Jacco van der Kooij has been one of the clearest thinkers on B2B revenue for the better part of two decades. He's flying in from Palo Alto to speak at Shift AI Europe in Barcelona next month, and I grabbed him for a conversation ahead of the trip.
Something he said early on has been rattling around in my head since: AI did not cause the problems the SaaS industry is in. It simply exposed them.
What he means is that the last fifteen years built an entire operating model on inbound. Inbound leads, inbound expansion, inbound retention. Everything depended on customers taking the first step. That worked when inbound worked. Email, SEO, and social drove pipeline. Now they don't, not the way they used to, and AI-generated volume is accelerating the decay. Applying AI to that old process just produces old results at bigger scale and lower cost.
His observation about AI companies is pointed. They're making the exact same mistakes as the SaaS companies that came before them, only faster. He thinks the consequences start showing from 2027.
On what's actually working right now, he draws a clean line between two worlds. High-touch sales, humans aided by AI, and high-volume sales, AI aided by humans.
Both coexist. The organisations winning are the ones that know which world they're in and are doubling down on the human capability inside it. The question isn't whether AI replaces sales. It's what role the human plays once it doesn't.
This connects to something I keep seeing in our own business. The 28 sponsors we have for Barcelona came almost entirely through relationships I'd built over years. People who pick up the phone, reply to a WhatsApp. The AI GTM tools I've tried haven't moved the needle yet. Jacco's framing explains why. I was applying them to processes that were already breaking down.
His take on human connection surprised me a little, but it shouldn't have. In a world where so much can be automated, what's left is trust and the ability to genuinely understand someone else's problem. Those things don't automate. He thinks human-to-human connection becomes the dominant factor in doing business over the next two years. After that, in his words, all bets are off.
The practical advice he kept returning to:
Stop trying to understand the whole picture at once. It's moving too fast.
Find the specific constraint AI can eliminate in your business, go deep there, and compete hard.
On Barcelona, he made a point I want to pass on directly. Bring someone with you. Your CFO, your CRO, whoever. One person comes back and tries to explain eight hours of content in a fifteen-minute team session. Two or three people come back speaking the same language, having heard the same things, ready to move.
Tickets at europe.shiftai.events. 13-14 October.
The full conversation is on The AI Revolution Show. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube:
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
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