Skeuomorphic Design Thinking Limits the Potential of AI GTM Tools
Skeuomorphic Design Thinking Limits the Potential of AI GTM Tools
The Signal
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Sup y’all!
Thanks for continuing to read my thoughts around this little corner of the internet we’ve found ourselves in — B2B go-to-market (with a particular curiosity for automation, AI and discovering+building the future playbook for GTM teams.
This newsletter is manually written, word-by-word, sans AI. Just like the hand-grinded beans and slow-poured v60 drip coffee I made this morning… some things are simply better when crafted with care and time.
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Today’s topic is a more theoretical, or “heady”, one. I kept thinking about it, so I decided to organize all my swirling thoughts into a post.
Let’s get into it.
Skeuomorphic Design Thinking Limits the Potential of AI GTM Tools
1. What is skeuomorphic design?
Chris Dixon of a16z first introduced me to "Skeuomorphism design thinking" in the context of Crypto/Web3 (yes, I’m one of 38 people who still believes in magic internet money).
Here’s how he describes it, in his piece called, Doing old things better vs doing brand new things:
New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before.
Early in the development of new technologies, the first category tends to get more attention, but it’s the second that ends up having more impact on the world.
So far, the use cases of GenAI for B2B go-to-market seem to squarely fall into the first category (there are a few exceptions).
And, at the core, this is the concept I’ve been exploring over the last few weeks.
Skeuomorphism can hold back innovation by limiting design to old paradigms. In the context of crypto, for example, you may not fully realize the potential of decentralized technologies (like new governance models or tokenized economies), because the focus is instead on replicating outdated systems. For example, trying to mirror centralized banking in DeFi could restrict the development of more efficient or radically different financial models that blockchain allows.
Using GenAI to “do old things better/more” is not where the massive innovations will happen for gtm tech, imho.
The value will be created in the native, cutting-edge stuff. On the frontier.
2. Creativity will become the only limiting factor of outbound
I watched two videos recently that absolutely blew my mind. They were powered by AI. But they weren’t interesting because of that. They were interesting because they helped me accomplish a “Job to be Done” in an entirely new way, that wasn’t possible before AI. Both tools were completely new ways of thinking about a previous job I was doing. Instead of making me do the job better or faster, they made me stop doing that job and do something completely different that accomplished the same outcome, but in 10x less time (and for ~free).
One was a tool for copywriting (to help me edit this blog!) called Type.ai. The other was a tool called Cursor, that I’m using to help me code some simple little experiments.
As I was watching both of the video tutorials, I had a visceral reaction — I was not limited, in what would be possible for me to build or create, technically. Instead, I would only be limited by my personal creativity.
Coding no longer becomes the bottleneck (a technical challenge). What to write (the prompt) in plain English becomes the constraint. In other words, creativity will become the only limiting factor in a world where cheap and easy-to-use AI is everywhere.
This is both a terrifying and liberating feeling.
3. What is the CRM’s future?
Klarna continues to push the envelope in terms of how AI can be used to reduce costs in a business. Earlier this year, they replaced ~700 jobs with AI. And this week, they made this announcement:
I am not saying that I think this will become the norm with every company. But, it is another data point that shows we are so early with AI, and are probably limiting how we’re thinking about redesigning a world of products and UIs where AI is natively built into software from the ground up.
Is the future of CRM and GTM tech headless or invisible? Built in-house with the use of AI, like Klarna? Agentic? Chat-interface? Something else? I don’t know. But, we’re early.
A16z put out a piece called “Death of a Salesforce”: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech, and in it, they make the case that the opportunity for GenAI is to replace the current systems that are disparate data silos, into new workflows and UIs that cannot exist today, due to technical limitations.
With LLMs, the core of the next sales platform could be entirely unstructured and multimodal, including text, image, voice, and video. A company’s sales platform could include data about existing and prospective customers from countless sources: recordings and transcripts from any conversation with someone at the company, emails and Slack messages, sales enablement materials, product usage, customer support activity, public news, financial reports…the list is endless. Furthermore, the LLM powering the platform would be constantly ingesting data to create the most up-to-date context.
They go on to talk about how AI will redefine workflows, saying:
With this data infrastructure, common sales activities may be redefined, or even disappear completely. Simultaneously, we’ll likely see seller workflows emerge that simply aren’t possible today.
^ The former is “better, faster” (eg: Skeuomorphic), while the latter is what I’m interested in watching to see unfold in the coming months and years.
I’ll close with something the GOAT, Tomasz Tonguz, said in his post last week:
The new software GTM playbook has yet to be written. But the companies who figure it out will become the next wave of massive businesses.
Featured product of the week: BuyerExperience.io → Turn lost deals into repeatable revenue without scaling headcount.
I love when GTM Leaders become founders, like Brian Hamor. He's also a bootstrapper, so I want to share some love.
Read this mini case study, and book a demo with Brian today.
PS: Brian is not paying me, nor am I an investor or advisor. BuyerExperience.io is just a cool product and I want to support Brian, so I’m sharing it today. Quote I’ve been chewing on this week:
The only test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.
-Naval
That’s all for this week! Thank you for reading. Your attention is greatly appreciated.
See you next time,
Brendan
🫡