Don't automate your go‑to‑market.
Go-to-market benefits from every new technology, like every other department. It also moves faster than any of them, and runs on taste and judgement. Yet it's the first thing everyone tries to automate.
The companies that sold the human coming out are quietly putting one back. Artisan ran billboards reading Stop Hiring Humans, then hired its first human BDR. Klarna replaced 700 support staff with an agent, then said it had gone too far.
What AI produced at scale is slop. Same openers, same fake personalisation, comment sections full of agreeable nothing. It works for a while. Then a market learns to ignore it. Cold email took years to burn. AI comments took four months.
What still works is almost embarrassing. A phone call. Eleven emails a founder actually wrote. Forty of the right people in a room. A cake shipped to the team you want to work with. A gift that proves you listened. A puzzle, a maze, a free tool worth keeping. Content with an actual creative direction.
None of it scales like a sequencer. That's why it works.
Taste upstream. Who you're for, what you won't sell, the angle you'd run even if it were unpopular. Judgement downstream. A sequence or a phone call. When to walk away.
Intelligence is a commodity now. Trust isn't.