Sales has changed a lot in the Age of AI. But a lot of it is still … mostly the same.

10 things that changed, and didn’t:

#1. The old SDR job is gone. AI sends 10-40x the volume at the same reply rates.

#2. In-person still closes at 3x remote. Only ~27% of B2B meetings happen in person. Agents can’t do this.

#3. Speed to lead is solved. Every inbound gets a real answer in minutes, 24/7, and it wins. No excuses anymore for a Calendly and a mediocre human screening meeting days later.

#4. You still can’t coach an inbound rep into outbound. 95% won’t make the switch. Most human tech sales reps like to just follow up with hot leads. No change.

#5. Coverage is no longer the constraint. Agents chase every lead, including the ones humans wrote off. No excuses for every lead not to be followed up with. For real.

#6. The best reps still just work harder. AI beats the mid-pack, not the top.

#7. More deals now close with little or no human AE. Full journeys complete in chat. More. But not all.

#8. Relationships still win the $1 M+ deal. AI can’t hold 18 months of CIO trust. But often requires a top-tier FDE to even get a deal going.

#9. The buyer might not be human. Agents are starting to buy, and they trust the AI answer.

#10. Bad sales behavior is still bad. In fact, AI can reinforce it.

We still buy from humans, especially $20 k-$50 k+ deals.

We just buy from AI, and with AI … a lot more than we used to.

Let me summarize a few convos with founders from past 2 weeks:

Personally, I won’t invest in an agentic “SaaS” / B2B company anymore no matter how good your AI and agent is …

Unless it unlocks materially more budget than just traditional software budget.

This may sounds obvious but I think a lot of folks get confused by it. It’s not enough today to use AI to make your B2B product 10x better than the old guys. That’s great and it WILL win you customers.

The problem? That alone won’t win you incremental budget.

You can steal Salesforce’s budget, or Workday’s, or whatever, but all the incremental budget is going to AI that either has radical ROI (gets you customers) or radical cost savings (don’t need half support team) or radical insights (100x better analytics -> insights -> ROI). Agentic ROI.

Stealing budget just from other software is no longer enough.

-> You have to have Agentic ROI, and where that shows up is much larger deal sizes than usual in your category.

If deals are usually $20k in your category, but you can get $60k-$200k with AI, look, that’s the sign.

If deals are usually $20k and you can get $20k but you can be incumbents with AI, that’s great. But it’s not enough.

If your deal size isn’t at least 2x what your pre-AI competitors have, you don’t have Agentic Revenue, and you won’t scale to be bigger than them, and you may end up in … a 2x ARR trap at scale. No one wants that.