Hey {First_Name}, noticed you breathe oxygen and work in B2B SaaS. Let’s connect!”
Be assured that after reading this, First_Name does not want to connect.
No wonder cold-email reply rates have fallen from roughly 5% to 3.43%. And trust in AI companies has also taken a hit. Cue the end of the hype cycle.
We were promised GTM utopia with 20 autonomous AI agents generating ICPs, writing proposals and closing six-figure deals while we sipped margaritas.
What did we get? AI slop at industrial scale, and enterprise inboxes reaching for restraining orders.
I’ve sat in rooms where fortune telling analysts predicted AI would kill outsourcing. But, now Grand View Research projects global BPO business to exceed $695 by 2033, up from $358.6B.
Because sometimes automating everything just creates more work and the need for more humans to clean up the mess and do it right.
Humans Connect with Real Humans, Always.
Growth is also about connecting with more humans and making them see your value and vision:
𝟭. Accountability > Licenses
14 AI subscriptions don’t equal a GTM engine. Companies increasingly want partners who own outcomes - not fabricated 80% open rates and 55 LinkedIn posts.
𝟮. Conversations > Spam
When synthetic outreach costs $0.0001, it’s worth about that. Five deeply researched real conversations can beat 50,000 automated messages.
𝟯. Taste > Generation
LLMs are brilliant at finding the statistical middle. Great positioning lives outside it. You can’t prompt your way into taste.
So where does AI do well?
AI is revolutionary when used correctly. Front stage generation needs to be human to connect with other humans. What AI can own is backstage intelligence:
• Connecting fragmented buyer and CRM signals.
• Finding patterns across segments, industries, and accounts.
• Turning unstructured data into effective deal intelligence.
• Equipping humans with sharper thinking, better stories and better decisions.
Infinite AI slop has made trust, taste, and context scarce and therefore valuable.
At stotio, we’re putting Engineering and Human Back into Growth Engineering. We blend strategy, storytelling, behavioural science, and AI to make growth smarter and more human.
We are helping clients across sectors (Deep Tech, IT/ITES, HRTech, Education, Agri Tech, FinTech, AI products, FMCG) run strategy at the speed of the market, build narratives that move decision-makers and build pragmatic GTM engines across the right channels, budgets and growth objectives.
If your GTM strategy depends on hoping a VP doesn’t notice that an algorithm complimented their 2019 event keynote… We should talk.