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Some people are sprinting. Some are walking. Some are still deciding whether to step on.

Let me paint you a picture.

A post sales leader I know who is sharp, experienced, and downright great at her job told me recently: “My next role has to be at an AI company. It’s the only way to stay relevant.”

She’s probably not wrong.

But there’s no real desire to change what feels comfortable: she’s at a big company right now. Good pay. Stable. Things are “going okay.” So she stays. And watches. And wonders.

That tension between the pull of what’s next and the comfort of what’s now is where most post-sales professionals are sitting right now. And I get it. I really do.

We’ve all accepted it. Now what?

The conversation has shifted. Nobody is debating whether AI is here to stay anymore. That battle is over.

What I’m hearing across my network right now sounds more like this:

“I thought I knew what I was doing.”

“This is a lot.”

“Honestly? It’s a little scary.”

The overwhelm is real. The shock is real. And somewhere between the LinkedIn posts celebrating AI wins and the Slack messages about mandatory AI enablement sessions, most people are quietly asking the same question: Am I already behind?

Its happening across the board. Fortune 500 companies, startups and all are trying not to get left behind.

Here’s what I want you to hear: You’re not too late. But the window is narrowing.

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The market is sorting itself out

AI-first startups are the new shiny object for investors - and for good reason. Meanwhile, the tech giants are either leading the charge or starting to look like they’re rearranging deck chairs. Companies that were household names two years ago are suddenly playing defense.

And inside those companies? Emergency all-hands meetings. Rushed AI enablement sessions. “Here are some tools, go figure it out” energy.

Even the tools themselves moved faster than people could keep up. “Claude” became a household name before half the people I know had fully pivoted from ChatGPT. The landscape kept shifting while most teams were still trying to find their footing on the last update.

The ROI question nobody has fully answered

And then there’s something else..

There’s always been ambiguity around what AI actually returns. I wrote about this when McKinsey hosted a session on it a while back — and yeah, the question is still largely unanswered. We see the potential. We have strong suspicions. We can point to time saved and workflows automated. But the hard data? The definitive proof? It’s still catching up to the hype.

And that’s okay. This is all still very new.

The more authentic answer is: we’re running the experiment in real time. The companies investing thoughtfully now are building the case studies the rest of the market will learn from in 18 months.

Here’s my hunch on what will actually matter

After spending a lot of time in the weeds on this.. talking to teams, testing tools, building workflows.. here’s where I’ve landed.

1. The winners will be the ones who educated their teams, not just equip them.

There’s a big difference between handing your team a list of AI tools and actually building AI fluency. The companies that see real ROI won’t be the ones who downloaded the most apps. They’ll be the ones who took the time to teach their people how AI works - the foundations, the mental models, the judgment to know when to use it and when not to. Fluency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.

2. A lot of companies will throw AI at everything. Don’t be one of them.

The “skip the strategy, just deploy” approach is going to produce some very expensive cautionary tales. Rushing to automate broken processes doesn’t fix them - it just makes them faster and harder to unwind. The teams that skip foundational steps will become the case studies the rest of us reference at conferences for years.

3. The human-vs-AI question will answer itself.

Taking everyone’s job? Still feels like a stretch to me. But will the nature of human work shift? Absolutely. The most likely future isn’t humans replaced by AI..it’s humans becoming managers of AI-driven, agentic work. The CSM who knows how to direct, quality-check, and build on top of AI agents will be exponentially more valuable than the one who doesn’t.

AI right now feels a lot like one of those moving walkways at the airport. Some people are sprinting. Some are walking. Some are still deciding whether to step on. But once you’re on it… everything moves faster.

4. Agencies and consultancies have a real window right now.

If you’re in a smaller firm or running your own practice, this is your moment. The companies that need help building agentic workflows, enabling their teams, and operationalizing AI aren’t going to figure it all out internally. They’re going to look for partners. Be that partner.

What’s coming next

Here’s where I get genuinely excited.

I’ve been in the lab. Testing tools, building workflows, and tinkering with what’s actually useful for post-sales teams.. not what sounds impressive on a product page.

Starting next week, I’m going to pull back the curtain on what I’ve been building.

Each week I’ll do a deep dive on a specific AI tool or workflow I’ve built from a post-sales operational perspective. Most of them I plan to make available to anyone who can use them. Because the industry has given a lot to me, and this is my way of returning the favor.

Stay tuned. It’s about to get interesting.