The question I hear most often from SEs right now isn't about a product or a deal. It's some version of: "Is AI going to replace us?" It's a fair thing to wonder. And I don't think the honest answer is as simple as "no, never" or "yes, eventually."
The more useful framing: AI isn't replacing the SE role. It's splitting it in two — and which side of that split you end up on has everything to do with how you respond to the shift that's already happening.
What's actually changing
Enterprise software buying has shifted. Buyers spend more time researching independently before they ever talk to a vendor. AI-powered product tours let prospects explore a product without an SE present. The bar for what a customer expects when they finally do engage with a human has risen significantly.
At the same time, AI tools are doing things that used to require SE time. Pre-call research that took 45 minutes can happen in 3. First drafts of POV success criteria, follow-up emails, and competitive positioning can be generated in seconds. The overhead is compressing.
What this means in practice is that the work that justified an SE's calendar in 2020 is increasingly automated. That's not a threat — it's an opportunity to redirect that time toward the work that actually wins deals. But it requires a deliberate shift, and most SE orgs haven't made it yet.
A simple way to think about it
We've found it useful to think about SE work in three tiers:
Tier 1: Scalable, repetitive, information-based work. Account research. Standard discovery question prep. POV status tracking. Post-call follow-up emails. Competitive battlecard lookup. This is the work AI is best at right now — and it's also the work that was quietly draining SE capacity.
Tier 2: Technical judgment and knowledge synthesis. Architecting a solution for a complex environment. Evaluating which capabilities apply to a specific use case. Answering a deep technical question you've never seen before. AI is getting better here, but good SEs still have a meaningful edge — and likely will for a while.
Tier 3: Human-dependent relationship work. Building trust with a skeptical enterprise architect over six months. Reading the room in an executive meeting. Understanding that the technical objection is actually a budget objection. Being the person a customer calls when something goes wrong. AI isn't touching this. The SEs who understand that are using Tier 1 automation to buy themselves more time in Tier 3 — and that's where the leverage is.
What we're actually doing about it
Our team has spent the past several months building AI into daily workflows in concrete ways. Not as experiments — as real operational changes. Automated account briefings delivered before the work week starts. Meeting prep that pulls deal data and enriches it with current news before every customer call. POV health tracking that surfaces at-risk evaluations before they quietly fail.
What we've found is that adoption isn't uniform. Some SEs adapt quickly and immediately see the value. Others are more cautious — sometimes for good reasons. The job of SE leadership right now is less about deploying tools and more about helping people understand why the shift matters and making the transition feel navigable rather than threatening.
That's harder than it sounds. People who have been excellent at their jobs for years are being asked to change how they work. The right response isn't to mandate adoption or to let people opt out — it's to bring the team along together, share what's working, and be honest about what isn't.
The skill that actually matters
Gartner estimated that by 2025, 35% of Chief Revenue Officers would establish formal AI operations teams — a signal that AI is being treated as a core business discipline, not a side project. For SE orgs, the equivalent is intentional adoption led by leadership rather than left to chance.
The SEs who thrive in this environment aren't necessarily the most technically deep or the most naturally gifted with customers. They're the ones who can learn fast, adapt their workflows, and use AI to multiply their capacity — while staying anchored in the human judgment that no tool can replicate.
That combination — technical credibility, relationship depth, and the ability to leverage AI thoughtfully — is what the next generation of enterprise SEs looks like. We're in the early innings of figuring out what it means in practice. But the teams that get there first will have a real and durable advantage.