want to come chat with us for a little bit? We have two listeners, why not? Yeah, we're not going to post this anywhere. It's No, we're just going to record it and chat.
I like that a lot. So come on, Dale, ask a question. Awesome. So, Yeah.
Adam Adam Adam kicked it off really well. AI, nonsense and go-to market. What when you said AI is nonsense and go-to market, what do you mean by that? Yeah, I think it's a great man.
Um, It's tough, it's like this is the whole foundation of where I think we've been foundationally getting all of go-to market wrong for actually a long time. And and my my gut tells me that AI is um, just exposing uh how bad we have all been at go-to market for a long, long time. And and Look, there are some interesting things that have happened over the course of the last 20 years. One, um, marketing grew out of just running field events, right?
I mean, back in the day, it was like, ah yeah, marketing does, you know, the field parties and all that kind of stuff. And they but they weren't zero respect. If you wanted to scale, it was a linear decision about BDRs and AEs, right? That's what we were going to do.
Um, and at the time, it worked because you could send a single email and get a response from a C-level executive in the Fortune 1000, right? You could make a phone call and get a CFO of an F100 on the phone and actually chat with them. And then what we did is the moment that we decided marketing mattered was also the moment that we gave them automation tools, right? We're like, oh, Yeah.
And so what we did was we indoctrinated the the mission of marketing with a fundamental concept of like lead volume, right? And squeezing that out. And again, before the channels got devastated by volume, it worked. It did work.
It was more productive, right? And there was this whole excitement around what was happening with marketing because it was actually pretty freaking easy to do a pretty decent job, right? I mean, you could do a an Outlook mail merge and generate a hundred leads in a two-week period of time, right? So you get your hands on a Marketo and wow, like look at this.
This is insane. Obviously, you know, I don't mean to diminish the early day marketers entirely, right? Like they were working with what they were given and they were given a market largely for most industries that was like open and receptive to getting these types of comps. Um, although I do pride myself on having been a fax machine bandit for a number of years early in my career.
Fax machine. My man, ain't nothing like it. You fax, and here is my golden move, fax the fax to a pizza shop near the executive and have them staple it on top of a pizza and have the pizza delivered to the office. Like old old old school sales rebellion.
Bro, it like we got to get back to that. I'm a huge fan of the phone. You got to do stuff that doesn't fit, but that actually is kind of what I think the best marketers are thinking about right now is whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. These are humans.
How cool would it be if somebody sent me some cool thing stapled to the top of a pizza box? That's what yeah, dude, I'm hungry. And I don't know who doesn't like pizza. We'll just assume we're going to lose 10% of the market on a campaign that's pizza box driven.
But like, okay, but I think what's happened with AI is because it's now not only do I have scale delivery and my marketing automation tools, but now I have scale content generation. I'm going to and I use that word content very loosely in this context, right? We kind of can do anything and what anything has resulted in in most places is more volume because AI's given us what some level of conviction that it actually might connect with the recipient. So anyway, this this is kind of what I foundationally feel like and when you talk to senior leadership, they also are like, ugh, I hate this.
I'm doing it. But they do it. Oh, you're right. So I hate it, but I'm going to make everyone do it.
that you get it but then you do it. Yep. And then you still do it because you're skating towards the wrong KPIs. Right?
Everyone's skating towards a wide top of funnel and not skating towards a wide middle of funnel, right? And and that's where I think everything falls apart. So So, it was like the it was like back in the day with Gary Vaynerchukck when he was saying like, um, you from a marketing perspective, you will not market onto Facebook or social media platforms, but you'll read it every day. Like it's the same thing.
It's just like you're doing the same thing you don't want to have happening. 100%. Right, 100%. But unlike knowing that people will actually read stuff on social, they are not reading your spam cannon emails.
No, I mean, I I was just having this conversation with someone the other day. I pulled up my my phone and when I looked at my emails, they all like I had 23 that started with some version of, hi Adam, hope you're doing well. Um, and like they immediately get deleted. There there's so much AI out there and so many tools that are being launched every day, both for go to market, for not go to market.
Like, how do you distinguish hype versus reality? Look, man, I mean, there's um, I think there's two pieces of this puzzle, right? The first is the way that SAS and whatever next generation naming acronym convention we want to use for everything that's coming up in the AI space in particular. But they've been incentivized to tell their own stories forever.
And it's like I kind of get it, right? Um, the reality is I do think some of it is utter nonsense. Right? I you know, I look at some of these tools, you play with them and you go, oh, that sucks.
Um, that like objectively is terrible and it takes you, it takes a real practitioner all of about 15 minutes to be like, hey, this is a bullshit machine, right? Like a really poorly wrapped GPT wrapper. Right, cut it out. Dude, I can create a prompt that's better than that and plug it into any number of workflows.
I've got N8N. So does everybody else. Cut it out. Like this is not a product, right?
So there's that, but I'm not entirely sure. I think that's the narrative, the general narrative in the market about why these tools stink. There are actually a lot of them that don't stink. Sure.
The problem is is that they're all talking about themselves. And all of them solve one of 19 interrelated paper cuts, right? And so the real the real effort and the thing that is so difficult is that leadership is getting pitched on this new paper cut solution. And they're like, yeah, but like what does this make possible for me?
Right? And that's not the story that they're telling, right? And and so I think one of the issues that's in play is you've got operational stars who have never designed soup to nuts a go-to market program. And you've got go-to market program leadership who have never had an operational job.
And there's no translation happening in between those two audiences, and tools are coming in and telling stories that continue to drive a wedge between those two stakeholders in the organization. And I and so for me, my last company that I that was a Martech in the HubSpot ecosystem, we exited in April. Our big story was, dude, it's not us, not by ourselves, no way. It's us plus these guys, plus HubSpot.
If you stick it all together, here's an end to end program that becomes possible. And so whenever I chat with other Martech, sales tech startups, that's the thing. I'm like, hey, you got to slow down. You got to find five friends that you think are really good at things that are complementary to what you do, and you guys got to start telling stories together.
But it's also why I think agencies have never been more valuable because we have the remit to look at all this kind of stuff. And and and you know, look, if all you did with an agency was just say, hey, can you give me five playbooks and tell me the tools and tell me that they work and then I'll go implement? I think that's a service that's going to start to evolve in the market because big companies that have RevOps stars, marketing op stars, they can do the work. It's just the vision disconnect between what's technically possible and campaign design.
That's where translation just falls apart for me. Yeah, there's a um the problem is people are trying to get into the middle of the chain and they don't look at it end to end. So they don't understand that there's a flow from the marketing to the sales piece, to the CS piece and like, yes, I can go write a better email as a salesperson potentially, if I prompt it properly and give it like your LinkedIn profile and much of other things. But that's only like one link in the entire chain.
So like that productivity, we were deciding about this prior to the show, that productivity paradox may be fundamentally creating a little bit of better productivity for yourself, but as an organization, it's not moving the needle. And not optimizing a funnel. You're app you're optimizing a specific activity. And right.
And it's like Yeah, but what's creating the opportunity for the rep to send a better email, right? Because not for nothing, whatever that work that's been done by Deman Jan or the marketing team is the context to the freaking better email. So how much better is the email absent an end to end understanding of how that person got there to begin with, right? So again, we're we're what we're doing is acting like all these islands of activities aren't part of an archipelago, and it's like, no, no, no.
Somebody needs to start having like a key West vision and building the bridges between all of these things. And that's again, it's where I think, you know, truly visionary marketing, GTM, sales, CS leadership along with our operational counterparts across marketing ops and RevOps have to start coming together. And they got to slow down to speed up, right? Because there's just a total lack of clarity.
But let let let's talk about that lack of clarity and let let's talk about signals for lack of a better terms, right? Like this term signals has been used more broadly over call it the past 6 to 12 months. You know, cold outbound doesn't work. You can't cold email is dead, no one picks up the phone.
iOS 26, you know, with call screening is going to kill cold calls and like it's the I actually turned it off because I do get calls from unknown numbers that I do need to answer and I don't want to screen every single one of them. Um, and put people through that pain because then like, whatever. But like when we talk about signals, what is a signal? Like what is a signal-based strategy?
Because I've heard everything from, okay, we're going to email every time someone changes a job. That's a signal, right? Because they're they're 10 times more likely to buy new technology because they need to make an impact. Yeah.
What's a signal-based strategy? Yeah, I love that. Uh, so this is this is my favorite thing on planet Earth right now, except for my family. My family.
Uh, so, all right, so so here's a couple of things that that I think are really important. Um, one, if the signal that you're working off of is easy to collect, everybody else has got it. Doesn't mean anything. Right.
So, you know, people talk about GTM Alpha and all this kind of stuff, mostly because the VC world needs to like, you know, act as though growing business is this weird kind of intellectual academic pursuit and it's freaking not, right? It's like, I actually am the thing that feels me and it's like, whatever, and I've got my beef with venture. But but, you know, you you look at it and one of my favorite questions to ask when we get started working with a company is go into the sales folks on the front line. It's like, you got into a discovery call.
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What is that thing? And the thing that's wild is that more often than not, there is a way to get that before that person ever gets into the discovery call, right? And and here's the thing. People are thinking way too small about what signal is and what it is for.
Right? I'll give you a really good example. We have a customer right now that they have it's really a profound, it's a provocative solution and they're really kind of on their own in the market. But they basically provide what's known as uh like a cashless option for employee stock purchase programs, right?
In the net is, normally, you know, I I have my salary and I'm an employee and I'm in the middle of the road or kind of lower tier. I need to take home my whole salary, right? In order to live my life. But I could use my stock to buy my stock.
But you know what? What if these guys actually paid to buy the stock on my behalf and I got share in the upside of the business? Wow, now we're starting to increase participation. The companies love this for a whole bunch of different reasons.
I'm jacked about these guys, like they are big time. Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission demands that these programs and everything related to them gets filed and then it's public, right? The SEC has a public API, it's called the Edgar database. You can get any of it for free.
Everything from the earnings call transcripts to their 10K filings to the specific document related to this ESPP program, it's called an called an AK, right? Like unbelievable treasure trove of information. Now, we know specifically that if we look in that information and this is a place where building a very specific LM-based kind of generative, hey, are we hearing signal here that indicates that this company has a real opportunity to touch on a nerve that has been exposed here in public? Awesome.
That's a great time to reach out. But that's a tiny piece of what signal here is. What we're now doing for them is taking the last five years of all those filings and creating a gigantic meta-analysis of everything that impacts these ESPP programs. Something that the CEO, CFO, Chief Human Resources officer and every other stakeholder in this decision is going to understand exists and they're going to want to read it.
It is a profoundly valuable resource for navigating this problem. So now what are we doing when we reach out when we see that signal? Delivering the Bible that helps them solve for it from an organization that gives them an easy button to address the entirety of the problem. And this is where I think people are really not rocking the value of going super deep on signal.
So sure, maybe, right, if I have a former customer and they loved me and the utilization was really high and they moved companies to a place that also looks like my ICP, sure. The most common signal there is. Signal. Great.
Let's go. Like that's a that's low hanging fruit. That's super simple. But if you want to get to go-to market Alpha, if you want to truly generate new demand for your business, those are not the signals that are going to drive you.
Those are not the types of things that are going to give you foundational strength. And if you think about it hard enough, the signal itself becomes the message, right? And so now it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hey, I can see that you're really struggling with the thing that we're good at.
By the way, here's how to navigate that from a resource that is the best on the planet. And the reason that we built it was so that we knew that you were in this pickle. So right, and so you become the authority on the signal itself, right? And so I think that this is some of where because it's newer, and again, because you've got GTM engineers out there, they're like, oh, I can find out when somebody's left their job.
It's like, dude, you Have you led a GTM org? Do you have Nope. Experience as VPM marketing? No, you don't.
So all you're doing is picking apart this nonsense and it's like, you're a clay cowboy. Good for you. And I'm the huge But like this is not actually transformative to the business. This isn't actually changing the fundamental capacity of the organization to go generate revenue, right?
It's got to be a lot deeper. And I and I think that's why people that will be most successful in this evolution of go-to market will be the knowledge the the the people with the knowledge that are more business people that then intersect with how to go start developing their own AI automations just to play with it. So when they go back to a GTM engineer or a developer, they can articulate properly and you can iterate through it. Like it's the iteration, it's not the first part of it.
It's like, um, there was a the diary of a CEO podcast. I was listening to what he was talking about from a neurological perspective and they're saying like, Chat GPT or or generative AI are making people stupid. Because because they're not strategically thinking about it. They're asking a question, they're getting a response, they're taking the answer, they're putting it into an email, they're sending it to their boss, whatever they're ended up doing.
Instead of like taking the answer and being like, okay, I don't know if I agree with this piece, how do I make it better? And they iterate through it, just like we would, just like in this conversation. Like, how are we having a conversation here is really how you have a conversation with with AI, so that you get to a perspective that's your own and not AI perspective that may be someone else's perspective they pull off the the the internet. This this is the fundamental problem I think even with people just learning how to write an email is you have so many people right now that use, you know, chat GPT or claud or whatever to do everything that I'm really good at asking a question.
I won't go far so far as say people are good at prompting, but you're really good at asking a question. But if you have to think critically on any level, you have no idea what the hell to do because all of your answers are coming from your AI and you're going to get exposed really quickly in some interview where someone's like great, we're going to be in a room together and you have no laptop, you have no computer screen and let let's figure this out. Yeah. That's what I like to do to Dale.
Turn the laptop off and then answer my question, Dale. Here now. Go of these like under the phone, underneath the table. It's like, I mean, even my my 14-year-old will like his go-to answer now is, oh, I'll I'll I'll just use AI.
Like, dude, you're not going to be able to use AI on your test. I promise you that. Yeah, that's right. That's right.
And Nick, let's let's switch this up a little bit as we go through this because if not, we're not going to get through all of our stuff. Um, in this one, I find super interesting. So founders are under tremendous pressure to show that they're AI first, AI native, they like, how do you advise them to navigate this ask from the venture community, we were just talking about, um, without but I'll leave it there for a second. I I want to I'm curious what you say.
I will say out loud here what I say out loud everywhere. The best way to avoid that is don't take venture money. Um, so I'm look, I'm I'm anti-venture. Big time.
And for lots of reasons. Um, but I'll tell you that we are in we are experiencing a period of time wherein if you are operationally AI first, right? I'm not talking about your product. If you are operationally AI first, you can build product, market, and go to market with product with two guys, two gals, two humans after work.
You don't need that money. And I'll tell you what, you know what everybody's super excited about? Revenue, right? So, I don't care.
I just don't care. Being AI first, I think being operationally AI driven, there's no there's no excuse at this point. Make drag and drop. N8N used to be like a little difficult, drag and drop.
Relay, this guy Jacob Bank runs relay.app, another one, drag and drop, right? If if you aren't at least looking at workflows and then saying, oh, this is a point within the workflow where there's lots of context. Maybe I'll write a prompt.
And if you can't write a prompt, it's because you're lazy, right? And if you're lazy, you're going to suck as a founder. I don't care if you're getting venture cash or not. It's like, you got to go learn how to be operationally AI first.
And this is the thing, it's we've got a we've got a customer, it's a hardware company, right? Cool hardware company. They put servers on top of industrial hot water heaters and use the expelled heat from the servers to heat the hot water. It's called green compute.
It's the cool is so cool. Interesting, very interesting. Right? But it's like this is a piece of hardware, but operationally, they're AI first, right?
And and they're saying, how do we Yeah. Look like we're 100 people and stay 15, right? So let me flip the question on you for a second because it's easy when you're certain I shouldn't say it's easy. It's easier when you're starting to build a company.
But what if you have a 10, $15 million ARR company that you started two years ago and now you're in this place of like, how do I articulate they may need funding, they may not need funding, whatever. How do you articulate and go through the process of the the AI mentality, AI native, whatever. Yeah, it's really interesting. So definitely a separate scenario and often times at that point, you do have venture and you've got a board and it's like, you're you're in the pickle that you're in.
So it's like, you you got to navigate that. And it's not just $10 million, it's billion dollar top line companies are also sitting there and going, ooh, what do I do about this AI thing, right? And I think there's a couple of things here. One, anybody who's paying attention to market reactions to afterthought AI feature introductions, I think should take to heart the fact that the market goes, dude, like, no.
So that's one of the first things that I would kind of say is that if you are going down that path and you're feeling the pressure to do it, you need to think completely differently about what you are and where you're going, right? Do I think HubSpot got everything right at inbound? No, I don't. But were there some introductions where it's clearly a version 0.
9. You're like, in its current state, not usable, but I see where you're going and this is a fundamental shift in how you think people will do HubSpotting, right? Like, yeah. HubSpotting.
About it, right? They did it, they really thought about it. And and and unlike, unlike Salesforce that bought Einstein, left it on its own database structure, and then kind of half fast the the the relationship between that functionality and what could have been possible. And as much as they like to kind of like go out there and blow a lot of a jetic smoke, none of it's real.
It's nonsense. And it's their customers and anybody who's real in that market is like, this is not a thing. I'm out here buying all these other tools now and I just I'm stuck with Salesforce. My world is built into this, you know, very complex backend database with all of our custom objects and relationships and whatever.
And so I'm just going to pull stuff out of it, right? Which is an opportunity in the market. But I think it's a clear kind of differentiation between doing it correctly, which is a fundamental reimagining of what you probably are going to have to be, which I think HubSpot did nicely. And looking at a Salesforce, which has done acquisitions in the AI space and really I think blown a huge agenetic opportunity and don't continue to blow it.
I believe. I just don't think that they're built very well to kind of innovate and that's a whole other kind of like structural issue over there. But but these are the I mean, I think these are the big things that it's like, you can't bolt it on. It's not a feature set.
You got to go, you know, offsite with the entire product organization and go like And I do think back to the I think I think back to the operational piece is really where we we look at as well. Like how do we how do we get AI injected operationally? So if we if we zoom out a little bit, you know, AI's all the craze right now, right? Like Dell said, you know, how do you how do you prove that you're AI first?
And what's the agenetic AI? And how are you using AI? It comes up in every interview, every podcast, every LinkedIn post like you I would love to see someone do an analysis of the the amount of conversations that don't reference the words AI. And I think there's I think there's a lot of hype and some of it may go away, some of it may continue to expand.
But you know, zooming out 18, 24 months from now, what role is AI actually going to play in GM? or in go-to market, excuse me, and and what's going to go away and just not be a thing anymore? Yikes. Um, Put your Nostradamus hat on.
You know what? What a what a brutal question to answer. I mean, so I was on a conversation with a prospective customer on Monday and we were talking through their environment and their market and some other things and I was saying, you know, hey, I kind of got on and took a look at your sales organization. It's pretty big.
Like it doesn't it's big and it doesn't make sense way big. Your your Tam from the annual perspective just ain't that big. I'm like, if you if we work together, like I'm going to tell you, one of the implications of us working together is that you're going to have both the insight and the capability to drop probably half that team. And look, I don't I don't like I really don't like that part of what AI is bringing to market.
Yeah. But I don't know what to tell you, it is, right? And I'm talking about both BDRs and AEs in this scenario, right? It it's way too many of all this stuff.
Now, where are they spending all their time? Are they all just kind of like on the beach half the time? Dude, I don't know. I have no idea.
I I don't know where they're spending their time, but there's no way you need a team that is that big for either of those roles. Both of them could be cut in half in, you know, eight weeks. For sure. Right?
What did they what did they say to that conversation? Honestly, the guy was like, I got to tell you, I'm kind of feeling the same way. at least at least they were real about it. I look, I mean, I think for all the the the kind of the PR, you know, public facing, hey, we're here, we're a team, we're going to like evolve and AI is going to open up new opportunities.
Dude, privately, in the board room, in exact top to tops, they are absolutely talking about how the organization is going to get smaller, right? And and we have proof, right? Accenture in the UK dropped 4,000 early career just the UK division, 4,000 early career analysts, right? And then you look and and there's a guy who founded, you know, super.
com and and he's built this really interesting AI first bootstrapped company index. There are now dozens and dozens of companies in this index of his of companies that got founded 12, 18 months ago and are at 30, 40, 50 million in revenue. Sure. They never raised.
They've got teams of eight, nine people, right? I mean, this is these are not outliers. When Instagram did it, it was an outlier, right? They had incredible viral growth.
It made no sense that they got to billions in valuation with 17 people at exit, right? But these companies now, you can't ignore it. The board is having the discussion. And I do think that as we get more efficient, we're going to lose a lot of these people.
But I tell you the thing that actually is freaking me out a bit is I do think that we're moving to an agenetic arbitrage, right? My organization knows what it needs. Your organization has agents that represent its capacity to serve those needs. I don't want to be the guy who says that the sky is falling, but pretending as though this isn't feasible within two years probably.
That's, you know, it's playing ostrich, right? And it's just not it's just not the right move. I think you got to be really thoughtful about what the world is going to look like and I do think agents are going to be selling to procurement agents that are given remits, RFPs that are automatically generated based on business data, right? Our whole business is sitting inside of Snowflake.
I don't even need to write an RFP anymore. I need a procurement agent to go talk to all the viable sales agents and then rationalize, do the arbitrage and then implement. I think that's a place that we could actually get to. And I don't, you know, I don't feel great about it.
I hope not. I think humans still have to be somewhere in there, but it's going to be a lot less of them. So, what jobs are maybe going away? Maybe all of them.
That is a very interesting take. Uh and a little controversial one, uh that we will have to sadly end it on because we're almost at time, but we can't do that without a little bit of rapid fire. Um, I'm very curious to see the feedback we got on that take. I like it.
I I I like leaving on a hot. All right, Nick, what's what's one GTM buzzword that you'd ban forever? Could never say it again. Oh man.
Oh man. This is a BS bingo game. Uh, Ooh. God.
I'm going to I'm going to go with all of the stage acronyms, the tofu and bofu. It's get it out of here. It's nonsense. I love it.
I love it. Don't don't don't call Dale Muffy. He doesn't like it. What's the hardest thing What's the hardest lesson you've learned as a GTM operator?
Oof. Uh as soon as you think you're there, you're probably three depths of click away from actually being there. Hmm. I like it.
What um what is one universal signal that you personally watch for in the markets right now? Oh, yeah. Um, I think one of the things that's really interesting that you can consistently watch for, um, is homepage messaging. It is a thing that you can always get.
It is easily scraped in, it is parsible, and it's fascinating to see how organizations are changing the way that they talk about themselves. And every single company that sells to a business should understand how that's evolving over time. Um, I I think it's like an obvious win. I love that.
As we wrap it up, last question, uh, dream vacation destination. Oh, yoikes. Oh, man. Uh, I'm going to say Japan.
I've never been and it just seems wildly awesome. Nice. Love that. I got to go too.
My my son's got to go. He's he keeps talking about it, so. Got Got to do it, man. Got to do it.
Nick, thank you so much for joining the show. We appreciate it, man. Yeah, thank you guys very much. This is fun.
Thank you, Nick. Appreciate it.