Field Notes/brynplanningheadcountgrowth-teamplaysaudit-log
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 Hart, Chief Executive Officer⬩13 min read
tl;dr
High AI adopters generate roughly twice the net new ARR per go-to-market employee as low adopters, and your CFO has seen the number. The 2027 planning question is not how many people to add. It is which repetitive, time-sensitive work your existing team should stop doing by hand, starting with the first hour of the day that nobody owns. Give that hour an approved workflow, measure what it delivers for a quarter, then decide on headcount.
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.
High AI adopters generate roughly twice the net new ARR per go-to-market employee as low adopters: about $640K versus $370K.
It's also the kind of number your CFO will bring up in your next 2027 planning meeting.
Ready or not, your 2027 planning meeting is happening
Most companies I talk to are building their 2027 plan right now, and the types of conversations they are having are similar. Finance "asks" for flat headcount. Sales suggests that maybe more pipeline would be helpful? Both parties then turn to the Head of Growth with eyebrows raised.
Last year, many leaders expected AI to reduce headcount. Realistic or not, they were looking for these reductions. And some reductions did show up, but were much smaller than expected. In McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey, 39 percent of respondents expect AI to decrease their organization's overall headcount over the next year, but just 14 percent report that AI contributed to a decline in workforce size over the past year, less than half the 32 percent who predicted a decline in last year's survey (McKinsey).
This dynamic is very clear in current hiring plans. ICONIQ reports that Sales and Post-Sales teams are still growing, roughly 10 to 20 percent depending on company scale, while Marketing and RevOps are expanding more slowly or staying flat, partly because those teams have higher AI adoption than other go-to-market functions. Leaders are betting on tooling and process before adding headcount.
So what is the key question growth leaders should be asking as they look ahead to 2027? The first needle moving question is what should the team stop doing by hand? Headcount should follow from that answer.
What high AI adopters are doing differently
ICONIQ's data covers B2B software companies broadly, and it splits performance by AI adoption rather than by company size, so the numbers are directional rather than a benchmark for your stage. That said, the direction is clear. The most AI-forward, high-performing companies run go-to-market teams 20 to 30 percent leaner than their peers, and they see about a 10 percentage point lift at the top of the funnel: new lead to MQL at 38 percent versus 27 percent, and MQL to SQL at 37 percent versus 29 percent.
The more interesting part of the report reveals what teams are changing. They are not simply speeding up the same work. They are moving repetitive work from people into systems and workflows. ICONIQ describes companies shifting the hiring mix from operators to builders: rather than hiring ten customer success managers to cover 2,000 new accounts, one company hired two engineers to build an AI customer success manager instead. Frontline reps build their own prospecting and enrichment tools, and RevOps formalizes the ones that work.
The report ends that section with a question many CEOs are now facing. For example, if a BDR becomes five times more productive, do you hire fewer of them, or expand the role and hire more?
Before you answer that, let's identify the work that can move from a person to a workflow.
In the growth teams I talk to, the first hour of the day looks like this.
Someone opens the visitor identification tool and scans the accounts that showed up overnight. They cross-reference the interesting ones against the CRM to see if there is an owner, an open deal, or a deal that was lost last year. They check whether anyone from that company is active in a trial. They decide which three or four are worth a follow-up, write the follow-ups, and move on to the meeting that was already on their calendar. What they did rarely gets written down anywhere a colleague could find it.
Then the same hour happens again tomorrow, with a different set of accounts, and some of yesterday's follow-ups get forgotten.
This is some of the work that turns existing demand into pipeline, and it has three properties that make it a poor fit for headcount.
It is repetitive: the checks are the same every day.
It is time-sensitive: a pricing page revisit is most useful to act on quickly and much less useful a week later.
And it interrupts the workflow of the team: it gets done in the gaps between the work people were hired for, which is why it gets done inconsistently.
Hiring another person adds capacity, but it does not change the operating model. The same repetitive, time-sensitive queue still depends on someone getting to it.
The first hour, two ways
Select a task to compare the manual process with an approved Bryn workflow.
Done manually
At the start of the day, someone opens the visitor identification tool and scans the list. Overnight signals wait until then.
With an approved Bryn workflow
Bryn detects accounts as they arrive, including overnight, and records each new signal against the account.
Done manually
Looks up each account in the CRM for an owner or open deal, then checks the product for trial activity.
With an approved Bryn workflow
Bryn pulls the CRM owner, open deals, and trial activity into the account's qualification decision.
Done manually
Chooses a few accounts based on judgment. The cutoff can change from day to day.
With an approved Bryn workflow
The team-approved Play applies the same qualification rules every time and blocks accounts on the suppression list.
Done manually
Writes and sends follow-ups between meetings. Some wait until later or the next day.
With an approved Bryn workflow
If automatic action is approved, Bryn takes it in the same hour. If review is required, it queues the action for one-click approval.
Done manually
The trigger, decision, and action are often scattered across tools or not recorded in one place.
With an approved Bryn workflow
Bryn records the trigger, score, decision, and action in its audit log. Connected tools keep their own records of what happens next.
Done manually
At the start of the day, someone opens the visitor identification tool and scans the list. Overnight signals wait until then.
With an approved Bryn workflow
Bryn detects accounts as they arrive, including overnight, and records each new signal against the account.
Illustrative example based on common growth workflows, not survey data. Bryn's audit log records what Bryn decided and initiated. Connected tools keep their own records of what happens next.
The first hour, two ways. Select one of the five morning tasks to compare the manual process with an approved Bryn workflow. Illustrative, not survey data. Terms as used in this article.
Give the hour an owner
The alternative is an approved workflow: your team defines which signals matter, which accounts qualify, what action is allowed, and where the result is recorded. When the conditions are met, the workflow runs, and every run is logged.
That is the model we built Bryn around. Bryn watches your website, product, and CRM for buying signals, scores each account against the customer profile you define, and runs the Play your team approved.
A Play can run in two modes: Run mode executes when the conditions match, and Approve mode waits for a one-click confirmation before the final action. Each Play sticks strictly to the rules your team approved, so the judgment stays with the people who wrote the rule. Bryn does the checking, the cross-referencing, and the approved first action.
In practice, that changes three things.
The signals you already pay to collect get acted on. The signals are already arriving in tools you already pay for: the website, the product, the CRM. Signals that arrive overnight can be scored and acted on before anyone starts a manual review, so by the time someone starts work, the follow-ups are already sent or already waiting for approval.
Warm signals get acted on while they still matter. The pricing revisit, the second trial user from the same company, the account that was lost last year and came back. Each of those is worth the most in the hour it happens. An approved workflow acts in that hour. A person acts when they get to it.
Finance and compliance get a record, not a reconstruction. Every run writes the trigger, the score, the decision, and the actions Bryn took to one audit log, exportable at any point. When finance asks what the growth team's tooling actually did last quarter, the answer comes out of the audit log rather than out of a week of reconstruction.
One boundary matters here. Bryn can control what it initiates, but not what a connected system does after receiving the action. Bryn records what it initiated and why; the connected system keeps its own record of what happened next. Bryn connects to the collaboration, CRM, outbound, and messaging systems most growth teams already run, with webhooks for other destinations, so the approved workflow runs through your existing stack rather than replacing it.
The "expand the role" answer
Back to ICONIQ's question. If the repetitive checks move to workflows, your team can stop owning the queue and start owning the rules. They decide which patterns are worth a Play, they read the audit log to see which Plays are producing meetings and which are producing noise, and they change the rules. That is higher-leverage work than checking the visitor list, and it is the job the ICONIQ report describes when it says the hiring mix is moving from operators to builders.
So my answer to the planning question is: expand the role before you add to the headcount. Give your existing team ownership of the workflows, measure what those workflows deliver for a quarter, and then decide whether the next constraint requires another person or a better workflow.
Plan around the signals first
If you are building a 2027 plan this month, I would start from the signals your company already pays for and ask what happens in the first hour after each signal arrives. Where the answer is "someone checks in the morning, if they have time," that is the work to move first. Where the answer is "a workflow runs and the result is logged," you have already made the change, and the headcount conversation gets easier.
If you are working through that plan and want to compare notes on where the repetitive work sits in your growth team, I would like to hear how you are approaching it.
Chris Hart is the CEO at Civic; he brings together decades of experience across technology, finance, and identity to help businesses navigate the shift to agentic AI. His Silicon Valley career spans more than 25 years, from running infrastructure at early internet and fintech startups to leading finance and operations teams at high-growth technology companies.
Beyond Civic, Chris has championed veteran leadership as Vice Chair of the Pat Tillman Foundation since 2006. When he isn't thinking about the future of identity and AI, you'll probably find him surfing or hanging out with his Dalmatian.
