We’ve all had a boss or two we couldn’t stand… but can you imagine working for an algorithm?
This is a very real possibility, according to our very own Armando Biondi, Co-Founder and CEO of Breadcrumbs. A 3x investor, 2x senior leader, and angel investor in over 300 different companies, Armando shared exactly why in his keynote Hot Takes Live.
The idea came to be when Armando was thinking a great deal about a GTM tech stack and realized that some macro-trends weren’t even in the future… they were already in the present.
The “daft punk law” is a perfect example. We all know the “harder, better, faster, stronger” mindset (and song, which originated in 2001?!) that most tech businesses prioritize. There’s always more data, more tech stack complexity, and more customer expectations. We’ve also got an ever-increasing speed of change and increasing costs of acquisition.
On the other side, the average cost of employee management has gone up, too. The average tech salary in 2022 reached six figures for the first time in 17 years, and nine out of ten prominent companies with the shortest employee tenure are in the internet and software sector. And with all of this, 87% of hiring managers are saying it’s harder to find good talent that’s qualified for the positions they’re seeking to fill due to an increase in skill gap.
And finally, the last macro trend is that consumer ML and artificial intelligence (AI) are now here. Just look at TikTok; it can use algorithms to fairly accurately show individual users the content most relevant to them from all over the world.
Technology has always meant three things: scalable, efficient, and reliable. Every consumer tech ultimately finds its way to the B2B world.
There used to be a Mad Men ethos to tech, but today Ops is the “emerging” category, and tomorrow we’re going to see an integrated GTM.
In days past, people had the intuition and/or insights to “move the needle,” so to speak; they’d make decisions and execute on them, or they’d manage other people to do so. It wasn’t always efficient, scalable, or reliable.
Today, intuition has absolutely been replaced by data. Insights are replaced by ML/AI. So while people are making decisions, it’s the software driving those decisions. We operate on and around the software giving us intuition and insights. It’s somewhat efficient, scalable, and reliable—but it’s not perfect.
And finally, Armando predicts that an integrated GTM approach will allow the software to contribute to decision-making, ultimately managing people and other software. People will make software-assisted decisions and focus on non-softwareized-yet areas. This will be efficient, scalable, and reliable.
So what does this look like?
Best-in-class companies will be the ones able to tighten the loop between input, decision, execution, learning, and iteration to as close to real-time as possible. Agile organizations with a flatter core team of hyper-specialized, higher-leverage employees surrounded by software and freelancers or agencies will be most powerful.
For entrepreneurs, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at the intersection of data, intelligence, and GTM to solve friction points that have historically relied on operators’ experience and insights. Think premium-priced tools with out-of-the-box expert services bridging the knowledge gap for companies or operators and enabling lower seniority employees. It’s maximum efficiency and highly scalable.
Junior operators will have the tools to make a larger impact faster, though there is the risk that they may not acquire seniority or experience in their role the same way. Middle management will be under pressure to mature into senior roles and will need to manage the actual operational side of these new tools.
In a world with commoditized, modularized, and reliable intelligence, the highest-value contribution is not making any single decision but rather setting up the framework through which decisions are automated.
Armando believes we’ve almost reached that point. Do you?
Want to check out the full video? Watch the full Hot Take Live here!