AI & ML

Will AI take my job?

By
Steve Hazelton
April 7, 2023
5 min read

“100% of this article was written by a human” (True)

We’ve all seen large language models (LLMs) rapidly move into the mainstream, and many of us are already using them at present to generate blog posts, sales emails, and marketing campaigns (sadly, not yours truly). 

Indeed, there is no shortage of ideas and blog posts explaining how businesses will use LLMs to generate content and remove routine or laborious tasks. Some say LLMs will render coders and lawyers obsolete. (BTW, they won’t). While there will certainly be job disruptions, we believe the change will be one of radical productivity improvement and, as a result, much more interesting and fulfilling work for many of today’s knowledge workers.

Before continuing, let’s clarify. LLMs are just one type of AI, a “tool.” If you think that auto-creating a sales email is a kind of “meh” endgame of billions of funding, you won’t hurt our feelings. That’s because we feel the future of AI in business will be utilizing many AI tools that will go far beyond creating content. They will help you think and take action. They will help you do things that are almost impossible or are very expensive to do today.

If you love manually updating JIRA with bug reports, typing QBR results into spreadsheets every Friday, or getting five people in a room to discuss your best customer, then the adoption of AI for your business is going to be a bummer. For the rest of us, AI will make us much more productive, informed, and, ultimately, employable.

Before continuing, I would like to say that I have spoken to many companies that have “started using AI in our business.” This always means dumping a healthy serving of emails and support tickets into GPT and generating summaries. And many now say, “That was cool, but now what?”

They’ve just scratched the surface. At the risk of sounding like an AI hype machine, answering “What’s next?” is really difficult because we’re still trapped in an impossibility box: today, there are things we think are impossible but aren’t anymore. 

 

At Sturdy, business for AI will go beyond Generative AI, fundamentally changing how businesses collect, organize and synthesize their information. For now, I will call this AI Harmonization (AIH).  Again, this goes far beyond writing sales emails. Beyond the LLM, AIH will illuminate previously dark sources of data and harmonize that information across other models, thereby creating previously unimaginable strategic visibility and scale.

The pieces of this AIH pie are the following: 

  1. Collect and flatten metadata, structured data, and unstructured data into a privacy-compliant, permissioned, and normalized structure;
  2. Autonomously identify themes, topics, and insights inside this information and at its intersections. 
  3. Automatically deliver “stuff” to, and synchronize with, other systems, workflows, and people who need it.
  4. All of the above will be done automatically, in real-time, without supervision.
  5. (extra credit): Your interface to this information will fundamentally change from “click here, then click here” to “tell me what you want.”

Of course, what I just laid out vastly simplifies the challenge. Yet, I can’t help but feel super excited about what it means…here are some examples:

If you are an Account Manager, your day might start with, 

“Here are three accounts you need to look at right now.”

Or, let’s say you’re a VP of CS, 

“Let me know anytime an enterprise customer has an issue within 90 days of their renewal date. Check this every day at 9 am.”

Or, imagine being a new VP of Products at a SaaS business, 

“Every Tuesday, send me an XLS with a product roadmap with all bugs, organized by topic, reported by our enterprise customers worth more than 500k in ARR ranked by unhappiness generated and estimated engineering complexity.” 

Sure, many of the examples above are already completed in many well-run companies today. They are just being done with manual labor. A lot of manual labor. In fact, our Sturdy data shows us that as much as 45% of an Account Manager’s day is data entry. Logging tickets, updating salesforce, writing call summaries (that number doesn’t even count the “account review” meetings). 

Yes, AI will eliminate almost all this manual labor masquerading as knowledge work. 

It will automate almost all data collection… reporting…and, eventually, much of the response. 

But, worker productivity will skyrocket and allow our teammates to focus on much more meaningful tasks.

(Shameless plug: you could buy Sturdy today and next week 3 of the examples shown above are now part of your business. (What, you think I write blog posts for my health?))

In short, the people interacting on a day-to-day basis with customers will have about twice as much time to do high-value things, like talking to customers. If I had to guess, I would say that this probably means companies will have fewer Account Managers, but it also means that they’ll become twice as valuable (because they’ll be 2x more productive).

If you were hired as an Engineer in 1970, it is likely that for the first decade of your professional career, you spent your days using a slide rule to double-check someone else’s work. Did a computer take the engineer's job? No. Did their jobs get better, more productive, and more important? You betcha. 

Let’s do this. 

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Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
5 min read

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

  • It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
  • It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
  • It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
  • It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
  • Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
  • Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
  • Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
  • Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
  • Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

Schedule Demo
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