Finding the perfect time to automate sales GTM without skipping the 'eyes light up' moments

Sometimes the best signals aren’t in the data. They’re in the eyes. Automating the sales process too early means missing the moment someone lights up, marking the instant a product clicks. Real insight lives there, and the smartest teams use AI to scale those moments, not skip them.

Matt Born is the Founder of Moona, a creative studio focused on early-stage product design. The startup veteran says the old market rules no longer apply, and the obsession with efficiency is killing the very insights that fuel real growth.

The window to the soul: "When you just send an automated demo, you steal away the opportunity to see what I call 'eyes light up moments,'" Born says. "You can’t see which feature or phrase makes their eyes light up. Oftentimes, it's not the product at all; it's the narrative they are internalizing about how it will change their life, and that’s the real value AI is uniquely suited to synthesize for us."

Autobots, roll out: He pushes back against the common AI narrative with a better metaphor: the "mech" suit. Instead of an android meant to replace humans, he sees AI as a tool for augmentation. "An android is here to take all your work away," he explains. "A mech is here to augment you, to make you stronger and more capable while you remain in control. That’s what creates a path to whatever comes next."

Poof, gone: For Born, this mindset isn't just theory; it's a survival tactic. He has watched successful, multi-million dollar creative agencies he once admired simply vanish over the past two years. "I’m focused on founders who have had lots of success and are now wondering why their old playbooks don't work anymore," he says. "You're now competing against people building something that goes from zero to $20 million in two months."

Data blind spot: A product doesn't define a person's life, it just fits into it. It’s a nuance, Born argues, that creates a critical blind spot for even the largest AI models. "The incumbents, with the biggest datasets in the world, they don't have the nuanced data around how people are actually using a particular piece of software," he contends. "Because of that void, most of the data is garbage in, garbage out. Until we have that behavioral data, we will never have truly purpose-built, agentic software."

Once bitten, twice shy: His advice is colored by a self-professed lifetime of disappointment with overhyped technology. He urges founders to adopt a pragmatic approach, focusing on tools that solve a problem today by reducing fear and giving back time. "I could have spent three hours writing a proposal for a client that they weren't going to read anyway," Born says. "Or I can spend five minutes using an LLM to send an 80% okay version of it, and they're still not going to read it. That's good for me, and that's good for our business."