Christopher Dessi

Canada 🇨🇦 I’m heading your way In June, I’ll be at DSA Canada Connect 2026 and I want to talk about something I’m seeing across almost every Direct Selling company right now: the massive AI acceleration gap opening up. On one side: companies moving fast, solving real problems, building capability. On the other: companies stuck in planning mode, waiting for the “right” strategy. The difference isn’t technology. It’s action. In my session, I’m going to run you through something we’ve done with many of the 20+ direct selling companies we work with, something that accelerated their progress significantly. You’ll learn: → Where you are right now (honestly) → Where your immediate opportunities are → How to lead this, regardless of your title or technical background → Real examples of what’s working and what’s not And we’ll tackle both sides of this transformation: the incredible capability AI unlocks AND the very real risk it poses to human connection at the absolute heart of direct selling. It’s my first time in Canada (getting in a week early to explore), and I can’t wait to help you get on the right side of the acceleration gap. Thanks to Peter Maddox for inviting me and Ben Robinson for recommending me. If you’re there, see you in June!

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Claude Code, Claude Code, Claude Code. All over my timeline. From Rev Ops, to GTM Engineers, to top notch Agency Owners. All are building or innovating, moving to another level. But why... 1) Cost - SaaS is expensive, and orchestration for top level customers is more expensive. Build it yourself is a real solution now. 2) Speed - should you wait for 5 API calls or just orchestrate it how you want. 3) Adaptability - workflows change often. Why should we have to rebuild the same thing 500 times when we can programatically do it in minutes. 4) Scale - Scale usually means more expense (Enterprise plans, etc). We orchestrate large clients and get penalized in reverse for not pushing bigger plans. Much easier to build the solution clients need, vs spending money for the sake of spending the clients marketing budget. Look, I'm not sure the path is quite clear yet but I do know this.....SaaS is changing. Agents are going to be orchestrating what you want when you want it. Data is faster and cheaper, and coding can be done while you sleep. Definitely not boring time to be alive.

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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If moving from seat based pricing to a consumption model is on your mind, this will be worth catching. We’re joining RevOps Co-op and Intercom on March 25th to talk through how teams are actually making this shift work in practice. Technology, how it works and the costs involved are evolving quickly. Planning needs to evolve with them. If this is something you or your organisation are exploring, feel free to join us. #RevOps #SalesOps

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Thanks TechRadar Pro for spotlighting Benjamin Barrier's insights on navigating the AI-powered web. His core message is clear and powerful: organizations must move beyond identity-based detection and lean into intent-based cybersecurity. In a world where traffic is made up of human and bot identities, knowing WHY traffic interacts with your platform is paramount. He outlined that: 🤯 DataDome saw nearly one billion requests from OpenAI-identified crawlers per month last quarter 💡 To succeed, teams must: ⏩ Reaudit and reframe how they think about non-browser traffic. ⏩ Replace static rules with dynamic, context-aware defenses. ⏩ Define consistent access policies for AI agents—which roles are welcome, under what conditions. https://lnkd.in/gfWmV-k6

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Sales starts with asking the right questions. If you don't understand your customer, you're just waiting for things to happen. Here's some practical advice on how sellers can make things happen and control their own destiny.

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Most B2B companies don't have a pipeline problem. They have a pipeline visibility problem. The most honest thing I hear from CROs? "Our CRM shows us what happened, not what's about to happen." That's where Pipeline Control Points come in. Inspired by Tidemark's perspective on Control Point Patterns, we've applied the same thinking to pipeline generation at The Pipeline Group. Pipeline Control Points are checkpoints across your GTM funnel that help you: - Master buyer access with propensity-driven targeting - Eliminate attribution black holes (40-50% of leads in most systems) - Track pipeline velocity and stage pressure points - Identify systemic bottlenecks before they hit forecasts Get the full framework that's helping companies build predictable revenue: Pipeline Control Points: Why They're Critical for GTM Growth (https://lnkd.in/e_WE5bMe) What's your biggest pipeline blind spot right now? #Tidemark

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Thoughts from conversation on #agentic with Ray and Anthony, discussing it's contribution to our ecosystem: Notably, value can no longer be defined by what others *aren't* capable of doing. With agentic, barriers for new entrants looking to solve persistent problems are going away. The opportunity to create economic benefit and technical efficiencies is no longer constrained by infra / opex. We're seeing so many startups proving this out every day, highly specialized and focused products solving real challenges, unshackled thanks to new containerized standards. Feeling more and more like an angentic enabled #programmatic renaissance. Exciting times!!

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Bigger vendor isn’t always better for Sales Teams. 📉 The Highspot + Seismic merger is official. While the headlines talk about "Market Leadership," many sales leaders are asking a different question: "How long will it take for my support ticket to get answered during this multi-year integration?" "Where is my roadmap feature that was promised?" History shows that massive tech mergers often lead to: ❌ Slower innovation cycles. ❌ Integration headaches for the customer. ❌ A "feature bloat" that makes simple tasks complex. AND esepcially in 2026, sales teams can't afford that slow response and ambiguity affecting their core function ⇉ revenue generation. In the sales enablement space, we are hitting an inflection point. The market is splitting into two: ↳ The Giants: Massive, end-to-end "Revenue Clouds" that are powerful but complex. ↳ The Specialized: Nimble, AI-native platforms like SalesTable AI that focus on simple and AI first; making your reps Ready to Sell on Day 1. Congrats to the teams at Highspot and Seismic, but for those of you looking for speed and agility in 2026... the game just changed and we are here to collaborate. Gerhard Gschwandtner - this is the exact topic we discussed during our interview :) Now, it's happening. https://lnkd.in/gtF3R-Zc #SalesTech #StartupLife #SalesReadiness #SalesEnablement #Consolidation #SalesTable

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The agent market is polarizing into two extremes. 🧩 1) Builders (e.g. n8n, clay and many others): flexible tooling where customers assemble bespoke “agentic” workflows. 📦 2) Packaged vertical agents: pre-built solutions that promise outcomes out of the box (security triage, sales research, IT helpdesk, finance ops). Under the hood, both share the same unit of abstraction: a workflow. The key difference is who authors it: 🧑‍💻 Builders: authored by the customer, optimized for their environment. 🧠 Packaged agents: authored by the vendor/SMEs, optimized for many environments. Each extreme breaks in predictable ways. 🧩 Builders break like code: they’re great until reality changes—new data, new edge cases, new tools, new questions. Then the workflow either fails or degrades into “automation cosplay.” Many flows never needed AI; they needed glue. 📦 Packaged agents break on variance: real organizations don’t follow the vendor’s ontology. Data is fragmented, naming is inconsistent, policies are full of exceptions, and “best practice” is aspirational. The agent is often smart but not situationally correct. So the real gap isn’t “more agents.” It’s a better unit of adoption: something that carries domain expertise and survives contact with a messy environment. The middle ground is specialized agent templates: opinionated starting points (domain language + best-practice playbooks) with a deliberate adaptation surface—connectors, schema/ontology mapping, guardrails, and human checkpoints—plus an eval harness so teams can tune behavior, version changes, and rollback safely inside an Agent Builder/IDE. 🏁 In a fragmented space, the winners won’t just sell “agents.” They’ll ship templates that become production systems—because they come with a customizer that keeps them from becoming a bespoke services project.

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I joined Andrew Walker on Yet Another Value Podcast to talk about something that’s quietly reshaping fundamental investing: the combination of expert calls + AI. Having spent time building the expert calls business at Tegus and now working with investors using AI at AlphaSense, I’ve had a front-row seat to how the research process is changing. We discussed a few shifts that feel especially important: * Expert calls have moved from a resource for larger funds to a mainstream input across the buy-side — and AI is accelerating that accessibility even further * Capturing those insights on platforms like AlphaSense has created a new longitudinal dataset on companies and industries that simply didn’t exist at scale 5 years ago * With AI, investors can now compare expert insight vs sell-side vs management guidance vs internal views in minutes — which changes where real analytical effort goes * “Getting up to speed” now takes hours, not days — research time, resources, and effort are intensifying on getting to a differentiated POV on the value drivers that truly matter The interesting implication: AI isn’t replacing the fundamental investor — it’s raising the bar for what good fundamental work looks like. Thanks Andrew for the thoughtful questions and conversation. #FundamentalInvesting #InvestmentResearch #AIinFinance #EquityResearch #InvestmentProcess

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