The Empty Cubicle Question: What Are We Actually Building?

For years, the B2B sales technology industry has been built around a simple assumption:

People do the work. Software helps them do it better.

CRM helps salespeople manage opportunities. Sales engagement tools help them reach more prospects. Intelligence platforms help them prepare. Coaching tools help them improve.

The human seller has always been at the center.

Agentic AI challenges that architecture.

Not because salespeople disappear.

But because software is beginning to do some of the work itself.

From tools to workers

An AI copilot helps a salesperson research an account.

An AI agent can research the account itself.

A coaching platform tells a salesperson what to improve.

An agent can increasingly prepare the next action, execute parts of it, observe the result and feed that information back into the workflow.

That is a fundamentally different proposition.

The question is no longer only:

How can AI make every salesperson more productive?

It is also:

Which work still needs to be performed by a salesperson at all?

That distinction matters.

Don't automate the org chart

There is a risk that companies approach Agentic AI exactly as they approached previous generations of technology.

Take the existing organization.

Take the existing processes.

Add AI.

But if AI changes who — or what — can perform the work, simply automating today's process may be the wrong starting point.

The better approach is to deconstruct the work.

• What requires human judgment?

• What requires relationships?

• What can an agent research or analyze?

• What can be executed autonomously?

• Where does a human need to approve?

• What should be bought from a specialist provider?

• What should be built around your own process and data?

And perhaps most importantly:

Which activities no longer need to exist?

This is not simply automation.

It is redesign.

The sales stack starts to look different

This is where the Build vs. Buy question becomes strategically interesting.

For the last decade, a new sales requirement usually resulted in another software evaluation.

Today, there are more choices.

You can buy the capability.

You can build it.

You can buy infrastructure or data and build your own intelligence on top.

Or you can redesign the process so that the capability is no longer needed in its previous form.

That could lead to a very different sales technology stack.

Fewer applications.

More shared infrastructure.

More APIs and data services.

More company-specific agents.

And more intelligence built around the way the company actually sells.

The objective isn't to replace SaaS.

It is to become much more deliberate about what deserves to remain SaaS.

This is why I wrote the second edition

This shift became one of the central themes of the second edition of my book, Navigating B2B Sales: The Agentic Age Unpacked.

The first edition, Navigating B2B Sales: The Digital Age Unpacked, was largely about navigating the digital transformation of B2B sales.

The landscape has moved again.

Agentic AI raises a more fundamental question: not simply how technology supports selling, but how the work of selling should now be divided between humans, agents and software.

And once you ask that question, Build vs. Buy becomes unavoidable.

Not as an IT procurement exercise.

As a revenue architecture decision.

From the book to a practical question

That thinking also led us to create buildorbuy.guru.

The idea is deliberately simple.

Before renewing another sales tool, adding another platform or commissioning another AI initiative, examine the capability itself.

Should you buy it?

Should you build it?

Should you combine the two?

Or should you stop doing it altogether?

Because Agentic AI has made one thing increasingly clear:

The future of B2B sales will not be created by adding AI to every existing seat.

It will be created by redesigning how the work gets done.

And perhaps those empty cubicles are the wrong thing to worry about.

The more interesting question is:

What will replace the work that used to happen inside them?

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Further reading This thinking is explored in more depth in the second edition of Navigating B2B Sales: The Agentic Age Unpacked — including the shift to Agentic AI and a practical framework for deciding what to build, what to buy, and where hybrid approaches make more sense.

The full book is available as a free PDF at buildorbuy.guru.