The Folly of Scale

In SaaS, we’ve built our engine like Icarus built his wings, layer after layer. More headcount, more dashboards, more layers of process designed to absorb the inefficiencies we quietly agree to live with.

It works, until it doesn’t…The system rewards growth at all costs, and somewhere along the way we start mistaking movement for progress.

Anthropic’s recent prediction that AI could automate half of today’s jobs is less a tech headline and more a mirror. Because it won’t just replace routine tasks, it’ll reveal how much of what we built was a workaround for systems we never had the discipline to fix.

Ops teams have become experts in operational theater:

• Reporting on clean metrics layered over broken processes

• Chasing productivity through volume instead of conversion and fixing root cause issues

• Solving for noise instead of signals

The future isn’t in doing more faster, it’s in doing less, better.

A few ways to get there:

• Ops needs to pivot from scorekeeper to architect. The future isn’t cleaner dashboards, it’s building workflows that survive AI-led decisioning cycles and human-free processes.

• Kill redundant processes before AI inherits them. Automating bad ops just makes bad decisions faster.

• Anchor your KPIs to outcomes, not activity. Productivity isn’t SDR calls per day - its ACV per AE hour.

• Clean your operational debt. Stale opps, duplicate accounts, bloated coverage models - cut what you’ve been tolerating

The danger isn’t that we’ll fly too close to the sun. It’s that we’ve been orbiting a broken system, mistaking inertia for altitude.