3/11 Event in NYC - vibescaling @ Clay HQ
Last Wednesday, vibescaling and Clay co-hosted our latest quarterly event with Alex Lindahl at Clay HQ in Flatiron, NYC.
The theme was "Future of Agents in GTM" - four early-stage founders demoing live, no panels, just product. 5-10 minutes each - showing innovative, real use cases in GTM.
Big thank you to Crosby, Dust, The General Intelligence Company of New York, and Karumi for showing us what the next wave actually looks like in practice.
Here are my 4 takeaways from the event:
Table of Contents
#1 - The Emergence Of Claude Cowork Has Changed The Game, Again
MCP dropped at the start of 2025, and I think most GTM folks didn't really know what to do with it or what to make of it.
The launch of Claude Cowork on January 12, 2026 landed differently.
In Q1 of 2026, it's clear that the best AE/SDR/sales leaders are now using tool orchestration platforms like Dust/Claude Cowork/etc to automate some of the most mundane parts of their day.
You no longer need a RevOps person to help give you access and create this - you can easily do it yourself now.
What we saw with Dust - and what I've been seeing across clients this quarter - is that people finally get what orchestration means in practice. Not in an abstract "agents will replace your stack" way. In a "wait, I just connected my tools and told it what to do in plain English" way.
IMO, the interface finally caught up to the concept. MCP was a protocol that helped a lot of the most popular tools be motivated to add in a connector into Anthropic's consumer facing tool.
We're going deeper on this in a dedicated post with the Anthropic team soon (shout out to Chloe for being an early supporter of what we're building here at vibescaling), it’s been a common request.
But the signal from this crowd (and my own learnings) were clear - this last quarter, something shifted & people are craving content on how to use tools like Claude (Cowork/Code/Chat) for their most common tasks as a seller.
More on this in the coming months!
#2 - Our Preference Is Strongly Going Voice-First
Ask anyone in that room what tools they're running daily and you hear two names over and over: Granola and Wispr Flow.
And if you go on any podcast with a VC or founder right now, same answer.
Not typing is becoming a luxury - and people are actively paying for it.
The reasons are pretty straightforward:
Voice infra has gotten dramatically better (shoutout to the embedded infrastructure like LiveKit, one of our portfolio companies, making this possible)
We speak 2-3x faster than we type
Most importantly, AI has conditioned us to expect that the most mundane parts of our workflow should just disappear
This is why Siri never cracked it. Apple built voice on top of everything else. The tools winning today are built voice-first, from the ground up - single-purpose apps laser focused on one thing. That focus is why people are actually adopting them.
Karumi's demo was a good visual of this. Their agent navigates the site, answers questions, and asks qualifying ones back - no rep needed. Pablo didn't demo Karumi; he let Karumi demo itself to the room.
The broader point is bigger than any one tool: buyers don't want to talk to a rep, but they also don't want a static demo or a chatbot they have to type into. They want to speak, and have what's on their screen respond dynamically.
Tools that crack voice-first interaction are going to have a real edge.
#3 - The Best Agent Use Cases Are Amplifying Humans, Not Replacing
What is still confirmed: agents aren't replacing high-value humans anytime soon - especially in enterprise sales.
The stakes are too high & the deals are too complex (and the leads are too few lol). This is why the "AI SDR will run your entire outbound" narrative still feels off to me (and most of my network), and probably will for a while in the enterprise B2B world.
What the demos actually showed was useful to confirm where we stand: agents getting humans from 0 to 90% faster, then handing off to the human for the last mile; empowering sellers to let it adjust to how they specifically like to work.
Redlines turned around in hours instead of days. Call prep done before you open your laptop. A co-founder agent that caught a feature request from a transcript and went off to spec and build it. None of this removes the human. All of it makes the human more dangerous + 5-10x your leverage coefficient.
The framing that's going to land best right now IMO: agent handles the volume, human handles the judgment.
The reason to be testing these tools now isn't just productivity - it's literacy.
The teams that are experimenting today are building a base layer of knowledge. So when the next tool/protocol/interface drops, they're not starting from zero, they’re building on a higher base.
#4 - The "Agent + Services" Business Model Is Underrated & Growing
One thing Crosby raised that's got me thinking: there's an emerging category of companies where the product is the agent, but the business model looks like a service firm.
Not software that helps you do the work. Software that just does it.
For startups especially - where speed matters more than almost anything and budget is real - this is a genuinely different value prop. You're not buying a seat. You're buying an outcome, delivered faster and cheaper than any traditional firm could pull off.
The interesting long-term question is where this goes for professional services broadly. Law firms, consulting firms, agencies - a lot of that work is about to get repriced. The agent makes the unit economics work in a way that human-staffed firms simply can't match at scale.
We don't fully know what that looks like yet. We're planning a dedicated post on how the services economy - law, consulting, and beyond - is being restructured by this shift. But the Crosby demo was a good early signal of where things are heading.
The #1 piece of feedback I got from this event is that people want these sort of in-person quick demo formats where they can learn how others are using AI (not with words, but with literally sharing their screen).
Stay tuned for future events, we’re in process of planning a mega one in SF and NYC for this summer + we’re stoked.
If you want on the list for the next one in NYC or SF - DM me.
And if you're a BDR, AE, or sales leader curious about what's out there in AI-native GTM right now - DM me on that too 🙂.
Thanks for tuning in!
If you enjoy it, please give us a rating, review, or follow on Spotify/YouTube/Apple Podcasts - it really helps us grow this.
For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, partner @ Vibescaling - a GTM advisory, recruiting, media, and investing firm, working with seed through series C AI-natives to help them grow.
Where to find Vibescaling:
We work with many of the hottest AI-native startups in various capacities, and for those who are interested, shoot me an email at [email protected] or a DM on LI.
🫡 cheers,
Chris