Nooks Expands Beyond the Dialer. Here's Why That's a Big Deal.
Nooks x The Signal
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Hey y’all!
I’m excited about today’s post.
You probably know Nooks as a dialer (a best-in-class dialer, for that matter), coaching platform, and virtual sales floor - to help some of the world’s best sales teams prospect more efficiently. They’re beloved by reps and managers alike (a rare statement).
But they’re announcing something big this week: Nooks is officially expanding into sequencing.
And I am stoked to share what I find most interesting about this move: why it’s interesting for Nooks in particular, what it means for the GTM tech space, and how it will positively impact sales teams.
I’ve gotten to know Dan Lee (CEO of Nooks) recently. And I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Donnelly (Founding Sales Team member) earlier in my career—he’s a phenomenal sales operator, and a legend. When people I respect join a startup, I take note.
Here’s what we cover today:
The old outbound model is showing its age
Why now? (Consolidation szn continues)
What is AI Sequencing?
The dialer advantage
Humans + agents, working in tandem
Conclusion
Alright, let’s get into it.
The old outbound model is showing its age
For a decade, the outbound playbook looked roughly the same. Build lists. Write sequences. Dial. Hope something lands.
In January of 2024, I wrote that The “Predictable Revenue” Playbook is Dead; RIP (2011-2023).
The tools built around that model reflected it. Sequence management. Task queues. Activity logging. They were designed to manage manual work—and they did that reasonably well, for a while.
But the model was always brittle. Reps bouncing between five different tools. Sequences going stale after a few months. Best-practices being lost as reps got promoted. CRM data drifting further from reality with every sync error. RevOps spending half their time reconciling duplicate records.
AI didn’t create these problems. But it does make them impossible to ignore.
The new GTM playbook runs on agents, signals, and real-time intelligence. The infrastructure to run that playbook looks completely different from what we had before. Most of the tools we’ve been relying on weren’t built for this new world.
That’s the gap Nooks is going after.
Why now? (Consolidation szn continues)
Two things are happening at once.
First, the expectation for what AI should do has shifted.
A year ago, teams were excited about AI writing a cold email. Today, they expect AI to figure out who to email, when, and why… and then draft it. The bar moved from automation to intelligence. Chatbots, to agentic workflows. I’ve felt this in my daily workflows and consulting work. We’re early. But, it’s wild what is possible today. And it’s all changing so fast.
Second, teams are actively cutting tools.
Back in November of 2023, I published an article titled, Consolidation szn (The race is on...) | 6 sales tech unicorns chasing after the elusive “one-stop-shop”. In it, I argued that companies will need to expand their offerings over time, or else get squeezed by other all-in-one sales tools. So, seeing Nooks expand is right in line with that prediction. And they’re doing this with AI at the core of their product.
Sales teams are approaching legacy SEP renewals and asking a harder question than they used to: is this tool earning its spot in the stack, or just surviving on switching costs? The answer, increasingly, is the latter.
Both of those forces point in the same direction. And why a launch like this lands differently in February 2026 than it would have, even just one year ago.
What is AI Sequencing?
Nooks launched AI Sequencing this week! They call it the industry’s first Agent Workspace for Intelligent Outbound.
The concept is worth unpacking. Most people know Nooks as a dialer. A really good one. AI Sequencing takes the platform into a different category: a unified workspace where prospecting, enrichment, sequencing, email, LinkedIn automation, and calling all live in one place.
The keyword is unified. Not integrated. Not connected via API with a two-hour sync delay. One system. This is going after the classic, and elusive, compound start-up (and all the gains that come with it). AI agents monitor real-time buying signals (think: CRM activity, call transcripts and discpositions, LinkedIn, web data, etc.) to surface the right prospects at the right moment. They draft personalized outreach grounded in actual account data. Worth calling out: the email drafts come with built-in hallucination guardrails.
The agents generate outreach based on real account data, not generic AI slop. Reps still review and send. This unlocks speed without sacrificing accuracy or brand control. The agents guide reps toward the highest-value next action. And the whole thing stays CRM-first, so your data doesn’t live in some shadow system that drifts from your CRM over time.
Reps stay in control. Agents handle the busywork.
Think of it less like a tool upgrade and more like a new system of work for outbound, where humans and agents work together (more on that later).
The dialer advantage
I find Nooks’ move into sequencing interesting because it’s clearly differentiated from a startup just bolting on features.
They’ve spent the last five years building—and earning—a reputation as a best-in-class dialer (parallel dialing, virtual salesfloors, call coaching, and more). Thousands of reps have been using it daily, running live conversations, and generating a massive amount of unstructured data in the process.
Call transcripts. Conversation outcomes. Rep behavior patterns across thousands of accounts. What messages landed. Which signals actually preceded a booked meeting.
Most sequencing platforms don’t have that rich context. They have CRM fields and email open rates. Nooks has something much richer. And when you train AI agents on that kind of data, they can reason more like a top (human) rep.
This is why I find their expansion notable. They’re not guessing what good outbound looks like. They’ve watched it happen, at scale, for years. That’s a real advantage that compounds over time as the product learns. Most sequencing tools go stale. Sequences bloat. Data drifts. The more you use them, the messier they get. Nooks is designed to do the opposite: every interaction—every call outcome, every email reply, every signal that preceded a booked meeting—feeds back into the system. The agents get smarter. The sequences stay fresh.
It’s a continuous learning loop, and it’s one of the harder things to replicate if you’re building on top of a legacy data model. Which is what I’ve argued for a while around the concept of a “System of Intelligence” that gets better the more you use it, not worse.
Humans + agents, working in tandem
The part of Nooks’ vision I find most compelling is the philosophical bet underneath all of it.
A lot of AI sales tools are chasing one of two approaches: full automation (the AI does everything, no human required) OR light feature addition (sprinkle AI on top of an existing workflow). Nooks isn’t locked into only one.
The Agent Workspace model is built around humans and AI agents working together in the same system. Agents reason, prioritize, and draft. Reps make judgment calls, build relationships, and close. Each makes the other better over time. It’s not either/or. It’s both.
This is the right bet (imho). The best outcomes in outbound still come from human judgment applied at the right moment. The rep who reads the room on a cold call and pivots the pitch entirely, the one who knows when to go off-script. AI isn’t replacing that intuition.
Nooks’ team shared an analogy with me, which I think is spot on as the opportunity in front of them:
Just as Cursor reimagined the IDE for AI-assisted coding and Harvey redefined legal work with AI agents, Nooks is re-architecting outbound around humans and AI in one shared workspace.
AI can eliminate all the friction around those moments. So reps spend their time on what actually requires a human.
That’s the new GTM playbook. And Nooks is building the infrastructure to run it.
Conclusion
The tools that dominated outbound for the last decade were built for a different era—one where the job was managing tasks, not intelligence.
Nooks’ big bet is that the future of outbound is a shared workspace where humans and agents operate together, get smarter with every interaction, and run the entire motion from one place. Starting from the dialer—where they’ve already earned trust—and expanding outward from there.
It’s an optimistic view of where this all goes. A perspective I share. I’m excited to see where they go from here, as this week’s launch propels the sales world into the future, yet again.
Reach out to Nooks’ team to see how they can help your sales team get more intelligent with outbound in 2026, and let them know The Signal sent you.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your attention and trust.
See you next time,
Brendan 🫡