Gabe Larsen's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I know a dozen marketing leaders who got fired in the last 90 days. Call it whatever you want… it’s a bloodbath. The lie we keep telling ourselves is this: “If I drive awareness, engagement, and pipeline… I’m safe.” No you’re not. Because the second revenue dips, you become “expensive support.” And support gets cut first. Here’s how it usually works behind closed doors: - CEO asks why pipeline isn’t converting - Sales says leads are junk - Finance sees marketing as a cost center - Board wants accountability Guess who gets thrown under the bus? Marketing. Not because it’s fair, because it’s easy. So if you’re sitting in that seat right now, here’s the truth: 1. Personal brand isn’t optional anymore, it’s insurance. Not for vanity but for leverage. If your entire identity is tied to your company… you’re fragile. If you can generate attention, conversation, and demand on your own… you’re dangerous. 2. “Using AI” is not the flex you think it is Everyone is using AI. Few are using it to actually produce outcomes. Nobody cares that you used Gamma, Descript, or ChatGPT. They care that you shipped faster, tested more, and drove revenue. AI doesn’t make you valuable, output does. 3. If you don’t speak revenue, you’re already on borrowed time. This is where most marketers lose the plot. If you can’t walk into a room and say: “Here’s how marketing influenced closed revenue this quarter" You’re not in the business, you’re adjacent to it and adjacent roles get cut. 4. You don’t need better campaigns, you need tighter alignment with sales. The best marketing teams I’ve seen do one thing differently: They are embedded in revenue. Not “aligned,” not “partnering,” but embedded. They sit in pipeline reviews. They know which deals are stuck and why. I’m not trying to scare anyone here… just calling it how it is. Marketing is changing fast. Either you figure out how to tie what you do to revenue…or you’re going to get treated like a cost.

White-collar LinkedIn is telling itself a lie: “AI is coming for low-skill jobs first.” No it isn’t. Anthropic dropped a study showing the jobs with the highest AI exposure are overwhelmingly white collar. It’s analysts, marketers, recruiters, finance teams, consultants. Basically anyone whose job is: - thinking - writing - summarizing - analyzing …turning messy information into something readable. You know. The exact things AI is already freakishly good at. And before someone says the usual line… “AI will just augment us.” Sure. For the top operators. But companies don’t adopt AI so everyone can keep their job. They adopt AI so one strong operator can do the work that used to require five. It’s an difficult topic. But it’s probably a conversation we should start having.

The most awkward moment in business has nothing to do with AI. It’s the hug vs handshake decision. You know the moment. Suddenly you're stuck in that weird half-hug where nobody knows where their arms are supposed to go. For years I was a hug guy. Then the pandemic happened and we all discovered the fist bump, which felt like the safest diplomatic option humanity has ever created. Now we’re in this strange middle ground. Some people are still hugging. Some are firmly handshake. Others just hover awkwardly waiting for the other person to make the first move. It’s basically a real-time social negotiation. Personally, I’ve drifted back to the safe zone: Handshake. Fist bump. High probability of avoiding the awkward half-hug. But I’m heading to a few events over the next few weeks, so I’m curious…Where do you land in the great workplace greeting debate? Handshake Hug Fist bump Or the dangerous “wait and see” strategy.

"AI should come out of HR budget, not IT, because it is a headcount replacement strategy, not a software project." That’s what a PE operator told me yesterday. That’s how he sees it. If it sits in the IT budget, it becomes a science project. If it sits against payroll, it becomes a strategy. Is he right or wrong? He doubled down on it. "The most important AI right now is the kind that changes your labor equation. Not the kind that writes prettier emails or summarizes meetings you shouldn’t have had he added." Look around. Most companies are doing bottoms up adoption which means 200 employees freelancing prompts with zero visibility and no accountability. You want a real AI strategy. - Pick one high volume, repetitive job. Support, sales, recruiting, engineering - Run a 30 to 90 day pilot - Measure labor hours removed If it does not pay for itself, kill it. PE does not care about your AI steering committee. They care about EBITDA. Ship one deployment that funds the next one. Is that too harsh? Or is he right?

Sales is a hot topic right now. AI. Agents. Claude. New tools launching every week. And honestly? For most sales leaders it feels like a mess. Here's the reality: sales development has always been messy. It's manual. It's time consuming. It’s a grind. AI can remove a lot of that motion. Research, outreach, follow up, qualification. That’s the transactional work. But the leaders who actually win with AI aren't just plugging in tools. They’re stepping back and asking a harder question: Where should AI take the motion… and how should the role evolve around it? Those are the leaders worth highlighting. That’s exactly why we’re launching the Sales Development Leader Awards. The goal isn’t hype. It’s recognition. We want to spotlight the operators who are actually building the future of sales development. The ones experimenting, learning, and pushing the industry forward. Because let’s be clear, AI isn’t killing sales development. It’s forcing us to rethink how it works. So meet this year’s nominees. Vote or nominate the sales leader who’s making it happen: https://lnkd.in/gsMV44nF Tagging the nominees here Elric Legloire, Alan B., Dariia Gerasymova, Emily Parker, Harry Altman Housien S., James Barton, Parveen Marrero, Prahelika Rajagopalan, Thomas Ross , maximus greenwald, 🏄🏼‍♂️ Scott Leese, Tito Bohrt, CheeTung Leong, Willie Pierson, Dolapo Fadare, Jacki Leahy 🪄, Jason Bay, Scott Larson

Did you see Salesloft's announcement about sunsetting Drift? Let’s take a brief moment of silence…for the conversational marketing category. Remember the dream? “Talk to website visitors in real time and convert them.” What we actually got was a button bot that: • routes you to a form • drops you into a live chat queue nobody is staffing • sends you a “book time on my calendar” link In other words… a lead capture widget pretending to be a revenue engine. Meanwhile something much bigger started happening. AI made it possible for the system to actually handle the conversation instead of just capturing the lead. Instead of a chat bubble asking “How can I help?” AI can now: • qualify buyers • answer product questions • run discovery • book meetings • move deals forward No forms, no chat queues, no “book time on my calendar.” The buyer interacts directly with an AI teammate that actually runs the sales process. That’s why this announcement matters. The market is moving from chatbots to AI employees. From capturing leads… to actually running revenue work. And honestly it’s why we built Jordan at Atonom. Jordan isn't an AI tool. She's a Cloud Employee that work across phone, email, chat, and messaging and actually do the job: https://lnkd.in/g27TehqG Crazy. The chatbot era is officially over, and the AI workforce era is just getting started. Running Drift, a Salesloft company? We’ll migrate you for free and beat your contract price. DM me.

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.

Accenture made AI a promotion requirement. Most companies are still “playing around with it.” If you want a shot at leadership at Accenture, you have to use the AI tools. You can’t just be curious or show up to a lunch-and-learn. You have to use it. In your workflow, on real work, with measurable impact. This is Accenture. Not some 20-person startup trying to look innovative. This is 780,000 employees. Promotions have always been tied to things like: • Revenue you managed • Teams you led • Years you’ve been around • The internal capital you built Now there’s a new variable: AI execution If two leaders deliver the same outcome, the one who used AI to do it faster, cheaper, and at scale wins. Bonkers. That’s the start of output-based leadership. If your company isn’t tying AI adoption to compensation, promotion, and performance reviews, you’re signaling that it’s optional and optional doesn’t survive budget season. We’re moving from AI as curiosity to AI as expectation. It’s no longer “try ChatGPT.” It’s “show me how you used it to move the business.” That would be a big change.

Calling out SaaS sellers: your buyer enablement sucks. As a CRO armed with a big budget, I'm on a mission to invest in game-changing technology. But, let's get real for a moment, I've got a bone to pick with all you SaaS sellers out there: YOU HAVE TO ENABLE YOUR BUYERS You might think your sales process is a breeze: - Discovery - Demos - More Demos - Contract - Close But it's high time we give it a makeover. Here's the reality check: - Discovery - Demos - VALUE ASSESSMENT - Contract - Close Seriously, folks. In today's challenging economy, you honestly think you can just demo your way into my wallet? Do you really believe that after a barrage of demos, I'll just hit "buy now"? Think again my friend. I've got to sell this stuff internally, and that's where you need to step up your game. Every purchase requires: - Current State: Help me explain & show how bad things are - Future State: Help me paint a picture of how amazing things can be - ROI Model: Project that return on investment, even if it's a bit of an exercise in creative math. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ve enabled the buyer because you: - Sent over the same generic deck you use for everyone - Forwarded the Gong recording no one internally will ever watch - Said “let me know if you need anything” and disappeared That's lazy stuff. I need custom stuff. You've got to empower the buyer to be an internal superhero and convince their teams that this is THE solution. If you don't, well, you're leaving it all up to the buyer. And trust me, you'll end up hosting a 'Project Cancellation Party.' That's just a fancy way of saying 'YOU SUCK' for not aiding me in selling it internally, despite my HUGE pain. Look, help your buyers make the switch. You've got a killer product; now, enable us to be the heroes in our organizations. Okay, I'm done now.

AI is supposedly killing SDRs. So why is OpenAI hiring a Head of Sales Development? They’re not replacing it. They’re actually scaling it. Don’t believe me? Go look for yourself. So what’s actually going on? Most people are confusing motion with ownership. AI will absolutely kill a lot of the motion SDRs do: - list building - research - first-touch outreach - follow-ups - scheduling That’s the repetitive work. But the function doesn’t disappear, it evolves. Someone still has to: - design the outbound strategy - orchestrate humans + AI - decide where automation works and where it breaks - own pipeline creation I’m not seeing great companies hire armies of SDRs anymore. I see them building pipeline machines, where AI runs the motion and humans run the strategy. And I don't know if most people are ready for that. That’s exactly what we’re digging into at the free virtual AI SDR Summit on April 9. No paid tickets, no paid sponsors, no paid speakers. Just real people sharing what's working. If pipeline matters to you this year, you should probably show up. https://lnkd.in/gd6-naK5

Most AI SDR posts are lying to you. “AI booked 400 meetings.” “AI replaced our outbound team.” “AI generated 10,000 leads in 30 days.” Congrats. You optimized for activity. - Now show me pipeline - Show me close rate - Show me revenue Because meetings without pipeline are just calendar spam. Here’s the truth: AI does not work everywhere in sales development. It works in specific buckets. Hot? AI should dominate Warm? High leverage if you move fast Cold? Dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing Most teams are deploying it in the wrong one… then blaming the AI. Remember: AI doesn’t fix bad strategy. It scales it. This carousel breaks down exactly where AI should own the motion and where humans still matter. If you’re running AI in the cold bucket and wondering why it’s underperforming, that’s on you my friend. If you want to go deeper, check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gdh-z-hZ

Intentionally writing worse on LinkedIn so people don’t think it’s AI? Stop. No buyer has ever said, “Wow, this post had typos… must be legit.” They care if you see something they don’t. If you say something that actually helps them make money, save time, or not look like an idiot in their next board meeting. Perfect grammar doesn’t make you credible and bad grammar doesn’t make you authentic. Both are a distraction from the real problem…Most people have nothing original to say. Write clean if you want, break rules if you want. Just don’t confuse either with substance. Say something worth reading, or don’t hit post.

AI kills seats. Seats power SaaS. Now what? Price AI like software, or like labor?

Most people go to Shoptalk and think they are making progress. But when they get home, nothing really happened. Just a lot of conversations that go nowhere. So we’re doing something different. We’re putting the right people in one room. We’re giving it enough time so the conversation matters. It’s at the W Hotel penthouse. There will be wine, food, and music that everyone can add to. No panels. No big crowd. No booths. Just real people having real conversations. The goal is simple: Walk away with a few conversations that actually turn into something. If you’re at Shoptalk and want something better than the usual: - March 24, 5 to 8 PM - W Hotel Penthouse https://luma.com/c8pgdm7f Atonom Boldr OctaneAI OrderProtection.com Fran Brzyski Tanner Chatterley David Sudolsky Gabriel Menezes

Most AI agents are toys. • It read my inbox and drafted replies… unbelievable • It researched competitors, summarized reports, built a strategy memo..incredible • It wrote some code and glued together a workflow… amazing They call it an AI revolution, but most of it is just a slightly better assistant and a cool LinkedIn post with basically zero economic impact. Saving you 8 minutes reading email isn’t a revolution. AI doing full jobs is. Here’s what that actually looks like at Atonom. A large healthcare company deployed a single autonomous Cloud Employee to handle Tier 1–3 support calls. Now it: • Handles 2,600+ support calls per day • Covers 65 different support skills • Operates in 15 languages • Logs 124 hours of talk time per day Now here’s the fun part: The average human support call there used to take 18 minutes. The AI resolves them in 3 minutes and 35 seconds. It's the same work, same customers, just not done by humans anymore. When you convert that back to human time, this system is replacing roughly 600+ hours of labor every day. That's not per month, that's per day. That’s the difference most people are missing. One version of AI helps you work a little faster. The other version replaces the work entirely. Most of LinkedIn is still talking about the first one. We're busying building the second one. Stop building AI toys. Start hiring AI workers.

A friend told me the other day he’s scared he’s falling behind in the world of SDR. It's just changing so fast... - AI apparently replacing every SDR on earth - A startup inventing a new brand new sales role - Another outbound “framework” on LinkedIn He said he doesn’t even know who to follow anymore or where to start learning. And honestly… I get it. There is a lot going on. So we decided to do something about it. We’re hosting a virtual event called the AI SDR Summit: https://lnkd.in/gd6-naK5 - No paid tickets - No paid speakers - No sponsors pitching their software. Just operators & thought leaders sharing what’s actually working in modern sales development. Now we need the best people in SDR land. Who should we invite to speak?Who are the operators pushing the craft forward right now? Tag them below so we can make sure the best voices are part of it.

AI is not a side project anymore. That era is over. Full breakdown in this week’s newsletter.

Most of us aren’t losing to AI, were getting exposed by it. For years, GTM teams got paid for motion. You know, more emails, more calls, more pipeline. It looked busy and it felt productive but it wasn't. Now AI shows up and does all of that faster, cheaper, and without complaining. And suddenly everyone’s asking the wrong question: “Is AI going to replace me?” Wrong. AI is replacing the parts of your job that never mattered. This edition of TalkAI breaks it down: - Why pipeline won’t save you anymore - Why Drift dying is bigger than people think - Why “using AI” is a fake flex - And what actually survives when the work disappears One thing hasn’t changed: If you don’t own revenue, you don’t own anything. Rad it.

Most AI sales events are starting to feel like a joke. - Five-figure tickets - Sponsor booths everywhere - The same recycled keynotes about “the future of sales.” Panels debating whether AI will “assist SDRs.” Meanwhile…other companies are already replacing huge chunks of the SDR function with it. But most of the sales tech industry doesn’t want to talk about that. Because if AI actually executes the work, a lot of categories start to disappear. So we decided to do something different. We called a handful of builders actually deploying AI in sales and said: “Let’s show people what’s really happening.” - No sponsors - No paid speakers - No vendor pitch decks. Just operators walking through what they’ve actually built. If you want the truth about where sales development is going, come: https://lnkd.in/gd6-naK5

Do you have a pipeline problem… or a speed-to-lead problem? I was talking with a company that generates thousands of inbound demo requests every month. Dang. That’s the kind of volume every VP of Sales dreams about. Then he told me the part nobody posts about. Only about 1/3 of those leads ever talk to a human. TWO THIRDS DISAPPEAR. Not because they weren’t interested. Because nobody responded fast enough. The average response time was close to an hour. In internet time, that’s basically never. So think about what’s actually happening: - Marketing spends millions generating demand - People raise their hand asking for a demo - Then the SDR team gets to it… eventually Same generic cadence. Same generic message. Same slow response. And the typical reaction? “We need more pipeline.” But what about the pipeline you already have? Are you actually taking care of those leads the way you should? The reality is humans simply can’t respond fast enough at scale. That’s where AI starts to get really interesting. What happens when speed-to-lead drops from 40 minutes to 40 seconds? I’m seeing companies improve response time by over 100x. And when that happens, something interesting occurs. The old SDR playbook starts to break. Because the company that responds first… wins the deal. This is one of the big topics we’ll be digging into at the AI SDR Summit. Not “AI writes emails.” But what happens when AI becomes the first responder for your entire pipeline. https://lnkd.in/gd6-naK5

Everyone says AI is killing SDRs. So explain this. Why is OpenAI hiring a Head of Sales Development? Because AI replaces motion, not ownership. I break that down in this week’s TalkAI newsletter, plus: • Why most deals die after the demo • What the best SDR teams are doing with AI • And the most awkward moment in business… the hug vs handshake debate. Worth a read...

“I’m paying for an intent tool. I can literally see buyers on my site. And it’s still not turning into revenue.” That’s what a client told me yesterday. It's not a tool problem. It’s an execution problem. You’re tracking anonymous visitors. You’re piping the data into Slack. And then… Nothing. It gets “sent to sales.” Which is corporate code for: We hope someone does something. They won’t. Of course it’s not converting. You’re taking high-intent behavioral data and tossing it to a rep drowning in pipeline reviews, forecast calls, and quota pressure. Humans chase what’s loud. Website visits are quiet. Quiet gets ignored. So here’s what we’re testing: No more “send it to sales.” A full-time AI SDR owns the signal. Email. Phone. SMS. Immediate follow-up. Not “Hey {{first_name}} saw you on our site.” Real outreach tied to behavior. If a dedicated signal SDR outperforms your current team, the problem was never intent tool. It was accountability. Signal-based outreach isn’t magic. It’s discipline. Most companies love buying signals. Very few have the courage to expose their execution gap.

We thought AI would replace factory jobs first. Turns out it’s coming for white-collar work instead. Recruiting. SDRs. Analysts. Support. Entire layers of “information moving” jobs exist because humans were slow but AI removes that constraint. Which means the middle layer of work is disappearing. In this edition of TalkAI we break down: • why resumes were always broken • why speed-to-lead beats pipeline • how one AI Cloud Employee replaced 600+ hours of labor per day Read the full edition here.

Resumes didn’t die because of AI. AI just exposed that they were always BS marketing documents. Since the beginning of time, we've told candidates to play the same stupid game: • keyword-stuff the resume • polish the formatting • rewrite bullet points to sound impressive • tailor the cover letter Now AI can do all of that in....12 seconds. And suddenly everyone’s shocked that recruiters can’t tell who’s actually qualified. Of course they can’t. You’re reviewing marketing documents my friends, not evidence. The resume was always a weak signal and yes, AI exposed it. Here’s what hiring teams are going to have to accept: • You can’t manually process modern hiring volume anymore...period. • If 1,000 people apply to a role, no recruiter is reading 1,000 resumes • They’re scanning, skipping, and guessing so your precious system is going to break. The solution isn’t, go back to better resumes, the solution is stop pretending resumes tell you anything useful. What actually works looks different: • AI reviews the applications • AI scores the candidates • AI runs the first interview Humans step in once someone proves they’re worth time. That sounds controversial until you remember the old process was a recruiter spending 6 seconds looking at a PDF. We’ve been building this exact approach with a AI Cloud Employee at Atonom named Reece: https://lnkd.in/ekjS2x8y • Reece reviews the applications • Reece scores the candidates • Reece runs the first interview Humans talk to the people who actually prove they can do the job. Not because AI hiring is trendy. Because the old system was broken long before AI showed up. A one-page PDF was never a reliable way to predict job performance. So did AI break the resume? No. It just killed the illusion that it ever worked.

Claude 3 Opus retired… and launched a Substack. Hahaha. I love it. You genuinely cannot make this up. We finally built AI smart enough to reason at a PhD level. And it chose… thought leadership. Some founder is grinding for their first 200 subscribers. Meanwhile a retired model logs on like, “Hey guys, just sharing a few reflections.” If a language model can pivot to the creator economy faster than most executives, that should worry you :)