What I Learned From a Packed AMA at SaaStr AI London 2025

No, Inbound Isn't Dead. The GTM Playbook Isn't Broken. But Your Moats Are Shrinking to Months.

What I Learned From a Packed AMA at SaaStr AI London 2025

Jason M. Lemkin 🦄 – Dec 08, 2025

I did an open AMA at SaaStr London last week, a classic part of each SaaStr AI event. But this one was different. The urgency was at the max.

The room was packed with founders, CROs, and marketers who all seemed to be wrestling with the same existential questions:

• Is inbound dead?

• Is the GTM playbook broken?

• Will AI agents replace my entire team?

• Should I just give up and become a forward‑deployed engineer?

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Most of the anxiety I’m seeing in the market right now is based on a false narrative—a dangerous “woe is me” story that’s been accelerating since late 2023. It’s time to get honest about what’s actually happening—and what you need to do about it.

The “Woe Is Me” Narrative Is Killing Your Growth

Let me start with the question everyone’s asking: “Is inbound dead? My traffic is down 50 % in the last 12 months.”

Here’s my honest response: Woe is you. Your SEO is harder. You don’t have as many leads as you had during a lockdown. Poor you.

This leads to a narrative that I think is quite dangerous: that the go‑to‑market playbook is broken and doesn’t work anymore. It’s just not true.

Yes, the playbook that some folks ran from 2021 doesn’t work as well today. But the plays still work. Webinars, inbound, outbound, left‑bound, right‑bound—it all still works.

The Same CROs, CMOs, Etc. Are Running the Hottest AI Companies

If you look at the hottest AI companies right now, you’ll see a cast of characters from the 2010s. B2B leaders you know from SaaStr 2017‑2018 are running today’s AI rockets.

• Vercel (just raised at $10 B): Their COO was the Chief Business Officer at Stripe.

• Replit (0 → $250 M this year in vibe coding): Their CRO is from ZoomInfo.

• Bolt (one of the vibe‑coding leaders at $60 M): Head of sales was on our old SaaStr sales team.

That wouldn’t be possible if the plays didn’t work. These leaders are using different tools—more AI—but it’s the same playbook, same demos, same everything.

The biggest real difference? There’s just so much demand. Tools like Cursor, Replit, Lovable, 11 Labs are so disruptive that everyone is in market simultaneously. 11 Labs went from almost nothing to $300 M this year. Bolt has so much inbound they can’t service it. At $60 M ARR, Brian has maybe four people on his sales team. How many of thousands of leads can they follow up on?

“They’re all classic B2B sales reps—just instead of calling every lead and trying to convince them their fungible product is the exact same as another product, they have insane demand and are servicing it. But it’s the same playbook.”

The AI Budget Paradox: Record Spending, Record Cuts

According to Gartner, overall enterprise software is going to grow the fastest it ever has—15 % a year at $400 B. It’s never grown this fast before. Of that 15 %:

• Almost half is taken up by price increases from existing vendors (everyone’s raising prices).

• About half of the remaining half is new AI budget.

That means if you’re not one of the vendors getting price increases or new AI budget, everyone else has to get cut.

Vendor count is stabilizing or shrinking to make room for new AI offerings and price increases from select vendors. CIOs have been saying: “Give me an app. Give up an app. You want to add a couple AI apps next year? I’ll find you budget—but you’ve got to give up two. You have 100 marketing tools? Maybe 96 is enough.”

I just got an investor update yesterday from a pretty successful company at mid‑eight figures in revenue. They had $1.5 M in churn last month—from happy customers, no CSAT issues, no other problems. They literally said: “We’re cutting apps next year. We’re an attachment to CRM and we got cut.”

The CEO failed because they didn’t get above the cut line. It was great to have, but not mission‑critical, and it got cut to make room for an AI app.

Our SEO Is Down 8 %. But Our Traffic Is Up 50 %.

Is SEO dead? Let me give you our real numbers.

At SaaStr, our blog is our core—it’s home base. Our blog traffic was fairly flat for about four years. Going into this year, our SEO is down 8 %—not 50 %, but 8 % for real.

But here’s the thing: our traffic is up 50 %. We will end this year at saastr.com with twice as many readers as last year, even though our SEO is down.

Why? Because people all want to read about AI GTM content. They don’t want classic SaaStr themes about CS teams and CROs unless there’s an AI angle. Because we have some of the best AI GTM agent content out there, people are devouring it.

Meanwhile, G2 says their SEO is down 30‑40 % or more. So if that’s your only play and you haven’t changed your product or GTM since 2021, yes—it’s probably going to feel 8‑50 % harder.

You’ve got to find your tailwind. That’s your job right now.

AI SDRs Didn’t Work Until Claude 4. Now They Do.

Someone asked me about AI SDRs: “You said they didn’t work, but now they do. Can you elaborate?”

Really, none of these SDR products worked before Claude 4.1 Sonnet or Claude 4 this year. Replit didn’t work. Lovable didn’t work. Base44 didn’t work. They were out there—they just weren’t very good.

Then the magical moment when Claude 4 came out and everything changed.

Look at Gamma—they do AI presentations. Founded in 2020. It was five years to $1 M, and then 1 → $80 M this year. Replit was founded almost 10 years ago. It was 10 years to $1 M, then 1 → $250 M. It’s not a coincidence that all of these apps took off in January‑March 2024, when the LLMs got better.

If you had a bad experience with almost any AI LLM GTM product before March 2024, write it off. It was a different time. Different LLMs. Different world.

The Two Failure Modes of AI Agents

I’ve identified two main failure modes for AI‑agent deployments:

Failure Mode #1: Pre‑Claude 4 LLMs

If you bought over‑hyped GTM SDR tools before February/March/April 2024, they just didn’t work well. The LLMs weren’t good enough.

I was with the CEO of Qualified—they’ve been trying to use AI to qualify inbound leads since 2019. I asked him: “This really took off around February or March 2024, right?” He said: “Yeah, that’s when it finally actually worked after 5 years.”

Failure Mode #2: “Just Turn It On”

The second failure mode: many folks simply told someone on their team to deploy it, or hired an agency that didn’t know what they were doing.

We were on a call with a global technology leader—pretty AI‑forward, impressive company—and they said: “We’re thinking about buying our first AI SDR. We’re just going to buy it and hand it to our SDRs and have them figure it out.”

It’s not going to work. You’ve got to train it—for a month, then every day, iterating the onboarding.

I’d say 80 % of the conversations Amelia and I have are a version of this: “I bought a tool and I have no leads. I bought a tool and I have a lot of leads, but I didn’t connect it to my leads. It didn’t magically work.”

The Right Way to Deploy AI Agents

Here’s the captain‑obvious thing for any AI SDR, BDR, even AI AEs, CSMs:

1. First, get it to work in the real world with humans. Figure out what actually closes deals.

2. Then tell the AI what worked. There’s no magical prompt. The prompt is: “Here’s the script that I use with a customer that I closed.”

3. Iterate that prompt.

4. Hook it up to data—Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake—and have it ingest the data to keep improving.

5. Read every email it sends and every response it ingests. Some will be dumb or wrong. Correct them (“Hey, that was wrong. SaaStr AI London is not December 4th”). Do this every day for about a month; the mistakes start to go away.

“If you can’t sell it yourself, the AI can’t sell it for you. It’s that simple.”

The #1 Skill for 2026: Become an Agent‑Deployment Expert

Someone asked about the most important skill to build for 2026. Here’s my answer:

If you are world‑class at Agent Force, Clay, Qualified, Artisan—or any two or three leaders with decent revenue—and you go through the deployment yourself (training, onboarding, getting it working), you become infinitely hireable for the next 18 months because only ~2 % of marketers have those skills.

Become the expert in deploying agents. It doesn’t need to mean you know every agent or are deeply technical, but you need to:

• Pick a few leading agents and deploy them yourself (not just tell someone on your team to do it).

• Watch, iterate, train, and refine every day.

• Spend a focused week deploying, then continue to work on it.

End of article.