Ingram says AI lets B2B teams automate mediocrity
Two operators argue in the same week that the automation-first move is the wrong one, from different sides of the market.
Morgan J Ingram says AI is mostly helping B2B sales teams produce more of the same bad outbound, and he is taking a team he coaches back to fundamentals this week because of it.
His evidence is volume of exposure rather than a campaign result. Ingram says he has looked at the outbound messaging of 50 or more tech companies and keeps seeing the same thing, citing lines like "wE aRE tHe LEAding provider!" and "wE HelP SoLVE all YOUr Problems!" as the pattern. He calls a genuinely world class outbound motion "far and few between", and blames part of that on how fast AI is changing what teams do.
His prescription is not a tool. Ingram lists psychology, industry trends, human behavior and buyer persona challenges and priorities as the study list, and says he is spending this week in the office running an SDR team he consults for through exactly those four things. The framing he puts on it is that if a team is only automating slop, nothing separates it from everyone else sending.
The same direction from a vendor
Richard Illingworth made a structurally similar argument earlier, saying everyone in the cold email space is sprinting toward a dead end by going hands-off with AI, self-serve dashboards and SaaS-level onboarding. His answer is to go the other way at Premium Inboxes with one-to-one audits where a real person reads your actual data, founder calls when something is broken, and client success managers who own an account.
everyone in the cold email space is sprinting toward a dead end right now.
Worth separating the two. Ingram is describing what he sees reviewing other companies' messaging and what he is doing with a team he coaches. Illingworth is describing the positioning of a service he sells, so his post is a commercial bet on the same thesis rather than independent confirmation of it.
For people sending, neither post comes with a reply rate attached, so treat this as two experienced operators reading the same market rather than a measured result. The practical read is narrower than the rhetoric. If your sequences could have been written about any vendor in your category, adding more automation on top multiplies the problem rather than fixing it.
I dislike AI for most B2B sales teams because it allows for people to automate mediocrity.
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.