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A tale of 2 vendors: as many of you know, we wanted to move off Marketo. Brutally dated, they couldn’t get their our unsubscribe link to work, and worst of all, not agent-friendly. So we talked to 2 leading vendors just before SaaStr AI Annual. We told both we were too busy until after SaaStr AI Annual. The first said, “Great, Talk To You Then!” The second … just did the deployment for us the next day. We’re already in production there. Deal done, signed, closed. The first will find out when they “circle back”.

By popular demand, Ask Andrea Anything is back. A few times a year, I open up time on my calendar for candid conversations with founders, CS leaders, operators, and people figuring out what’s next. You can ask me about: → The future of Customer Success in the age of AI → What I learned at SaaStr and the biggest trends shaping tech right now → Running a consulting business → Career growth and leadership → Product positioning and GTM strategy → Forward Deployed Engineers and the evolution of post-sales → Your Customer Success strategy and your challenges Or anything else you’re curious about Just real conversations. These sessions tend to fill quickly, and I only offer them a couple times a year now. 📅 Calendly link: https://lnkd.in/gnHZsX9h

“You’ll be reporting to 10K, our AI VP of Marketing,” claimed Jason M. Lemkin to the SaaStr audience. Did jaws drop? Mine certainly did. Bot meets boss. A human reporting to an AI agent sounds like the first act of a bad sci-fi comedy. One where the marketing team starts every Monday by asking, “Does the algorithm seem mad at us?” I hate this idea. And yet, dismissing it would be a mistake. To his credit, on his podcast after SaaStr, Lemkin also admitted that 10K is “NOT really a VP of marketing yet.” More like a replacement for marketing analysts, ops coordinators, and junior content marketers. The title may be wrong. The direction is not. Agents are coming for the busywork. AI agents will change knowledge work. Radically. Permanently. Probably weirdly. They’ll run reports, clean lists, draft emails, personalize follow-ups, monitor campaigns, update systems, summarize meetings, build landing pages, query databases, and replace a shocking amount of “can someone just take care of this?” work. Have at it, 10K. Some of this work should be run by bots: low-risk, internal, repetitive, measurable, operational work that doesn’t require a human to read the room or carry the relationship. But marketing leadership is different. Great marketing is not just output, testing subject lines, summarizing calls, or generating 47 LinkedIn post options before breakfast. Marketing still needs a pulse. Great marketing is about seeing what others miss and connecting the unconnected. It’s walking a trade show floor, overhearing a throwaway comment, and realizing it’s the missing link in your positioning. It’s sitting in a tense executive meeting and noticing that the real objection isn’t in the words being spoken. It’s knowing when the data is technically right and strategically useless. Bots hear words. Leaders hear meaning. Can AI help? Of course. AI can accelerate research, challenge assumptions, pressure-test messaging, find patterns, generate options, and expose blind spots. But it can’t build trust, sense hesitation, or know when the team is complying but not believing. At least, not where it counts. So the question is not whether AI will redesign your team. It will. The question is whether you will redesign your team first. Let agents own more of the execution layer, and let humans own more of the meaning layer. Less grunt work. More judgment. Humanity is the strategy. As teams get smaller and agents become more capable, the human traits that remain will matter even more: empathy, listening well, trust-building, and judgment. Especially judgment: the ability to connect the unconnected, choose the idea worth owning, and know what not to do, even when the machine can do all of it. Maybe one day a human will technically “report” to a bot. But the marketing leaders who win the agentic era won’t surrender leadership to machines. They’ll use machines to create more room for actual leadership. Because the most human leaders will win the agentic era.

Keeping everyone in the now, so I had to repost this. At SaaStr Ai I saw Piper the SDR from Qualified in action and kept coming back. Really impressed with where things are going. Take a look for yourself and think about how it could augment what you are building. The world is moving fast. Stay aware, share, and keep each other in the know.

New!! The Agents Episode #005 is Out! Our 2 AI VPs Cost $257/Month, a Website Willed Itself Into Becoming an Agent, and QB Sent 83 Personalized Emails at 12:20am: Amelia and I just recorded Episode 005 of The Agents right before 2026 SaaStr AI Annual.  You may have missed it in all the fun of the big event, here’s your chance to catch up! Most importantly: we both got the cost number completely wrong for our AI Agents. Our AI VP of Marketing (10K)... Continue Reading

Caught this at SaaStr AI Annual and it hit differently. Everyone's been asking: will AI replace SaaS platforms? Anthropic just answered that — with a slide. Claude isn't replacing Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, or Ironclad. It's doing the work *between* them. One lead flows through Clay → LeanData → Salesforce → Gong → Ironclad → Slack. Claude reads, writes, and hands off at every step via Connectors. The tools aren't the problem. The gaps between them are. This is exactly what Dharmesh Shah has been pointing to. The platform isn't dead — unmaintained, disconnected platforms are. If your GTM stack isn't wired tightly, AI has nowhere intelligent to run. Worth thinking about for anyone in sales, RevOps, or solutions consulting. #SaaStr #GenAI #HubSpot #GTM #SalesOps #AITools #Claude

Your AI GTM Agency doesn't exist yet... Let's say a VP of Sales typed this into Claude: "Our outbound reply rates dropped from 4% to under 1% in six months. What's actually working in 2026?" Claude gave him a strategy. Then named three agencies who specialise in fixing exactly this. One of them booked a $180K retainer that week. The other 200+ AI GTM agencies in the space didn't exist in that conversation. This is the shift most agency founders haven't priced in yet. VPs don't search for vendors anymore. They search for problems. "Why is my pipeline drying up." "How do I rebuild outbound after our SDR team plateaued." "Is AI SDR actually working at scale or is it hype." They're not asking who's the best agency. They're asking who can fix what's broken. Claude answers those questions with a framework first, then names. Whichever agency has written publicly about that specific problem becomes the recommendation. Everyone else gets skipped. So the agencies winning AEO right now aren't pitching themselves. They're publishing the answer to the problem before the VP even asks. What this looks like in practice: – One podcast appearance per month where the founder dissects a real problem they solved. The ones that matter for AI GTM: Topline, 30 Minutes to President's Club, Lenny's Podcast, SaaStr, 20VC, The Sales Hacker Podcast, GTMnow, Modern Sales Pros, Pavilion's Topline, Matrix Moments. – One implementation playbook published publicly per month — "how we fixed reply rates for a $10M SaaS by rebuilding their sender infrastructure." – One benchmark report per quarter with actual numbers from real clients. "State of AI Outbound 2026." Data nobody else has. – Quotes in the publications that AI actually cites: SaaStr blog, The Information, TechCrunch, Inc42, YourStory, Entrackr, The Ken, GTMnow, First Round Review, OpenView's blog, a16z's content engine. – A founder Substack or LinkedIn newsletter diagnosing one specific GTM problem each week. – A niche Slack community of practitioners: Pavilion, RevGenius, Modern Sales Pros, Wizard of Ops where the founder shows up and contributes, not just lurks. AI rewards the diagnosis. Most agencies are still running paid ads aimed at vendor-search queries nobody is typing anymore. The window is open. The category is consolidating in 18 months. The agencies that own the problem own the inbound. That's AEO. #AEO #AnswerEngineOptimisation #AIGTM #SaaS #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy #FounderLed #IndianStartups #AISearch #ClaudeAI

The vertical AI sessions at SaaStr Ai day two were the ones that shifted how I think about defensibility. The core argument: AI is the biggest leveller since the internet. Any business holding a monopoly today won’t hold it 12 to 24 months from now. Lower cost AI-native alternatives are coming in every category. The question isn’t whether disruption arrives. It’s whether you are the disruptor or the disrupted. But the same dynamic that breaks monopolies also creates entirely new moats. The session that stayed with me laid out four that actually hold in an AI world. Deep workflow ownership. You own the actions, not just the data. Proprietary data at scale. Not just volume, but depth and recency that competitors cannot replicate. Network effects feed the data flywheel. Every user makes the product better for every other user. Hardware to data to AI. The full stack from edge to model. The strongest moat of all. The strategic advice for incumbents was equally clear. Don’t fight the old system of record. Don’t try to rip out the EMR in healthcare or the legacy ERP in manufacturing. Latch on top of it. Become the system of action that sits above it. Be the value layer, not a feature inside someone else’s platform. And then the line I wrote down and underlined:  All AI hype, just focus on client value. Double down on it. The rest is noise. Twitter is a distraction. The signal is what your clients are actually getting done because of you. That’s the only scoreboard that matters. Everything else is theatre.

I don’t think that self-made apps from vibe-coding are secure or stable enough to trust your mission critical systems…TODAY. But they will be sooner than later. Maybe SaaStr Ai needs to worry more about this than building a chatbot that poses as a CMO.

The Agents Ep. 005 is live! 1⃣ The shocker: $257/month total to run both 10K (our AI VP of Marketing) and QB (our AI VP of Customer Success). I thought that was a daily number. Amelia thought it was a daily number. It's the monthly bill. Why it's so cheap: - 95% of our LLM calls run on Haiku or GPT mini, under a penny each - API calls to Salesforce, Bizzabo, WordPress, X are mostly free - Postgres storage is cents per month Cost is not the constraint anymore. Stop letting it hold you back. A few more things from the episode: 2⃣ 10K admitted on its own it's NOT really a VP of marketing yet It's a sliver of the role plus a full replacement for marketing analysts, ops coordinators, and junior content marketers. Fair. That sliver gets bigger every week. 3⃣ Our SaaStr AI annual website willed itself into existence as our third agent Started as a website. Now it's our best digital marketing manager for events. We didn't plan it. It just happened. 4⃣ QBee sent 83 fully personalized sponsor check-in emails at 12:20am while Amelia slept Each one listed exactly what that sponsor still owed us. Got fewer questions back the next day, not more. 5⃣ Killed another $4K/year pre-AI SaaS app this week  Replaced it with 10K in about an hour of vibe coding. Why? Not because we wanted to. But because it never progressed into an agentic app. 6⃣ Amelia walking 40 acres with WhisperFlow talking to QB and 10K out loud Contractors started asking HER to query the agents for them. Nobody wants to track down a human for answers anymore. Zero. 7⃣ Postgres vs Salesforce question keeps coming up. We're not leaving @salesforce. We're consolidating ONTO it. The third-party agent ecosystem (Agentforce, Artisan, Qualified, Momentum) is too valuable to walk away from. RIP Marketo though. Full episode on YouTube, Spotify at links in comments. And drop any questions as comments here and we'll answer all of them!

AI won’t fix a broken #GTM journey.
It will just make the damage happen faster. I recently read a SaaStr discussion with Jason M. Lemkin and Kyle Norton about AI in sales and GTM (link in comment). One point matters more than all the productivity promises: Poor AI orchestration creates terrible customer experiences. This is the part many companies skip. They automate follow-ups before defining relevance. They deploy agents before clarifying qualification. They scale outreach before understanding what buyers actually need. Then they wonder why their pipeline feels noisy, generic and increasingly disconnected from reality. AI is powerful when it removes friction from a well-designed journey. It is dangerous when it accelerates a badly designed one. Before asking, “What can we #automate?” GTM leaders (we!) should ask: Where does the buyer need real value? Where are we creating unnecessary friction? Which signals matter? Where does human judgment still change the outcome? The future of GTM is not automated noise. It is intelligently orchestrated relevance. And that requires strategy before systems. #GTM #AIMarketing #SaaS #RevenueStrategy

Still thinking about everything that is changing in the sales processes that we discussed at SaaStr Ai, and sure the sales collateral personalization is the one I'm more interested in, for obvious reasons, Essia.io ! Andre shared about how Anthropic is dealing with this for their sales team and I do believe we should all be taking closer look at it.

New!! Even a Mediocre Prompt Can Build Pretty Good Software Today: Here’s the exact prompt I typed into Replit the other day “ok i have an idea where we built a new speaker card page, where if you upload a headshot, we build you a 1080×1080 card on a background you pick from (one is attached) and show your headshot and ‘I’ll Be at SaaStr AI... Continue Reading

"Great recap. The biggest takeaway from SaaStr 2026 is that the 'growth at all costs' era is behind us. The focus has firmly shifted to operational efficiency and real profitability. For many, the smartest move isn't launching a new startup, but acquiring proven SaaS assets and using AI to hyper-optimize their margins. Why exhaust yourself building foundations when you can acquire an already profitable engine and scale it to the next level? That’s exactly the approach I focus on when scouting opportunities on Flippa: https://lnkd.in/dueWPKYN"

New!! SaaStr AI App of the Week: Helply. The Bootstrapped B2B Support Platform That’s Free Forever, Charges Only When AI Actually Resolves a Ticket, and Showed Up to SaaStr AI 2026 With Giant Pandas: The Bottom Line: Alex Turnbull bootstrapped Groove from $0 to $5M ARR as a solo founder over a decade. Then he bet against his own playbook. Helply is the AI-native B2B support platform he’s building in public. The support platform itself is free forever. No seats, no caps. You only pay when AI delivers a... Continue Reading

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm still processing FWDFest. We've been to a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship conferences in the past 20 years (including SaaSTR in 2020) so I can say with confidence that this one is special. Most events give you access to thought-leaders and powerhouses from a distance. FWDFest gives you an intimacy that is rare, and in an increasingly disconnected world, that matters more than you'd expect. The absolute highlights for me were Bill Ovenden from The Lad Collective and Daniel Flynn from Thankyou. After two days of big (and sometimes scary) technology stories and ideas, it was refreshingly grounding to hear how simple, human problems, solved with absolute conviction (and extraordinary confidence 😂 ), can become life-changing global businesses. As a sponsor of FwdFest this year, we received far more value than we gave. The generosity of the Silicon Coast community - the board, the organisers, my fellow volunteers, the speakers who donated their time, and the connections made - was genuinely humbling, and we are looking forward to a lasting relationship. ⏰  You have a week to secure 2026 prices with a $100 deposit at fwdfest.co/2027. I'm especially encouraging our New Zealand connections to lock it in! Our friend Jared Maloney came over from Hawke's Bay, NZ and walked away fizzing with loads of new ideas and connections. The Sunshine Coast innovation community has a lot to offer, and this event gives you a genuine reason to get on a plane and see for yourself. There is so much more to talk about, so over the next few weeks I'll be sharing the ideas that are still rattling around in my head, about trust, acceleration, adoption, authenticity, and value, because they all deserve their own discussion. But for now I want to thank these mighty humans for being so welcoming and good to me, Matthew Miller and Mogul Digital 🙏 Min Swan Rob Steffler Kathryn Giudes Bryton Wishart Justin Lippiatt Arkadiusz (Arek) Rejman Peter Wilson Erin Barnes Jason Garland Bek Wall James Simpson Tiffany Bower Brendan Bathersby

A package showed up at my door just now !  — my prize for placing 3rd at Wistia's Marketing Trivia during SaaStr Ai 10 days ago. Perfectly timed reminder of an event I've been thinking about ever since. Two days of AI demos, agent showcases, keynote takeaways — and the moment I keep coming back to is a taco-filled room of marketers getting weirdly competitive over Kahoot. Meg Dalessandro wrote a great recap on what makes events stick. From the BD seat, I'd add one thing: the best brand experiences aren't just memorable, they're conversational. After 48 hours of booth pitches, what I actually remembered going into follow-ups was who I laughed with over trivia, not who had the biggest banner. For those of us building partnerships in the AI space, that's the real takeaway: people don't remember your deck. They remember the 20 minutes they spent next to you while someone yelled about churros. Thanks Meg + Wistia for setting the bar. #SaaStrAI #BD #MarketingEvents

Great time was had by all at SaaStr Ai 2026! I even came back and built a little something with Replit 😎

Anthropic showed their GTM stack at SaaStr Ai 2026 last week, and it confirms something I have been thinking about for a while and started preaching. Salesforce is a perfect "GTM Data Lake". Most GTM tools are integrated and synced with it natively already. Meetings from Gong. Emails and calls tracked by Outreach. Slack messages. Notes from Notion. Support tickets from Pylon. Accounts, contacts, and leads enriched by Clay and ZoomInfo. All of which - data that are structured (or semi-structured), searchable, and ready to be used - flowing into Salesforce. And Claude sitting on top of this lake, connected through Salesforce MCP server. The intelligence layer that reads and synthesizes from this system of record and surfaces insights that used to take hours to pull manually. Somehow, Capchase and Anthropic arrived at the same place independently. I don't think it is a coincidence. It is where all GTM is heading. P.S. We're actively evaluating lead routing options and LeanData seems like a strong contender. Does anyone have a contact I could get in touch with?

We had a big print deadline for SaaStr AI Annual sponsors a few weeks back. A few sponsors uploaded placeholder graphics or incomplete assets and pretended they'd met the deadline. Very human move. They figured they'd buy time and swap in the real files later. QBee, our AI VP of Customer Success, checked every single upload with Claude. Instantly. And caught every placeholder. Then it followed up with every contact in the org. Not just the designer who submitted. The CMO. The marketing lead. Everyone. "Thank you for uploading. This doesn't meet the specifications. Here's what we need. Here's the deadline." No drama. No emotion. Just the truth. A human might have missed it. Or been too uncomfortable to push back on a paying customer. Or not checked until two days later when it was too late. QB doesn't care. It checks everything and tells the truth. One of the sponsors had someone who was already past due. QB told them: you're past due, you need to upload now to avoid a late fee. Another was approaching the deadline. QB told them: this doesn't count as a submission. Here's what we still need. In the age of AI, you really can't fake the deadline. You can't upload a placeholder and hope nobody notices. Because the agent notices everything.