The Agent Was Always An Agent

We had a sour on tap last spring that nobody ordered. Good beer. A Berliner Weisse, listed on the board as exactly that, “Berliner Weisse, 3.8%,” sitting there honest and ignored while it slowly went flat in the line. Two weeks of almost nothing. Then I rewrote it as “Overfruited Sour” Same keg. Same liquid. Same brewer, same recipe, same hands that made it.

You know this is coming…It sold out that weekend.

I didn’t improve the beer. I stopped describing it like a spreadsheet.

I keep running into the software version of this. There’s a whole category of products out there quietly doing extraordinary work under a name that makes them sound like a checkbox. Think about a piece of software that watches a job site all day. It notices when someone arrives. It clocks them in without being asked. It tracks where they go, trims the time card when they leave, sorts the cost back to the right project, and fixes the small human errors nobody had the patience to catch. It does this every day, in the background, for thousands of people, and it does it well.

For years a thing like that gets sold as “GPS time tracking.” A feature. A line item with a little tick next to it, shelved next to a dozen cheaper tools that do a worse version of the same chore. Buyers compare the tick marks, shrug, and pick on, who knows, probably price. The product was years ahead of its category and the category had it filed under office supplies.

Then a new word shows up in everyone’s mouth. Agent. And suddenly the exact same software, not one line of code different, is the future. The thing was already monitoring, already deciding, already acting on its own. It was an agent the whole time. It just never had permission to say so, because the word didn’t exist yet in a way a buyer would pay for.

That’s the part worth sitting with. AI didn’t upgrade the product for a lot of SaaS out there. AI upgraded the vocabulary. The capability was real for years. What changed is that the market finally had a shelf to put it on, and a shelf is the only thing a market can actually pay for. People don’t buy value. They buy value they can classify.

If they can’t file it, they can’t fund it, no matter how good it is.

This is the quiet tax almost nobody accounts for. Not a bad product. A great product wearing a cheap noun. You can be objectively the best thing in the room and still lose to a worse thing that picked a better word, because the word is what the buyer holds in their head on the drive home.

And it isn’t only products. I’ve watched the same thing happen to people. The smartest operator on a small crew is usually doing some essential job that has no name, the one everyone calls “the stuff nobody wants to deal with.” It’s invisible until somebody finally calls it a role, gives it a title, says this is yours and it matters. (Have you wondered why GTM Engineer has gotten so popular?! We’ve been here doing the work. Now there’s a title for it.) The work didn’t change. The person didn’t change. But you handed them a noun they could grow into, and they grew.

Naming isn’t decoration. It’s permission. You can do that for a beer, for a feature, and for the person sitting three thousand miles away who’s been carrying something heavy under a label that made it sound light.

The beer was always that good. I just stopped underselling.

Stay Positive & …Until The Next Cycle