Ghosted: Yesterday v Today.
- Old Ghosted: You didn’t follow up enough. You needed a better cadence. Tighter messaging.
- New Ghosted: You didn’t make it past the Buyer’s AI gatekeeper and you never knew it. You were toast before you were even considered by a human.
Introduction
Every day, we all get dozens of emails pitching some product or service promising to transform our business.
Here’s what I do now:
· I scan and delete. Or, if the topic is of interest, I don’t read it but →
· I copy and paste it into one of my AI agents and ask it to evaluate:
- Does it offer meaningful value for my business?
- Does it align with my goals and priorities?
- Does it minimize risk compared to alternatives?
Because I’ve trained my AI agents on my company’s needs, I trust their judgment.
If the AI flags it as a high-value opportunity with good fit and low risk, I engage.
If not, the conversation never even starts.
While this process is a bit manual with the cut & paste it still saves significant time & energy while filtering out 90% of the noise and only letting ‘signal’ through. By the end of the quarter, I’ll have this process automated with no human intervention on my part.
Chances are, you're doing something similar—or you will be soon.
Why This Matters
This isn’t the future of the Buyer / Seller relationship. This is today. Like now!
If you haven’t already shifted your sales approach, the time to move is now.
AI filters are deciding who advances and who gets screened out. Often before a human ever sees your pitch.
From Scarcity to Abundance
Over the past 40–50 years, Sellers operated in the Age of Scarcity. We sold scarcity itself. If you had the information, the unique product, or the exclusive access — you had the power:
- Sellers could claim: “We are the only or best solution.”
- Sellers controlled the flow of information and framed the buying process.
- Buyers had few alternatives and limited visibility.
- Control was the advantage, and it belonged to the seller.
But now, we are selling in the Age of Intelligence characterized by abundance. The scarcity sales model is collapsing. The sales methodologies we used in that scarcity model break down in this age of intelligence. They simply don’t work.
Buyers now have abundance: information, options, access — accelerated by AI agents working on their behalf.
Their AI agents screen every message, every proposal, every pitch evaluating your offering based on clarity of value, fit, and risk compared to alternatives. If you sell based on the scarcity model you won't just lose to a competitor, you'll lose to an invisible filter without even knowing it.
How AI Agents Evaluate
If you were the algorithm, here’s what you’d care about:
· Is the offer clearly structured?
· Does it map to business outcomes?
· Is there proof (ROI, customer examples, risk mitigation)?
· Is the solution a good fit for existing priorities and constraints?
· How does it compare to alternatives?
· Does it fit a unique category that the algorithm can’t process and ‘kick out’ for human intervention?
These filters run in milliseconds. There is a good chance a human never sees the details of your message.
If you’re not structured for both human and machine evaluation, you’re invisible.
Selling to Algorithms: The New Rules
1. Structured clarity beats charisma.
2. Evidence beats promises.
3. Position is everything.
4. Velocity matters more than volume.
5. Time is more important than money.
6. Strategic signal density, not noise, wins deals.
The advantage now belongs to sellers who make it simple for buyers and their AI agents to see why they are the right choice.
Your offering is now judged not only by executives but also by:
· AI sourcing tools
· Vendor evaluation platforms
· Procurement AI agents
· Internal corporate scoring systems
The Quiet Shift Has Already Begun
Like all new technologies, the change AI brings about sneaks up on you.
Buyers are already:
- Using AI to shortlist vendors.
- Copying sales emails into AI tools for evaluation.
- Prioritizing based on algorithmic scoring.
If you're not ahead of this shift, you won’t lose to better sellers you’ll lose to invisible algorithms.
The most important thing you can do now is align value messaging for both human judgment and AI scoring.
Closing Thought
You're no longer selling only to people.
You're selling to algorithms. They are fast-moving, high-filtering, clarity-demanding systems.
The sellers who adapt will thrive.
The ones who don't will disappear without ever realizing it.
Welcome to Algo Sales.
It's time to move differently.
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I train sales professionals, business leaders, and their AI agents on Sales and Deal strategies using the Compass Sales Strategy Operating System. This training acts as a force multiplier, empowering you and your AI agents to work in alignment to win business and exceed your number in competitive environments.
This essay is part of the Compass Physics Doctrine Series — created to equip sales professionals to move, position, and win in the Age of Intelligence.
Compass is the first Sales Strategy Operating System designed for sellers competing in AI-driven, high-velocity environments — helping you manage time, velocity, position, and strategic signal generation when it matters most.
This was written while listening to ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys.
Artwork: Picture of my grad school textbook published in 1977 that introduced me to AI. I designed and coded my first AI app in 1978. The app administered & scored psychological tests to eliminate the potential bias introduced by human testers. It was written in Snobal, a string-array processing language, on a PDP-11 computer.
