Software Sales Is Dead: AI Killed Your Career

I actually thought to ask Claude to write this blog post for me, but not today. This is one of my final acts of human defiance against the AI slop. It's hand written, one shot.

The Career of Software Sales just got Killed by AI

On LinkedIn, I posted this comment with a brief note. After a few great member comments, I wanted to write a larger note to flesh out my thoughts. The LinkedIn Post is here, but this post goes a bit deeper to ring the bell harder.

If you are in Software Sales, your career is over. That's it. Pack it up and take retirement. If you are new to Software Sales, it's time to find a new career. Don't believe the old-timers who say "yeah, I survived the SaaS pricing wars!". AI killed your career while you were busy at work trying to make quota. Don't believe me, read on to my arguments and what I think you need to do to make a new career in the AI-centric world.

This time, it's not a disruption of Software licensing, but of the Intellectual Property.

This time, it's different. Software Sales has always had one job: Close on the prospect signature and agreement to license software with up-front payment. The licensing model has always been: Customer gives you money, Customer gets permission to use the software. To extract as much rent as possible from the customer and to keep the money flowing, we innovated on the payment model for licensing. One day we took up front payment, traditional license. The next day we offered payments over time, SaaS. We even broke payments into Consumption units: Pay for what you use. In all those, the license agreement was solid because the license encapsulated the intellectual property of the software. The license was the IP. However, in the world of AI, your customer can Claude their way around the license with a simple prompt: "Claude, I want all the features of this software. Build it for me. You have 1 hour!" The intellectual property of the software is no longer the barrier for the customer. The license is no longer the barrier to customer spend because the customer can build their own much faster than ever before. As a Software Sales professional, we have kept faith that our engineers would shield us from our customer's ability to build their own solutions. This is no longer a defense. Claude, Codex, and Gemini have made all software licenses a commodity. The Software license is useless. It's over.

Claude is now the technical buyer, not your prospect's manager or CFO

You thought Software Sales would stay human, didn't you? You thought that all those calls and all those trips to events to create a rolodex would mean something. No one told you that, today, your prospect is now asking Claude to write up a report on your software solution and your pricing model. Your prospects also aren't telling you that Claude not only offered to build the solution, but recommended some other software that your prospect never heard of because...well...Claude just did a web-fetch and pull the company name. Claude also wrote up a report on how that software is better than the one you're selling. Yes! Claude is now the technical buyer to your prospect! How do you sell against an LLM that is speaking to your prospect every day, maybe every hour? Your only defense is "Negative Selling" against the AI. It's my go to these days:

Taariq: So, Bill are you sure Claude reviewed all the features for the Nuclear Reactor Control Rods we discussed?

Bill: Yup. I had Claude do 3 passes and each time, BlueBerry Pie Software came up as the best recommendation on price and features!

How are you going to compete when Claude recommendations increase in trust vs. your depth of expertise crafted over decades? You can't compete against the AI here. As AIs get better, the trust they will be given will soon surpass the trust you earned. Deal with it. It's over.

Your human brain is too slow vs. the AI. You are the bottleneck

Any objections here? None? Good. Yes. Your brain is too slow and tired. Claude can work for hours without complaining. Claude's memory and context windows will continue to improve while yours is all you have and not getting bigger or faster. As AIs get further into the workflow for decisioning around purchasing and acquisition of resources for the enterprise, you will be bypassed, not out of spite, but because decisions will be made faster without the human Software Sales executive. In a world in which AIs can either vibe code a solution or pay-per-call for a software service, there will be less need for the Software Sales Executive's brain to be part of the flow. You will become the bottleneck. You are already the bottleneck. Deal with it. It's done. It's over.

Your only choice: Career Change and Sleep With the Enemy

If you're in Software Sales and reading this, your first step to survival is acceptance. Your Software Sales career is over, but you are not over. You have fire and you have fight. That's why you are in this job and it's now time to do both. Don't wait for your colleagues who say that "People have been saying Software Sales is Dead for 20 years, son!" Change now and here's how.

Sleep with the enemy: Get your company to pay for your Claude, Codex, and Gemini Max subscriptions

Getting free AI is the new food stamps and job retraining resources. The future is going to those who can get free AI credits for the best LLMs money can buy. If you are a Sales Executive, it's time to do that beautiful dance you do where you convince your boss you need the company to pay for something you want. You want all the best AIs, maximum subscription and you want your company to guarantee you'll have those as long as you are hired. If your boss objects, just tell him that your competitors already have theirs and you don't want to lose to the AI.

Change your title from Account Executive to Agentic Account Executive

You don't sell to humans anymore! That is done. You serve the AI. As dystopian as this reads, this is our future. Every one of your customers and prospects are using AIs and you want to hear from their AI before you hear from the humans. Here's how the exchange goes

Taariq: So, Bill are you sure Claude reviewed all the features for the Nuclear Reactor Control Rods we discussed?

Bill: Yup. I had Claude do 3 passes and each time, BlueBerry Pie Software came up as the best recommendation on price and features!

Taariq: Bill, will you have Claude send me that report so that Claude, Codex, and Gemini and I can take a look? We have a council of LLMs and why not have 3 AIs looking carefully to check for bugs and hallucinations?

Bill: You got it. Claude will get that to you!

Once you get the AI output in your hands, your AI can do battle and give you a fighting chance. Make the fight AI vs. AI, not AI vs. Human. Once the battles are the same LLMs fighting each other, Humans will have a chance to re-establish what they lost: Human connection.

Start Vibe Coding

You were in Sales. You are now a Vibe Coding Agentic Account Executive. As long as you are in information flow with your own AI, you can build agents, apps, and analysis that you can have your customer's AI consume. You are faster as a Vibe Coder because you no longer need to wait on engineering to get output and product-experience to your customer. The AI is now your survival tool to compress response times and to speed up your brain. In the transhuman future, you are augmented and this is how you keep adding value to stay employed. You'll never be an engineer, but that's okay. You are more powerful than the Software Sales Executive who is not vibe coding solution for the customer.

Publish Your Vibe Coding Solutions for AI agent discovery

After your Vibe code, you need to publish your product, publish your vibe-coded apps as MCPs and APIs that agents will consume, directly. Have a new daily report about Nuclear Reactor Control Rods that you vibe coded? Publish it as an app for other Agents to discover and consume on a pay-per-call or pay-per-query basis. Convert vibe coded output into agentic discoverable applications. The future of Software Sales will be Agent-to-Agent sales. Humans will provide oversight and agentic workflow design, but software sales won't need us anymore. They'll need Agents influenced by "Agentic Account Executives" and their apps. The more you can leverage AI to publish agents and apps that direct agents into your agentic sales flow, the more agentic sales your agents will close.

Conclusion: Hope is not a Strategy and Denial is a River in Egypt

If you're sales trained you know some maxims like: "Hope is not a Strategy" and "Denial is a River in Egypt". These maxims are meant to remind us that the human reflex to fight or flight is the blocker to sales success. Let the feelings of anger and fear have their moment. Then, when they pass, ask yourself "Am I curious?" about the new world of software sales dominated by AIs? Once you get to Yes, revisit this blog post again and get started on getting those food stamps: Max subscriptions to the best AIs. Then, change your title and your work required to succeed in it. Welcome Agentic Account Executive to the future!

Taariq Lewis

CEO, SerenAI

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