The Most Dangerous Decision in Business: Hug or Handshake

Most AI Agents Are Toys

Most AI agents are toys. They read your inbox. They summarize reports. They draft a few emails. Nice productivity boost. But saving someone eight minutes reading email is not a revolution. The real shift is AI doing full jobs. In this episode we break down what that actually looks like in the wild. One large healthcare company deployed a single autonomous Cloud Employee to handle Tier 1 through Tier 3 support calls across their product lines. Today it: Handles 2,600+ support calls per day Covers 65 different support skills Operates in 15 languages Logs 124 hours of talk time per day The average human support call used to take 18 minutes. The AI resolves them in about 3 minutes and 35 seconds. When you convert that back to human time, this system replaces more than 600 hours of labor every day. That is the difference most people are missing. One version of AI helps you work slightly faster. The other replaces the work entirely. Most of the market is still building AI assistants. We are focused on AI workers. Learn more about Cloud Employees at Atonom https://atonom.ai [https://atonom.ai] Get my weekly breakdown of AI, GTM, and Cloud Employees: https://atonom.ai/newsletter   Ready to hire your first Cloud Employee? https://atonom.ai/

The Human Buyer Is Going Extinct

Insight Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock recently argued that the “human buyer” could disappear sooner than people expect. Most people interpreted that as AI simply helping humans research software faster. But the bigger implication is something very different. What if the buyer itself isn’t human? For the past two decades SaaS companies built everything around human limitations: Dashboards to interpret data Menus and interfaces to navigate complexity Demos and sales calls to guide decisions Marketing funnels and nurture campaigns to influence buyers The entire SaaS ecosystem evolved around a biological decision maker. But in an agentic world, that changes. Instead of a human researching vendors, an AI agent could evaluate products, run tests, compare results, and choose the best option automatically. That means: No demos No product tours No nurture campaigns No traditional buying journey Just machine-to-machine evaluation. If that shift happens, the companies that survive will design products and infrastructure that autonomous agents can consume directly. Everyone else may spend the next few years improving interfaces that humans never use. Get my weekly breakdown of AI, GTM, and Cloud Employees: https://atonom.ai/newsletter   Ready to hire your first Cloud Employee? https://atonom.ai/

The Most Dangerous Decision in Business: Hug or Handshake

Everyone in business has experienced it. You approach someone at an event, extend an arm… and suddenly you’re in the dreaded half-hug. Arms everywhere. Nobody knows what’s happening. For years Gabe was firmly in the “hug guy” category. Then the pandemic introduced the safest diplomatic greeting humanity has ever created, the fist bump. Now we’re living in a strange transition period. Some people hug. Some people handshake. Some hover awkwardly waiting for the other person to decide. It’s basically a real-time social negotiation. In this episode Gabe shares his current strategy for avoiding the awkward half-hug and asks the real question: Where do you land in the great workplace greeting debate? Handshake Hug Fist bump Or the dangerous “wait and see” approach. Connect with Gabe Larsen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabelarsen [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabelarsen] Get my weekly breakdown of AI, GTM, and Cloud Employees: https://atonom.ai/newsletter   Ready to hire your first Cloud Employee? https://atonom.ai/

The Lie White-Collar Workers Tell Themselves About AI

White-collar workers are telling themselves a lie about AI. The common narrative says AI will replace low-skill jobs first. Factory workers. Retail workers. Service workers. But recent research from Anthropic shows something very different. The jobs with the highest exposure to AI are overwhelmingly white collar, including: Analysts Marketers Recruiters Finance teams Consultants In other words, anyone whose job revolves around: thinking writing summarizing analyzing These are exactly the types of cognitive tasks large language models are already extremely good at. And before someone says the usual line… “AI will just augment us.” Sure. For the top operators. But historically, companies don’t adopt technology so everyone can keep their job. They adopt it so fewer people can produce dramatically more output. Which raises a bigger question: What happens when one strong operator with AI can do the work that used to require an entire team? Get my weekly breakdown of AI, GTM, and Cloud Employees: https://atonom.ai/newsletter   Ready to hire your first Cloud Employee? https://atonom.ai/

The SaaSpocalypse Is Real. We Just Joined It.

For twenty years SaaS had a powerful moat: migration pain. Switching systems meant risk, downtime, broken integrations, lost data, and internal political battles. Most companies stayed not because the tools were perfect, but because leaving felt impossible. That dynamic is starting to change. We recently removed Salesforce and built our own CRM in Lovable. It wasn’t ideological and it may not be permanent, but it highlighted something important. Most companies already have the people needed to build and maintain systems: Salesforce admins RevOps teams Integration consultants You’re already paying someone to manage and maintain the system. The only question is what they’re building. Are they maintaining someone else’s platform… or building leverage inside your own system? At Atonom, we’re building Cloud Employees, AI workers that run real workflows across tools and systems. As AI begins to execute more of the work inside organizations, the economics of software start to shift. Per-seat pricing makes less sense. Interfaces matter less. Control of systems and data matters more. This isn’t the death of SaaS. But it may be the end of passive SaaS, where companies outsource too much of their strategic thinking to vendors. If AI is going to run more of the workflows in your business, you may not want to rent the operating system those workflows depend on. Learn more about Cloud Employees at Atonom: https://atonom.ai [https://atonom.ai] Get my weekly breakdown of AI, GTM, and Cloud Employees: https://atonom.ai/newsletter   Ready to hire your first Cloud Employee? https://atonom.ai/