Gabe Larsen

Remember when everyone suddenly started writing with em dashes because ChatGPT did it first? Good times.

Everyone said Shoptalk was great. It wasn’t. It was speed dating for vendors… and nobody told the brands. 5 dudes in quarter-zips circling one poor operator like sharks. “Quick question…” x 47. By day two, brands weren’t networking. They were playing defense. Smiling, nodding, slowly backing into fake meetings to escape.

GTM agencies are about to feel this… Used to be your edge was knowing 10+ tools and how to duct tape them together. Now agents replace half that stack and actually do the work. Which means your value isn’t the stack anymore… it’s whether you can drive revenue.

Sometimes I scroll social and see people posting about productivity hacks, leadership quotes, and their morning routine… While the biggest shift in how work gets done in 30 years is happening. At some point you just realize… Yeah I don’t need this person’s takes anymore.

A PE operator told me yesterday: “AI should come out of the HR budget, not IT. It’s a headcount replacement strategy, not a software project.” If it sits in IT, it becomes a science project. If it hits payroll, it becomes a strategy. Pick one repetitive job. Run a 90-day pilot. Measure hours removed. If it doesn’t pay for itself, kill it. Too harsh. Or exactly right?

80 million people don’t read the same AI article by accident. This is one of those articles you forward to everyone you know… especially the friend who still thinks ChatGPT is just a better version of Siri :) @mattshumer_ x.com/mattshumer_/st…

No takes today. Just cookies and good people. This is our team… AI turned us into gingerbread. Feels accurate. Merry Christmas.

Building companies is fun. Building a life is the point. Log off. Be present. The work will be there tomorrow.

Your product demo sucks. I’m sorry. It just does. Let me summarize the modern B2B demo: - 40 features - 0 narrative - No tension - No payoff Just click… click… click…“Hope that lands.” It never does. It's like we're optimizing for coverage not impact. Terrified of leaving something out, so we cram everything in: - Every edge case - Every tab - Every “we also do this” That's not confidence. That's insecurity. The job of a demo is not to explain the product. I know shocker... The job of a demo is to create one irreversible “aha.” One. - Not a tour - Not a walkthrough - Not an SE performance review The best teams know this. They stopped treating demos like presentations. They treat them like performances. - Pacing - Friction - Control - Reveal They decide exactly what the buyer should see, when they should see it, and why it matters right now. When it’s done right, you feel it. Goosebumps. No joke. Everyone else just drives the UI and prays.

AI isn’t “buy vs build.” It’s: do you even know what job you’re hiring it for? Because thats what it is, you use AI to do jobs, like humans. Most companies don’t really know what they are "hiring" AI for. They say, “We want AI for sales” or “AI for support” but what they really mean is, “We’re frustrated and hoping this fixes it.” It usually doesn’t. AI doesn’t fix broken processes. It takes whatever you already have and turns the volume all the way up. If your system is clear, it scales clarity. If it’s messy, it scales the mess. That’s why so many AI pilots look impressive and quietly fail. No one owns the work. No one defines success. Everyone treats it like software when it’s really closer to hiring a person. And hiring a person without a job description is how you waste a lot of money. The teams I’m seeing win with AI aren’t chasing tools. They’re slowing down, redesigning the work, and then deciding who or what should do it. That order matters.

Serious question for sales reps. Have you been asleep for the last five years? I’m interviewing AEs right now and I’m genuinely shocked how many think the world DIDN'T change. You still expect: - $300k OTE - Full WFH - No travel - Customer Success to clean up the customer - 100% inbound (No prospecting) - Side hustles on the side - Marketing to spoon-feed the narrative - An SE to do the thinking - “Some AI familiarity” - RevOps to fix the mess That job died with ZIRP. And don’t get me wrong, I liked that era too. But it’s over. The job evolved. The bar moved. If you want to win now, you have to evolve with it.

If your GTM plan still starts with hiring more reps, you’re cooked. And the pattern is always the same. Teams keep trying to run GTM harder. But GTM isn’t something you run anymore. It’s more like a system you have to design. Craig Rosenberg sees this every day. As Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners, he spends his time inside companies trying to move from founder-led growth to something repeatable. Here's the facts: - Buyers already did the research - Budgets are tighter - Boards don’t care about heroics, they care about efficiency Different game. What Craig is focused on is how the best teams are rebuilding GTM from the ground up: 1. Rebuilding the revenue process from the ground up, not sprinkling AI on top 2. Putting RevOps in the driver’s seat for AI prioritization 3. Proving impact with efficiency ratios, not dashboards that tell a nice story 4. Adding a GTM Engineer, someone who can actually wire the system together 5. Getting disciplined on build vs buy, and moving from quantity to quality This isn’t theory. It’s how modern GTM machines are actually being built. That’s what Craig is breaking down in our upcoming session. Friday at 1pm PST 👇 Join us here: linkedin.com/events/buildin…

Most CEOs are "implementing AI." @satyanadella Nadella is dismantling @Microsoft to save it. The @BusinessInsider piece reveals a leader who realizes his current company cannot survive what’s coming. Because this isn’t a rebrand or a roadmap tweak. It’s a hard reset on how Microsoft works: - Execs are being asked to either sign up for this or get out of the way. - Managers are being pushed back into the work, not just the meetings. - The people actually building AI are getting the influence. - Speed isn’t a suggestion anymore. It’s the job. That’s not normal CEO behavior. That’s what someone does when they believe the old version of the company doesn’t survive what’s coming. The most important idea in the whole article isn’t Copilot or models. It’s the idea that software isn’t built the same way anymore. For years, you added people and time to get more output. AI breaks that. That’s why Satya pulled himself out of the commercial spotlight. That’s why Judson’s now running point. That’s why Satya is sitting in messy, chaotic sessions with junior engineers instead of polished exec decks. This is what it looks like when a leader actually believes the shift is real. Most companies will keep bolting AI onto old systems. Microsoft is changing how work gets done. One path feels familiar. The other is how you stay relevant. My gut says most leaders won't have the stomach to take the second path.

If I were rebuilding a team from scratch, I’d probably start with Engineering, then move immediately to Customer Support. Engineering comes first because it sets the ceiling. If your engineers aren’t AI-native, everything downstream is slower, sloppier, and more expensive than it needs to be. Once engineering is equipped, I’d go straight to Customer Support. Why? Support is where volume meets reality. Same questions. Same issues. Same friction. Over and over again. This order matters: – Engineering first, to increase the rate of change – Support second, to eliminate noise and reclaim capacity Most companies sprinkle AI on the edges, run pilots, and argue about “strategy” while the backlog grows. More on this and other topics here: getsignals.ai/newsletter

What CAN and CAN’T you actually replace with AI today? Check the first comment to see where I would start first SALES DEVELOPMENT ◦ Outbound: You can’t replace it. You can only augment it. AI works as a researcher, list builder, signal detector, and drafting copilot. If you try to fully replace humans here, you don’t get leverage. You get spam. Fast. ◦ Inbound: You can replace most of it. AI can respond via email, phone, SMS, research the account, qualify intent, and book meetings. If it’s trained properly, it’s faster and more consistent than most teams. ◦ Chat: You can fully replace SDRs here. Not button bots. Not workflows. Full conversation agents. SALES ◦ Transactional: You can replace a large portion. Simple pricing, clear use cases, low risk decisions. AI closes these already. ◦ Relational: You can’t replace this. You can augment it with prep, insights, deal coaching, and follow-up. But trust, nuance, and pressure still need a human. MARKETING ◦ Execution: You can replace most of it. Content drafts, repurposing, ops, reporting, visuals, landing pages. AI is already better at the volume game. ◦ Strategy: You can’t replace it. Positioning, taste, judgment, and tradeoffs still matter. Most teams confuse activity with strategy. AI exposes that. CUSTOMER SUPPORT Tier 1: You can replace this. FAQs, password resets, order status, basic troubleshooting. Pure volume. ◦ Tier 2: You can replace a lot of this. Known issues, repeatable fixes, guided workflows. AI handles this if it’s trained and owned. ◦ Tier 3: You can’t replace this. Edge cases, bugs, emotional customers, high-risk situations. Humans should only see the hardest problems, not the volume. CUSTOMER SUCCESS ◦ Transactional: You can replace this. Anything that exists to move volume, push reminders, or prove activity instead of outcomes is AI work now. ◦ Relational: You can’t replace this. Real problems. Real risk. Real money on the line. But if you’re staffed like every customer needs this, you’re bloated. HR ◦ Execution: Ops, screening, scheduling. You can replace most of it. ◦ Strategy: Hiring judgment, culture, leadership calls. You can’t replace this. If you try, you’ll poison the org. ENGINEERING ◦ Throughput: You can’t replace engineers, but AI multiplies their output. Faster cycles. Faster prototypes. Faster mistakes too. ◦ Ownership: You can’t replace this. Design decisions, system integrity, and long-term bets still require humans. This is why headcount doesn’t drop. Pressure rises. BOTTOM LINE: AI replaces motion, not responsibility. If your org confuses activity with ownership, this transition will hurt.

@MerriamWebster just named “slop” the 2025 Word of the Year. And honestly… fair. If you’ve opened LinkedIn, Twitter, or your inbox this year, you already know what slop is. You can feel it in your soul. - It’s the post that sounds confident, says nothing, and somehow keeps going. - It’s the article that feels like an AI summarized another AI that summarized an article no one read. - It’s the phrasing. Technically correct, emotionally empty, and just unfamiliar enough to remind you no human ever wrestled with the idea. That’s slop. And once you see it, you realize it’s not really a content problem. It’s a volume problem. We didn’t get better content. We just got… more of it. Everywhere. All the time. And to be clear, AI didn't create the slop, it just made it impossible to hide. People who already had taste, ideas, and judgment? They’re dangerous with AI. People who didn’t? They’re flooding the zone. And now the internet feels generic. The irony is the best AI-assisted content doesn’t feel like AI at all. It feels human. Opinionated. Edited. Like someone actually stopped and asked, “Would I read this?” Everything else is just content noise. So yeah. Congrats to “slop.” It's the perfect word for 2025. But as the year winds down, I hope we choose to use AI to think better… not just post faster.

Let me guess. You missed your number. Again. Now comes the ritual. Find the scapegoat. One rep. One manager. One “underperformer.” Tell yourself, “If they’d just been better, we’d be fine.” If that helps you sleep after a bad quarter, congrats. It’s still BS. One person didn’t sink your number. - Your product did - Your positioning did - Your ICP fantasy did - Your leaky funnel did - Your 2021 GTM playbook did But those are harder to fix. So you do the easy thing. You fire someone. Franken-comp the plan. Promise the board “better execution.” Then you show up to the next board meeting and watch the same movie again. Miss. Blame. Replace. Repeat. You don’t have a people problem. You have a deeper one you’re avoiding. But keep hunting scapegoats if you want.

People screaming about AI aren’t defending the craft. They’re defending their ego. The high-horse routine about “real creators” never touching AI is the fastest way to tell any future employer you’re going to be really fun to work with. Businesses don’t care about your purity. They care about outcomes. Use AI, don’t use AI, that’s your call. But attacking people who do? Calling them lazy, unethical, uneducated? That’s not cool.

We’re already talking on social, then you ask me to “email you.” Why? If you want the meeting, let’s book the meeting. Right here. Stop hiding behind your inbox.