The last mile
GTM motion was a painful task for me. It is a game of trial and error and rejections.
Now agents help to do the grunt work and course correct. Map out the TAM, find a way to reach them, test how to pitch and how to position, and match the best offering to the best buyer.
Sometimes we are happy to see a targeted Meta ad that fits our current life stage. It shows us what is out there. Good matching does not feel like spam.
This is happening at the same time as commoditisation of intelligence, and compression of software and services margins. Work done behind a screen can be done by computer use agents, better, more effectively, and at larger scale. Cost of tokens and intelligence will trend towards 0 on a long enough timeline.
The frontier player pushes novelty and innovation. The chaser can copy the playbook at much lower cost. More than 90% of work is not mission critical and can be served by a non frontier model. DeepSeek Flash, not Fable. Many will settle for the most cost efficient second option.
Blue collar jobs are not a safe harbour. It is just slower diffusion, of people reskilling and of machines being ready. Byte jobs can switch instantly. Atom jobs need time to ramp up the setup.
Harder moats are regulatory capture, monopoly, and ecosystems. Ecosystems are a form of lock in. Integrations, data, habits, and partners make switching painful, even when a cheaper copy exists. Only you and a handful can be the service provider, and that is often achieved through politicising and bureaucracy, not product.
Most of my engineering work now is on loops. Product features and fixes, and sales and marketing research, running again and again.
The value is in the last mile. Integration, fine tuning, and navigating human gatekeepers for approvals. Capability is not the bottleneck. Liability is. Who gets blamed when there is a fault.
Across my businesses, the meat in the middle is software first. Agents prepare the repeat work, including ready sales packs. The human part is judgement, closing the sale, and orchestrating and fine tuning the agents.
If you sell intelligence, your margin compresses. If you buy intelligence cheap and sell trust, distribution, and a done job, your margin expands.