A Tale of Two Trades

Throughout history, bold claims about how technological advances will change our way of working have been made (hey Keynes, we’re still waiting on that three-hour work day to materialize), but time and again the reality has proven to be much more complicated.

Much has been made of recent advances in LLMs and a lot of ink has been spilled over what these huge advances in AI mean for the future of work.

When it comes to what the future holds for tech sales and the SDR role specifically, one possible framing is “bank teller or draftsman?”

The Bank Teller

As the ATM started seeing massive adoption by the mid-90’s, it was widely presumed that they would significantly reduce the need for bank tellers, as these machines automated many of the routine tasks previously carried out by human tellers. However, the situation turned out to be more complicated.

Instead of being eliminated, since the year 2000, teller jobs not only continued to increase, but grew at a rate slightly faster than the general labor force. Why?

From James Bessen: “Well, the average bank branch in an urban area required about 21 tellers. That was cut because of the ATM machine to about 13 tellers. But that meant it was cheaper to operate a branch. Well, banks wanted… to increase the number of branch offices. And when it became cheaper to do so, demand for branch offices increased. And as a result, demand for bank tellers increased. And it increased enough to offset the labor-saving losses of jobs that would have otherwise occurred. So, again, it was one of these more dynamic things where the labor-saving technology actually created more jobs.”

He goes on: “This is in fact a much more general pattern. We see a whole number of occupations where you might think that technology is going to destroy jobs because it’s taking over tasks; and the reverse happens. So, if you look, for instance, when they put in scanning technology into cash registers, the number of cashiers actually increased. When legal offices started using, beginning in the late 1990s, electronic discovery software for doing discovery of documents in lawsuits, the number of paralegals increased rather than decreased.”

The Draftsman

Technology had a dramatically different impact on the role of draftsman.

Historically, architects and engineers relied on a small army of draftsmen to create detailed drawings, blueprints, and models for a given project.? Depending on the scope of the project or size of the firm, they could sometimes fill an entire room:

Likewise, a “computer” used to be a literal job long before it became an electric device.? They could fill huge rooms, making computations for everything from the IRS to NASA and massive engineering projects.

With the advent of computer assisted design software (CAD) and other advances in architecture and engineering, whole trades within these disciplines have been compressed into a single role.? Today an architect or engineer frequently oversees the “full stack” of their work and they have moved from overseeing a project team to being in many cases an individual contributor.

So while the role of draftsman as we used to know it is mostly obsolete, employment of architects is projected to grow by 5% from 2022 to 2032, which is faster than the average for all occupations.? On top of that, employment within all engineering fields is projected to grow faster than average for all occupations from 2022 to 2032, with about 188,000 openings projected each year, on average—no human computer necessary.

A specialist role is dead, but the generalist role it supported is thriving.

Implications for Tech Sales

So, what will it be??

With the wide scale adoption of AI, will the SDR and other specialist support functions be compressed into a more generalist seller role (a la the “computer” and draftsman to the architect)?

Or like the teller will we actually see an expansion in the speciality roles that support sales people, like we saw with bank tellers since the ‘90s?

It will be impossible to predict, but what we do know is that transformative adoption of new general purpose technologies can be puzzlingly slow.??

It took about 50 years from the general availability of electricity before we saw productivity gains in manufacturing.? Likewise, it took about 50 years from the advent of general purpose computing before we saw resulting productivity gains.? Robert Solow famously quipped in 1987: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

It might not take 50 years to see meaningful transformation in how tech sales is conducted due to AI, but barring the singularity killing us all first, it will almost certainly be slower than we expect.