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← Field NotesAuthorChris Hart

Chris Hart

Chief Executive Officer

Field Notes

If your team can't change the agent, you don't control it. Getting an agent live is only the start. Three tests after launch: change it, when your targeting changes, who updates the rules; check it, when finance asks what happened, who can show the record; take it with you, when you switch vendors, what records you can keep. The question before you sign: if the vendor's engineers left tomorrow, could your team keep running it? Source: Gartner, September 29, 2026.brynagentsgtm

If Your Team Can't Change the Agent, You Don't Control It

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built for them by vendor engineers. Before someone builds yours, find out whether your team can change it, see what it did, and keep its history if you leave.

Chris HartTen AI agents per salesperson. Will any of them drive more revenue? Start with one agent solving a real sales problem. Warm paper ground. Left, a card headed Gartner forecast for 2028: 10:1, AI agents to salespeople by 2028; fewer than 40%, of sellers will say agents improved productivity. Right, How to choose the first job, the job should meet all three, as three numbered cards: 1, buyers are showing interest, in blue: a potential customer is showing interest through activity on your website or in your product. 2, nobody responds quickly, in green: nobody is responsible for responding promptly, so potential customers may leave before anyone follows up. 3, delays can cost revenue, the focal card in purple: a buyer comparing vendors this week may not wait for the weekly review. Start where speed pays. Bottom band, the question to ask your team: when a buyer shows interest, how quickly does your team respond? Source: Gartner press release, July 28, 2026. Chris Hart, Civic Field Notes.bryngtmagents

AI Agents Are Multiplying. Give Your First One a Job That Drives Revenue.

Gartner predicts ten AI agents for every salesperson by 2028, yet fewer than 40 percent of sellers will say those agents improved their productivity. For smaller companies, the best place to start is one agent solving an urgent revenue problem that otherwise doesn't get solved.

Chris HartAI-assisted buying. AI does the research. A person comes back to verify. You may not see the research. You can see the return visit. Three cards in a row on a warm paper ground, joined by arrows. Card 1, the buyer's AI, drawn with a dashed blue border because it sits outside your view: builds the shortlist. Reads vendor sites, pricing, documentation, and reviews. Card 2, a person, the focal card with an amber border: returns to verify. Checks pricing, security, integrations, or fit. Card 3, your team, green border: responds while the question is open. Uses the account's recent activity and history to respond with context. Bottom band, the question to ask: would your team recognize the return visit in time to respond? Byline: Chris Hart, Chief Executive Officer, Civic.bryngtmai-buyers

Your Buyer's AI Does the Research. Be Ready When a Person Comes to Verify It.

AI is already part of vendor research for many B2B buyers. In Gartner's survey, 45 percent used GenAI during a recent purchase, and 69 percent preferred a sales rep to validate AI-generated insights. Be ready for that return visit: know which company came back, what they looked at, and whether you responded while the evaluation was still open.

Chris HartAgent-run setup. Let your agent set up your tools. Keep the go-live decision. Setup can give an agent broad authority before it has full context about your business. Three cards in a row, joined by arrows. Card 1, your agent: builds the setup. Handles the repetitive work of configuring the tool. Card 2, a draft, drawn with a dashed amber border: every change waits here. Changes stay staged until your team decides they are ready. Card 3, your team: makes the go-live decision. Reviews the draft and commits it. A record shows what changed. Bottom band, the question to ask: where do the agent's changes go before they take effect?brynagent-run-setupmcp

Let Your Agent Set Up Your Tools. Keep the Go-Live Decision.

Agents can now do much of the setup work on the software your team buys, and you should let them. But, before you fully hand over the task, check three things: whether changes stay in a draft before they take effect, who decides when the setup goes live, and whether you can see afterward what was configured.

Chris HartGrowth stack: build vs. buy. Build the brain. Buy the infrastructure. Own the logic about who to target and what happens next. Buy the infrastructure that has to stay reliable and auditable. Stat callout: 32 percent decided against at least one software purchase or feature they could build in-house, McKinsey, State of AI 2026. Left card, build: your intelligence. Your ideal customer profile, your signal weights, your response rules. Your judgment about your own buyers. Keep it where you can read it. Right card, buy: the infrastructure. Visitor identification, connectors, approval step and audit log. Needs uptime and ongoing maintenance. Someone else will eventually need to trust the record. Bottom band, the sixth question: who else will need to trust what this system did?brynbuild-vs-buygrowth-stack

Build the Brain. Buy the Infrastructure.

Coding agents have made more of the growth stack practical to build in-house. McKinsey says 32 percent of organizations have already decided against at least one software purchase or feature because they could build it themselves. The implication is not to build everything. You should own the judgment about who to target, what signals matter, and what should happen next. But you should buy the infrastructure that has to stay reliable, connected, and auditable.

Chris Hart2027 planning season. Plan 2027 with the team you already have. Finance wants flat headcount. Sales wants more pipeline. Start by deciding which repetitive work should stop being done by hand. Stat callout: $640K versus $370K net new ARR per GTM FTE, high versus low AI adopters, ICONIQ, 150 plus B2B software GTM leaders. Left card, the 2027 constraint: flat headcount, more pipeline, the classic do more with less, but now with a twist. Center: move the repetitive work, with an arrow pointing right. Right card, the team's new job: 1 define the rules, 2 review the results, 3 improve the workflow. Bottom band: plan the work before the headcount. Move the repetitive, time-sensitive work first. Then decide where another person would add the most value.brynplanningheadcount

Plan 2027 With the Growth Team You Already Have

The good news is that high AI adopters report roughly twice the net new ARR per go-to-market employee as low adopters. But, for 2027 planning the critical question is which repetitive, time-sensitive work your existing team should stop doing by hand.

Chris HartWhere the agent lives versus where the work happens. Your pipeline crosses six systems. Its controls need to cross them too. Left: an agent inside a platform, one platform with its own rules and log. Right: one approved workflow and one Bryn audit log across the stack, connected to six tools: Website, Product, CRM, Slack, Outbound, Warehouse. One account, six systems, before a seller responds. The question for every agent demo: who can act across the tools, under what rules, and where can you review what the agent decided and did?brynagentsgovernance

Dreamforce and UNBOUND Are Putting Agents Inside Their Platforms. Your Pipeline Runs Across Six Tools.

Dreamforce and UNBOUND are showing what agents can do inside Salesforce and HubSpot. Most growth teams I talk to do not work inside one platform: buyer activity moves across the website, product, CRM, Slack, outbound, and the data warehouse. The practical question is who is allowed to act across those systems, and where you can review the decisions and actions across the workflow.

Chris HartMore than 25 percent of Workday's new annual contract value came from AI. Its CEO said customers trust the agents because of the controls around them. Three controls: clear boundaries, what can the agent do. Recorded approval, who authorized it. Audit trail, what happened afterward.brynagentsgovernance

AI Drove More Than a Quarter of Workday's New Sales. Its CEO Credited the Guardrails.

Workday says the controls around its agents are part of why customers trust them. Gartner predicts governance failures will force many companies to pull autonomous agents back from production. The common issue: companies need to know what an agent can do, who authorized it, and what gets recorded afterward.

Chris HartHero image: Big companies scaled agents this year. Everyone else stood still.bryngtmagents

Big Companies Scaled Agents This Year. Everyone Else Stood Still.

McKinsey's 2026 State of AI: 40 percent of billion-dollar companies are scaling agents, up from 27. Smaller companies sat flat at 22. The gap is implementation capacity, not software cost, and there are three questions to ask before you buy.

Chris HartAI Pricing Broke This Year. Check what your vendors started counting. About four in five vendors recently introducing AI pricing chose capacity over consumption, with three checks: read the unit, audit the count, know the cap. Source: Bain and Company, August 10, 2026.bryngtmpricing

AI Pricing Broke This Year. Check What Your Vendors Started Counting.

About four in five vendors recently introducing AI pricing chose to meter pricing on capacity over consumption. Buyers need to know what gets counted, who carries the quality risk, and whether they can audit the bill.

Chris HartRamp Spent Four Years Rebuilding Outbound. You Shouldn't Have To. 30 percent of pipeline, shut down on purpose. Sending became a commodity. The advantage moved from a volume edge to a selection edge between 2021 and 2025.bryngtmagents

Ramp Spent Four Years Rebuilding Outbound. You Shouldn't Have To.

Ramp shut down the AI SDR program behind 30 percent of its pipeline, then spent four years rebuilding outbound around evidence, bounded action, and a record. The architecture they landed on is right. The timeline is the part almost nobody can copy.

Chris HartHero: The EU AI Trust Deadline Moved. The Buyer Didn't. Two panels compare the regulator's clock (EU AI Act high-risk dates deferred to December 2027 and August 2028) with the buyer's clock (evidence, record, and exit due on this quarter's deals).bryngtmagents

The EU AI Trust Deadline Moved. The Buyer Didn't.

Europe pushed its central high-risk AI requirements to 2027 and 2028 while most of its transparency rules took effect on schedule. If your trust roadmap was timed to a regulator's calendar, you now know it was the wrong clock.

Chris HartCivic Field Notes. The AI buyer grew up. Good. Delivered results, a verifiable record, and a clean exit. Three question chips and three 2026 survey stats: 21.7% direct P&L impact (Futurum), 75% AI strategy 'more for show' (Writer), 40%+ agentic projects headed for cancellation by 2027 (Gartner).bryngtmagents

The AI Buyer Grew Up. Good.

The 2026 buyer wants to know what your agent delivered, how you can prove it, and what happens if it fails. With only 29% of companies reporting significant ROI from generative AI, that scrutiny is healthy.

Chris HartCivic Field Notes. You already paid for this pipeline, why aren't you converting? A mid-market funnel narrows from 2,700 visitors to about 38 leads to 1 customer, next to three published benchmarks: mid-market stage benchmarks compound to one customer per 2,700 visitors; the top 10 percent convert visitors to leads at 8 to 15 percent against an average near 1.5 percent; acting on a signal within five minutes yields an 8x higher contact rate than waiting 24 hours. The other 98 percent got counted, aggregated, and forgotten.bryngtmsignals

You Already Paid for This Pipeline, Why Aren't You Converting?

Your site converts at ~2% of visitors. The other 98% aren't gone. They're sitting in tools you already pay for, waiting for someone to notice them.

Chris HartCivic Field Notes. Seeing is consolidating, acting is still open. Four go-to-market signal acquisitions in eleven months on a timeline: Cursor acqui-hires Koala (Sept 2025), Apollo acquires Pocus (Mar 2026), HubSpot to acquire Warmly (Jun 30, 2026), Zoom to acquire Common Room (Jul 2, 2026), with Acting marked as the high ground still open.gtmsignalsconsolidation

Seeing Is Consolidating. Acting Is Still Open.

Four independent go-to-market signal companies disappeared into four larger platforms in eleven months. That is not noise. It is the market telling us where the value is moving: seeing is becoming infrastructure, and acting is the layer still worth building on.

Chris HartMany faint lines converging through a single aperture into one focused purple beamstrategygtmvertical-ai

Why We Narrowed

We focused our platform that could do anything to a product that does one thing on its own. Here's why.

Chris HartA dark chart titled "The model was never the problem." A value-delivered curve peaks at a point labeled "the demo / budget approved" and falls to a low point labeled "week 6 / channel goes dark." A note reads: the gap was never intelligence, it was a job, a loop, and permission to act.gtmagentsproduction

The Model Was Never the Problem

Most agent pilots stall for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence. A go-to-market view on why, and what actually gets an agent into production.

Chris HartA dark graph titled "Everyone has signals. Almost no one runs them." An intent-value curve starts at a high-intent signal marked 10:02 and decays toward a baseline labeled hours later. A bracket over the first stretch of the curve is labeled "the gap," a point partway down is labeled "action, finally," and a note reads "the edge moved from detection to the minute after it."gtmsignalssignal-based-selling

Everyone Has Signals. Almost No One Runs Them.

Signal-based selling became the consensus go-to-market strategy of 2026. The bottleneck is no longer detecting intent. It is what happens in the next minute.

Chris Hart