The AI Efficiency Paradox

Why Your Sales Team Should Get Bigger, Not Smaller

I’ll admit it: I completely fell for engagement bait this morning.

A LinkedIn post made the rounds claiming that Clay promises to eliminate headcount but actually adds $300K+ in costs when you factor in GTM Engineers, agency support, training, and credit overages.

Classic gotcha format. I took the bait and fired off a reply.

But even though the post was designed to generate controversy, it touched on a misconception so common among revenue leaders that it’s worth unpacking. The real issue isn’t whether Clay lives up to its marketing. The issue is that many of us are evaluating AI investments through the wrong lens entirely: cost reduction.

The Post Was Built on a False Premise

I checked Clay’s website. There’s no mention of reducing headcount anywhere. Their messaging is about GTM acceleration: “Turn your growth ideas into reality today.”

The original post constructed an elaborate argument against a claim the company never made. But this tells us something about how the market perceives AI tooling. We’ve been conditioned by years of vendor pitches about “doing more with less” that we unconsciously internalize cost reduction as the primary value proposition.

This is a mistake. The best revenue leaders I know don’t evaluate AI investments based on what they can cut. They evaluate them based on what they can unlock.

A 160-Year-Old Economic Principle That Should Change How You Think

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange about coal consumption in Britain. As steam engines became more efficient and required less coal per unit of work, total coal consumption didn’t decrease. It went up. Dramatically.

Improved efficiency made steam power economically viable for factories that couldn’t afford it before. New industries emerged. The efficiency gains didn’t reduce demand for coal. They created demand.

This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When your BDRs become dramatically more efficient and can execute outreach at 3x the volume with the same effort, the rational response isn’t to cut headcount. The rational response is to hire more BDRs because the unit economics just got really attractive.

This is exactly what happened at Owner. Our business runs incredibly efficient on a per-head basis. That means we’ve actually hired far more salespeople than our peers, not fewer. In the last few months, we’ve gotten materially more efficient through AI tooling and process improvements.

Our response? We hired 27 XDRs in Q4.

The efficiency gains didn’t shrink our appetite for headcount. They expanded it.

The Right Question to Ask