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Everyone Has AI Now. Almost No One Has Clarity.
The tools didn't die, they got smarter. What never changed, and what decides whether any of it works, is whether you're clear on what you're actually doing.
There's a story going around that most of your software is suddenly dead. That SaaS is over, that you don't need Monday or Jira or half the tools you were paying for last year, because AI made them obsolete overnight. It makes for a great headline. It's also mostly wrong.
What actually happened to the tools
Look at what people are actually doing, not what they're posting about. They're still running outbound through Apollo. They're still living inside Monday and Jira and the rest of the stack they built their work around. What changed is that those tools now have AI baked into them, so they're easier to use and quicker to get something out of. The software didn't die. It got smarter. And on top of it, a flood of new tools showed up, most of which you genuinely don't need, and that flood is where a lot of today's noise is coming from.
So the real shift isn't that the tools died. It's that there are more of them, they're louder, and every one of them promises to fix you. Underneath all of it, the thing that actually decides whether any of it works hasn't moved.
The one thing that didn't change
That thing is clarity: a real grip on your market, on who you're trying to reach and how you get to them, and on what you're actually selling and why someone picks you over the alternative. That was the hard part ten years ago and it's still the hard part now, because no tool has ever been able to hand it to you. If your positioning was fuzzy before AI, it's still fuzzy. You just have faster, smarter tools helping you broadcast the confusion.
You see it clearest on a sales team
I see this most clearly with sales teams. I work with SDRs and BDRs constantly, and plenty of them are using excellent, AI-powered tools to sell something they were never really helped to understand. They don't know who inside an account matters, they can't always tell a gatekeeper from a decision maker, and they're not sure which direction the company wants them going this month. The tool isn't the problem. The tool is great. What's missing is the clarity that would tell them where to point it.
Adding AI to your own company
There's another side to this, and it matters just as much if you're the one building the company. Adding AI to your own product or your own operations is a genuine advantage, and I'm the last person who'd tell you not to. The catch is that it only pays off when you already know what you're adding and why. Point it at a part of the business you truly understand and it turns into real firepower. Without that understanding, all you've really bought is a pile of half-used features and more noise to stay on top of.
The bar went up, not down
That's the heart of it. The tools got better, which means the bar for knowing what you're doing went up, not down. SaaS isn't dead, positioning isn't dead, and strategy certainly isn't dead. If anything they matter more now, because AI takes whatever clarity you have, or whatever clarity you're missing, and multiplies it.