Automation doesn't replace humans. It doesn’t take people out of the picture. It takes the friction out of their day. All the little things that drain a team: reminders, manual checks, repeating the same instructions, chasing lost messages, fixing duplicated work… that’s

Something I've learned from building dozens of automations.. I've seen the same pattern everywhere. Teams buried in tiny tasks. Workflows held together by inboxes. Updates that happen late because someone forgot. Tools that don’t talk to each other. Processes that exist only in

I’ve worked with a lot of sales teams over the years. At Intercom and now while building automations for companies myself. One thing I kept noticing across these teams is that everyone feels like they’re doing deep research before a call, but most of it is just the same routine

I used to help companies implement AI and automation with Intercom. Mostly for support and sales ops. It was fun. Being able to work with so many different companies, I learned a lot. And I noticed a big pattern during my time there. Teams would say, “We can’t automate this,

I worked as an engineering intern in my 3rd year studying CS. I was tasked with building a chatbot to help users with an ancient credit lending software. This was pre ChatGPT as well, I will add. So I had to build the LLM myself. Cool experience for a third year. But it taught

One thing I didn’t appreciate early on: where the automation starts matters more than how clever it is. At Intercom I watched teams trigger workflows off vague signals: “when someone messages us with interest…” “when the pipeline gets updated…” Too vague. Too breakable.

I have a degree in Computer Science. And it was acquired in the pre-ChatGPT age. The longer I'm in the automation game, the more thankful I am for this. I didn’t have the safety net of asking a model to untangle a messy response for me. I had to learn how data was shaped,

Whenever I'm unsure whether something should be automated, I ask this question: “If I had to explain this step-by-step to an intern, could I?” If yes, automate it. Analogy: Pre sales call preparation: open this read that summarize this send here The process isn't creative.

I remember sitting in the Intercom Dublin office, watching a SaaS client's sales team argue over what made a “good lead” Ten people, ten definitions. Same messy process every time. A form comes in. Someone opens the inbox. Someone checks the website. Someone guesses the use

Last week I was sitting at my desk, americano in hand, reviewing a client’s old inbound log when I watched the same scene I’ve seen a hundred times. A lead came in at 11:02. Rep saw it at 11:03. At 11:04 he stood up to grab a coffee. By 11:09 the lead had stopped caring and

A few weeks ago I was on a call with a RevOps team at my desk, watching them walk me through their qualification process. It took about thirty seconds to see the real problem. One rep said a lead was qualified if they “seemed serious” Another said it depended on “tone”

I remember sitting on a call with a sales team for a cybersecurity firm when I was still early in the automation game. They were walking me through their ideal process, big whiteboard, iced coffees, the fucken works man. And I'll admit: The whiteboard looked great. But the

When I first started building automations, I assumed the biggest gains would come from the complex parts of a business. I was wrong. The real leverage lives in the boring processes that nobody looks at. The reminders nobody sends. The spreadsheets nobody updates. The inboxes

Something I learned working on the support team with a big AI company: A team isn’t judged by its best days. It’s judged by its average days. And the average day is full of: missed follow-ups late responses half-complete tasks manual updates that never get done prep work that

Third month into client work for my agency, I’m on a Google Meet with a small software dev agency - five sales reps and the founder. Their CRM is shared on-screen: 20 demo requests a month, close to 80% of them marked “not a fit” The reps start explaining their process. It’s

One thing I’ve learned working with founders: Most qualification problems aren’t actually qualification problems. They’re agreement problems. Everyone on the team thinks they’re on the same page. Then you dig in and realise: Sales has one definition of a good lead. Marketing

One late afternoon in Thailand, a Google Meet window open on my laptop, I sat waiting. The founder from a marketing agency joins from what looks like his spare room, laptop stacked on books, blinds half-closed, the kind of setup you get when you’ve stopped caring about

A pattern I keep seeing in teams that struggle with leads: They try to compensate for weak systems with more effort. More outreach. More calls. More reps. More hours. All while the core workflow is fragile and manual. Effort can’t fix a workflow that breaks the second someone

I’ve sat with enough sales teams now to notice this: Most reps don’t have a prep problem. They have a time problem disguised as a prep problem. They want to show up prepared. They’re not lazy. They’re not clueless. They’re just buried. A calendar full of calls. Slack pinging

Monday morning. First call of the week. An agency owner joins from his office. Dark circles, coffee mug, browser tabs everywhere. He shares his screen without being asked. “This is going to be fun” I thought to myself. Notion opens to a page titled Collections. Rows of