AI Should Make You More Human, Not Less

Here’s a take that might get me in trouble with the tech crowd: the best business development professionals I’ve ever met didn’t win because of their tools. They won because of how they made people feel.

And I think we’re at a really critical moment right now where the industry is at risk of forgetting that.

Because somewhere between the AI hype cycle and the pressure to do more with less, a lot of BD teams have started treating artificial intelligence like it’s the relationship. Like if they can just find the right tool, the right sequence, the right automated personalization token, they can shortcut their way into trust. And I get it, I do. The pressure is real. The pipelines are massive. The inboxes are flooded. And so people reach for whatever promises efficiency and hope the results follow.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: business development has never been about transactions. It’s never been about volume. At its core, it’s always been about one person deciding they trust another person enough to do something together. And no amount of technology changes that. Not now, not ever.

So the question isn’t whether to use AI. That ship has sailed and it’s not coming back. The question is what you’re using it for. And I think most people are using it for the wrong thing.

They’re using it to scale the surface level stuff. The first touch. The follow-up sequence. The “personalized” opener that mentions someone’s podcast episode from four months ago because Clay scraped it. And look, I’m not saying those tools don’t work in some contexts. But if your AI strategy is basically “let me sound more like a human without actually being one,” you’ve already lost the plot.

The philosophy I keep coming back to is pretty simple. AI should be doing the work that takes you away from the relationship, so that you can spend more time actually being in it.

Think about what actually eats a BD professional’s day. It’s research. It’s data entry. It’s finding the right contact, figuring out what they’ve been working on, trying to remember where the last conversation left off, writing the same follow-up email for the fifteenth time that week, logging the call, updating the CRM, and everything else that has nothing to do with actually talking to another human being. That’s where AI should live. That’s its lane. Let it own all of that so that when you finally get someone on the phone or in a room, you are completely, fully there.

Because that’s the thing people miss about great BD. It’s not a volume game. It never was. The best closers I’ve ever seen close at a fraction of the call volume of mediocre ones. They close more because they know more, they listen harder, they ask better questions, and the person on the other side genuinely feels like they’re talking to someone who gives a damn. You can’t fake that. You really can’t. And AI definitely can’t fake it for you.

What AI can do is give you back the mental space to actually show up that way.

If a tool is doing your research before a call, you walk in knowing things. You know the company just went through a leadership transition. You know they announced a new initiative last quarter that probably created a problem your solution can help with. You know the person you’re meeting with wrote something six months ago that actually connects to what you’re bringing to the table. And so when you sit down, instead of spending the first ten minutes of a thirty-minute meeting figuring out who you’re talking to, you can just start where it matters. You can lead with something real. You can say “I read what you wrote about that” and actually mean it because you did read it, you just had help finding it.

That’s AI making you more human. That’s the version of this I believe in.

And on the back end, same thing. If a tool is taking notes during the meeting, you don’t have to split your attention between listening and writing. You can just listen. You can catch the thing they said in passing that reveals what they actually care about. You can follow the thread of a conversation without losing the moment to jot something down. You can be present. And presence, real presence, is one of the rarest things in business development right now. It’s also one of the most powerful.

The relationship doesn’t happen in the email. It doesn’t happen in the LinkedIn message. It happens in the moments where two people are actually paying attention to each other. AI should be protecting those moments, not replacing them.

Now here’s where I’ll go a little deeper on the philosophy because I think there’s something important underneath all of this.

The people who are using AI to send more volume are operating from a scarcity mindset. They believe that if they just reach enough people, some percentage will convert, and that’s the game. And yeah, mathematically, that’s not wrong. But it’s also how you build a reputation as someone nobody wants to hear from. Buyers are sophisticated. Buyers are tired. They can smell an automated sequence at a hundred yards and they are not impressed that you name-dropped their recent blog post in the first line. That’s not personalization. That’s the appearance of personalization. And those are very different things.

The people who are using AI to go deeper, to know more, to prepare better, to follow up faster, to remember the things that matter, those people are operating from an abundance mindset. They believe that if they can just be more genuinely helpful to fewer, better-fit people, the game takes care of itself. And it does. It really does.

Because here’s the truth about trust: it’s not built in the pitch. It’s built in every single interaction before and after the pitch. It’s built in the “I was thinking about what you said and I wanted to send this over.” It’s built in the follow-up that actually addresses the specific concern someone raised in the meeting, not a canned response. It’s built in the check-in six months after the deal doesn’t close because you actually want to stay connected to this person, not just to their budget. AI can support every single one of those moments. It can remind you. It can help you write it. It can tell you when someone has gone quiet for too long. But the decision to actually do it, and to do it because you genuinely care, that has to come from you.

And so I think the real competitive advantage in business development right now is not the best AI stack. It’s the judgment to know when to use it and when to put it down.

Use it to prepare. Don’t use it to perform.

Use it to listen better. Don’t use it to talk more.

Use it to remember what matters. Don’t use it to fake like you care.

The irony of all of this is that as more and more BD teams automate their outreach and their follow-up and their “personalization” and all that fun stuff, the thing that becomes increasingly rare is a real human being who actually shows up, does the work, knows their stuff, and makes you feel like you’re the only conversation that matters. And scarcity creates value. So the more everyone else automates the relationship away, the more valuable you become by protecting it.

That’s the bet I’d make. Not on the best tools. On being the most human person in the room, and using the tools to make sure you can actually get there.

At the end of the day, people buy from people. They always have. They always will. AI doesn’t change that. It just changes how much time and energy you have to actually be one.

Use that time well.