The newsletterOnce or twice a week. 1 hot take, 2 tool suggestions, 3 best practices.
No. 001
Everybody's predicting the wrong dead software.
The take in the LinkedIn/X bubble right now is that AI kills the CRM. I think that’s hilarious. You still need a system of record. Somebody has to own the answer to “who is this person and what happened with them,” and that’s not going away because someone non-technical can vibe code now (no judgement, I do it too).
Here’s my bet.
I think the BI tool industry is just dead.
I haven’t built a single report in HubSpot or Salesforce in at least six months. Why would I? I point Claude at a data source I trust and it hands me the artifact on a schedule. (stress - data I TRUST, read the post below) Less maintenance and more customization.
So no, your CRM isn’t dying. It might be a bit overpriced, though.
The number of software categories that AI sort of just broke for me is ridiculous. I don’t touch Canva anymore. I don’t touch any BI tools anymore.
Two tools I'd buy. One I'm cancelling.
Gumloop
Claude: specifically to replace BI tools
Gong & Avoma (and similar tools)
Replacing it with
Three things I'd do this week
Scope the human work before you automate.
Every AI project I’ve been handed turned out to be a process mapping project first.
You have to understand the work that the human does in the first place, which I feel like what people try to skip.
Stop asking reps to fill in fields. Pull it from what they already said.
I was in a customer success audit last week. CS couldn’t do discovery before a churn call because sales never documented anything. The fix mapped out was to add required fields in Salesforce.
Skip it. The transcription already has the whole conversation. Run extraction via AI on the transcripts and write the summary where CS can see it. Zero friction for the rep and no constantly snowballing list of mandatory CRM fields.
Automate the task, not the role.
Sit with an IC, find the repetitive 20 percent of their week, build for that one thing. I won’t replace SDRs, onboarding, or customer success, because those are the first human touches a customer gets. Strip the admin off them instead and let them do the part you hired them for.
Thanks for reading the first newsletter! If you’ve got a system that’s leaking somewhere, that’s what I help with! Just hit reply.
Kevin
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Generate revenue. Subtract everything else.
Leads slip through cracks, reporting is a mess, and growth feels stuck. You’re not missing tools. You’re missing the system that ties them together.