Everyone's using the same AI, and your prospects can tell

I got nine cold emails last Tuesday, and I read all of them — which I almost never do — because I wanted to test a hunch. By the third message I could finish the sentences before I got to them. The same warm opener nodding at something I'd posted. The same "saw you're growing the team." The same gentle question to close. Nine different companies, nine different products. One voice.

None of them were bad emails. That's the strange part. Two years ago any one of them would have been a good email. Personalized, relevant, well-structured, not pushy — the kind of thing sales trainers held up as the standard. The problem isn't that the writing got worse. It's that it got identical.

The tool that helped everyone helped everyone

When a tool gives everyone the same advantage, it stops being an advantage. AI handed every rep the ability to research a prospect in seconds and write a clean, tailored opener. That was genuinely useful. It still is. But the moment it became available to your competitor too, the floor rose and the ceiling came with it. We all climbed to the same height and called it differentiation.

I watched this happen with a founder I work with. His team's reply rates jumped when they adopted an AI sequencing tool. Six months later the rates were back to where they started, except now they were sending three times the volume to get there. They hadn't gotten better. The whole market had gotten the same thing they had, and the novelty had worn off on the receiving end.

Personalization stopped meaning what it used to

Here's the uncomfortable mechanism. A buyer can't see your effort. They can only see the output. When a "personalized" line referencing someone's recent funding round arrives in forty inboxes that week, all looking roughly the same, the signal flips. It used to say this person did their homework. Now it says this person ran me through the same tool everyone else did.

The reference to my blog post in those nine emails didn't make me feel seen. It made me feel scraped. And that's the part the dashboards never catch, because open rates and reply rates don't measure how a message makes someone feel about you — only whether it earned a click before the pattern became obvious.

What didn't get commoditized

So what still cuts through? Almost always, it's the thing AI can't fake because it requires you to have actually been there.

A specific observation that only makes sense if you understand the prospect's business, not their press release. A genuinely odd, human aside. A point of view that risks being wrong. One rep who replies to me well doesn't tell me she's read my work — she disagrees with something in it, briefly, and tells me why. I always write back. Not because the disagreement is brilliant, but because it's evidence of a person on the other end making a choice.

That's the asset that didn't get commoditized: judgment. The decision about who's actually worth reaching out to, and what's actually worth saying to them. AI can generate the message. It can't decide that this particular person, for this particular reason, deserves a real one.

The reps who'll struggle over the next few years aren't the ones who refused to use AI. They're the ones who used it to send more of the same. The reps who'll win are using it to clear the busywork — the research, the formatting, the rough first pass — so they have more time for the one thing that was always the actual job: thinking hard about another human and saying something only they would say.

I didn't reply to any of the nine. Not because they did anything wrong, but because there was no one in particular on the other end. Just a very good tool, used the same way nine times. If your outreach could have been sent by anyone, don't be surprised when it gets treated like it was.