In March 2025 I started writing a book about what AI was doing to buyers. The working title was “AI-Powered Sales Transformation: Engaging the Modern Buyer.” The preface is a document in my Drive, dated and version-stamped March 28, 2025. I never finished it.
I’m finishing it now, in public, one issue at a time, with what the last eighteen months changed. It has a better name: Seller Beware, Advantage Buyer. This is part one.
Start in 1992. I was new to telecom, selling small voicemail systems to businesses that ran key systems and small PBXs. There was no internet in the sale. At my company there weren’t even computers on our desks. The job was a phone and a box of business cards. You called, or you walked in, introduced yourself, and asked for a few minutes.
Most owners had heard of voicemail. They figured it was for big companies, cost too much, or wasn’t needed. So the sale didn’t start with a price. It started with education.
I had to explain why a call that rang with no answer was a customer you might not get back. Back then that was normal. Nobody picked up, so the caller tried later. If the line was busy, they got a busy signal and tried again. I had to show an owner that one employee could forward a voicemail to another who needed to hear it. That was a big deal at the time.
Every purchase started with a salesperson teaching the buyer what was possible. The seller owned the first step because the seller owned the information. The metrics followed from that: how many calls did you make, how many doors did you walk through. Activity was the job because education was the job.
Now fast forward to 2024. My family was in Fayetteville for an event, staying in a rental near Dickson Street. I was getting ready for the day and scrolled Instagram for maybe two minutes. A cigar lighter came up with a V-cutter built into the same piece. It looked solid, not cheap. Three clicks and Apple Pay later, it was mine. Shipping was already saved. Nobody taught me anything. Nobody sold me anything.
That’s a consumer purchase, and it’s easy to wave off. But the same shift has been running through business buying for years, quietly. A network architect looking at a new platform doesn’t call three vendors first. They read, they ask peers, and now they ask AI to research dozens of sites at once and tell them what they’re missing. By the time a salesperson hears about the project, the buyer can be most of the way to a decision. Sometimes all that’s left is a quote.
The first step moved. It used to be the salesperson. Now it’s the buyer’s own screen. The salesperson used to do the educating. More and more, the salesperson gets educated by a buyer who already did the homework.
The preface said where this was heading: soon it won’t just be humans reading your messaging. The buyer’s research isn’t only done by the buyer anymore. Their AI does it, reads your website first, and decides what to tell them. That’s where this series ends, and it’s why it matters to anyone selling anything right now.
Over the next nine issues: the three-bid ritual that punished whoever educated the buyer first, the KPIs still measuring a job nobody does, when the salesperson enters the cycle now (sometimes never), and the second reader your website already has.
One question to sit with until the next one: in your last three deals, what did the buyer already know before your first meeting?
If the answer is “more than we expected,” that’s the conversation I’m having with sales leaders right now: kerzie.ai/schedule
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