How AI is Fundamentally Changing RevOps

I recently attended Primary Ventures’ “On the Business” day. These quarterly SaaS conferences are always fantastic – filled with actionable, highly relevant presentations delivered by engaging speakers, and opportunities to meet and develop genuine relationships with impressive, smart, supportive women. But this past event…blew my mind. 

We all know that AI is going to revolutionize GTM – everyone’s been talking about that for years. But what we hadn’t quite realized is that the revolution is no longer a thing of the future. It’s here, and the implications for RevOps are already greater than imagined. Here are a couple of examples from the OTB day that turned the light switch on for us:

At Ramp, the team is using AI to enable and empower their employees to do more themselves, including what historically fell outside of their functions’ scope. One example that stuck with us is that Ramp has built an agent on top of Looker that allows anyone in sales (or any function) to access whatever data they need, in a self-serve, plain-text, or voice-enabled fashion. Imagine a world where salespeople can speak to an agent conversationally, describe what they want, without needing to know the right fields to use (because let’s face it, we all have 5 different fields for ACV in our CRM, and only RevOps knows which one is which). And “poof,” the dataset is delivered. In real time. 

A sales VP wants to see pricing trends over time across various buyer profiles? Check. A new sales manager wants to understand individual-level funnel metrics for the sellers on his team? Check. The options are limitless. And follow-up requests can be delivered instantaneously, allowing anyone to slice and dice the data to their heart’s content. No need to lobby RevOps to prioritize an analysis and then wait until they have the bandwidth to actually do it. Sounds like a wish come true, right?

Next, 1Mind showed us a demo with their Superhuman AE. Right away, we were impressed that it looked and felt just like a regular Zoom demo call. Founder and CEO, Amanda Kahlow, asked the “rep” questions, and the AI agent answered them well, pulling up data and visuals seamlessly and throwing in wit and banter. 1Mind’s AE can function as an AE, a solutions engineer, an implementation manager, and a CSM, providing an end-to-end full sales cycle experience with one “rep,” which in turn, leads to a more comfortable and seamless experience for buyers. 

And of course, in a world where budgets keep getting tighter and revenue per employee is a key focus metric, the value proposition of a virtual AE is a CFO’s dream. We suspect the B2B SaaS SMB world, in particular, will find Superhuman AEs hard to resist, once they gain conviction that the technology is truly ready and that buyers are willing to purchase this way. And while more complex and relationship-driven Enterprise processes will likely still require human sellers, AI could enable a single human seller to manage the full sales cycle with AI assistants at each stage.

While the Ramp example has obvious implications for RevOps, the traditional owners of sales data, it’s the 1Mind / Superhuman AE that has the potential to radically transform RevOps. A world without human AEs (or BDRs, SEs, IMs, CSMs) is a world where we no longer need:

• Well-defined roles and swim lanes
• Rules of engagement (ROEs) and dispute handling
• Commissions and incentive planning
• Quota setting (at the rep level)
• Territory design and management 
• Field ops 
• And more

In a world with AI AEs, a large portion of what traditional RevOps teams do today would no longer be needed. 

And here’s where it gets really interesting…or scary (depending on your perspective). In a world without human AEs, there wouldn’t be front-line sales managers. At least not the way they look today. The role of sales management becomes less about inspiring and coaching and more about strategy (who do we sell to, how do we sell) and managing the AI agents and tools. In other words, it looks an awful lot like RevOps.  RevOps becomes sales management; sales management becomes RevOps.

Of course, before we get to that world, we have a massive, dynamic transition to navigate. With a significant change management component. The transition will require cross-functional alignment and collaboration from leaders across GTM, Finance, HR, Tech, and more. It’s exactly the type of project RevOps leaders are skilled in managing. And given the GTM nature of the initiative, they are the most likely to be tapped to manage the initiative. RevOps leaders – in close partnership with Revenue Leadership – need to paint the vision, outline the step-by-step path, and ultimately own this transition. And in the process, they will have the opportunity to define what RevOps will look like…both during this transition, and most importantly, after.    

So what will RevOps look like tomorrow?  Next year?  Five years from now?