No one comes into a sales conversation without first asking an AI. The buyer journey has changed. Lena Waters, marketing leader behind DocuSign’s IPO, Grammarly & Notion, joined me on Office Hours to discuss what this means for your go-to-market.
The first phase of AI transformation is debt repayment. Most companies are agentically connecting go-to-market processes that should have been fixed years ago.
“Removing human coordination overhead and calling it transformation? That’s debt repayment. It’s real value, but it’s not a new paradigm.”
Marketing teams can finally build their own tools. That unlocks growth. But it’s still phase one.
Websites are human artifacts. They exist to communicate, persuade & convert people who navigate to them. AI agents don’t care for beautiful styling or appeals to emotion. This new persona doesn’t browse. It parses.
“Think about how much time we’ve spent debating the top nav. Solutions before products? Are we allowed to call ourselves a platform? That’s applied human psychology. Agents don’t care.”
Some companies have abandoned websites & mobile apps entirely. The replacement isn’t a better website. It’s just a wall of text in the favorite format of an agent : markdown.
Agents are joining buying committees. For small value purchases, they are also the decision-maker. Which database should I use for my vibe-coded app? Let the agent decide. Pair of shoes? New laptop? New car? All of those decisions could be made entirely through AI.
In the enterprise, with many stakeholders & complexities, the path isn’t so clear. The wrong decision still falls on the person. You can’t sue an agent.
“You can’t go to your board and say, my agent told me we should do this.”
We used to sell to humans who researched with tools. Now we sell to tools that report to humans. Equip your agents like you’d equip an internal champion.