I don’t want to use your agent, I want my agent to use your thing

[Weekly GTM round-up] Sales is an AI-proof job, Marc Benioff framemogging, pacing the frontier, and a sales systems role at Perplexity

If you were forwarded this newsletter, join 10,781 weekly readers—some of the smartest GTM operators & founders—by subscribing here:

Thanks for reading this hand-rolled, 100% organic (human-written) newsletter.

Presented by:

Clay is the infrastructure GTM engineers build on. Start building for free.

& Supported by:

Attention → AI Agents for RevOps.

Clarify → The Autonomous CRM. Sell more, admin less.

Clearskies → The Context Layer for Revenue AI.

Nooks → Revenue infrastructure for reps and agents.

Rox → Revenue Agents for the Global 2000.

Sumble → High precision GTM data + intelligence.

Terret → The answer-to-action engine for revenue teams.

Hey, y’all! 👋

We’re back with another edition of the GTM Weekly Round-up: a bite-sized editorial plus a few links that are worth your time.

Let’s dive in.

I’ve been thinking about a question that a Product Manager at a company that will remain unnamed (but has a conference this week) asked me recently: “What do you think of [redacted], our agent?” I didn’t have the heart to tell them ‘I’ve never used your agent’ so I replied with generic feedback: I don’t want to use an agent inside the walls of a SaaS platform. Instead, I want my agent to use your software.

This post sums up my thinking:

I don’t want to use your agent inside your platform because you don’t have access to all of my context.

Your agents aren’t bad (in fact, I’m sure they’re great! These are smart people/teams building them). The problem is, your agent doesn’t have my context. It doesn’t have my Skills, personal preferences, Memory, access to other tools that my AI has access to (like email, slack, google docs, etc) or files on my computer.

Don’t build a new navigation system for a car, build CarPlay.

Let’s unpack this analogy. You could build a perfectly good nav system for a car, but it doesn’t know my home address, numbers of people I may call while driving, or what I was listening to this morning. Which is why everyone just plugs in their phone. The car’s job isn’t to be smarter than your phone; it’s to be the best possible screen for it. SaaS vendors are building the in-dash nav when they should be building for CarPlay.

By the way, the car still has context that your phone never will, like tire pressure, gas/charge left, check engine lights, etc. And the newest CarPlay pulls exactly that data in. The vehicle’s data flows to the driver’s platform instead of being walled off. The automakers betting on a walled garden are building a smarter dashboard to keep your phone out. I think the winners will be the ones who pipe their data into your system.

Example: Eric Nowoslawski used Grok Bot to build a Clay table via their CLI (you can watch a 2-minute clip here; from a recent episode of The Signal’s Live Show). This is a perfect example of Clay being okay with Eric having lots of context in his own systems, and using those to build inside their product in a more informed (context-aware) way. This creates a much better outcome.

UI/UX is changing (adapt or die).

There is a growing list of ways users now expect to interact with SaaS products (in addition to the traditional web application): inside chat interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, etc, via MCP/API/CLI, Slack bots, Grok Bot, computer use. It’s exhausting, but necessary to build for users in 2026.

As Aurelian put it:

As a builder, you need to build for this new reality.

As a user, you should experiment with all these new surface areas.

As a seller, you need to position your product based on your buyer’s desires.

So much is changing so fast. It’s both exhilarating and exhausting. I’m just trying to have fun and enjoy the (wild) ride.

---

Weekly GTM Round-up:

• The most important read in AI/tech-land this week: We Must Pace the Frontier. Dario’s article even had Sam and Elon retweet it in agreement! Meanwhile…

  

• I’ve said this many times, and will continue to beat this drum: Sales is an AI-proof career. I argued for it in last week’s editorial (The best sales reps are problem-solvers) saying: “I’m bullish on sellers in the AI era. As more of knowledge work gets slurped into the labs’ models, and surrounding ecosystem, the value of human-led problem-solving is going to become more valuable, not less.” First Round published an amazing article this week, with the same thesis. Read the full article here: The Craft of Sales.

  

• My friend Nate, at Perplexity, is hiring a Sales Systems Engineer, Enterprise Operations, to own the technical layer underneath their enterprise sales motion. “This person will run CPQ, account and lead scoring, data orchestration, and the integrations that connect Salesforce, Snowflake, and the rest of our GTM stack.”

• Colossus dropped another piece of art this week, a piece on Zuck: A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire (it’s also on Spotify).

• Crazy/cool to see the companies building at the bleeding edge continue to innovate, and disrupt even themselves. Great 2-minute video by the legend, Rob Cook:

  

• The debate rages on…

  

• In honor of Dreamforce this week, I’ll end with a little montage of Marc Benioff bangers:

  

  Shay Boloor@StockSavvyShay

  $NVDA CEO Jensen Huang told Marc Benioff to “just follow me” and the $CRM CEO had the perfect response. “We’re all following you, bro.”

  

  6:56 PM · Sep 15, 2026 · 387K Views

  ---

  56 Replies · 148 Reposts · 2.66K Likes

  

  

  

  Last, but not least, did you know: Marc came up with the idea for Salesforce while swimming with a pod of dolphins off the coast of Hawaii?

Alright, that’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!

---

As always, thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.

See you next week,
Brendan 🫡

PS: If you liked today’s post, send it to one person who would enjoy it.