When your client becomes an agent
What happens when the person on the other side of the deal is an AI.
Procurement teams are starting to put AI agents in front of the vendor conversation. The RFP arrives faster, the questions are more consistent, the follow-ups come at 2am. On the sell side, the person reading your proposal may not be a person at all.
This changes several things at once. Your pricing page is now read by a system optimising for comparability, not relationship. Your sales deck is parsed before it is seen. The soft parts of the deal — trust, chemistry, judgement — do not survive the first filter if the hard parts do not line up.
That does not mean the human disappears. It means the human sees you only after an agent has decided you are worth the meeting. The qualification happens upstream of anything your sales team can influence.
The practical response is dull but necessary: your public material has to be machine-legible as well as human-persuasive. Clear specs, clean pricing logic, structured answers to the questions buyers actually ask. Marketing copy that reads well to a CMO and parses cleanly to an agent.
The firms that treat this as a content problem will lose. The firms that treat it as a go-to-market redesign will not.
The decision: assume the first reader of your next proposal is a machine, and ask whether your material survives that reading.