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Fresh out of Georgia Tech in 1990, I took an inside sales job at a tiny Atlanta startup…
Articles by Mick
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To be or not to be? Positioning products versus platforms in the AI era.
To be or not to be? Positioning products versus platforms in the AI era.
As the founder and CEO of RedLine Advisors, I've worked with numerous software companies grappling with a key…
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Forget 007… today’s agents are licensed to automate
Forget 007… today’s agents are licensed to automate
Enterprise AI agents are not just the next big thing in enterprise automation. In simple terms, they are…
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Mick Hollison shared thisA Microsoft VP wrote in Fortune on Saturday that SaaS isn't dying. His argument is that in an agent-driven world, software is no longer something people log in to and navigate, and that its value was always "the data, relationships, governance, business rules and logic that lie underneath." He's right about the product. What he skips is what it does to the seller.If the buyer's agent never touches your interface, it also never sees the thing B2B companies have spent decades polishing: the website, the demo, the pitch that made a human lean forward. What it sees is a description of you, assembled from whatever it could read. That description decides whether you make the shortlist. So the interface didn't disappear. It moved. The front door of your company used to be a homepage a person could browse, and now it's a sentence a model can repeat. Most companies have never written that sentence on purpose. They have a tagline, a boilerplate, an analyst brief, and a homepage that each say something slightly different, so a model can end up repeating whichever one it finds first. The biggest product decision on your roadmap this year might be who writes your sentence, you or the summarizer. Defy the algorithm.
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Mick Hollison shared thisGoogle just gave every enterprise the same face. Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar became generally available this week. Any company can now put a lifelike, lip-synced face on its AI agent, and that face moves across 97 languages without a hitch. It's a genuinely impressive piece of engineering. It also solves the wrong problem. In July we ran the homepages of 29 venture-backed AI companies through our Signal Scan for Field Report 03. Of those 29, 11 scored exactly 70 out of 100, which is 38 percent of the sample. They didn't land near each other. They landed on the same number, and 70 is the ceiling for copy that explains what a company does without saying anything only that company could say. Now hand those same companies the same model, the same avatar and the same polite smile. Sameness used to live on the homepage, where a buyer could at least scroll past it. Now it looks them in the eye on a video call, in their native language. An avatar doesn't give you a story. It delivers the one you already have, and if you don't have one, it delivers that too, at scale. The companies that win this shift will decide what only they can say before they give it a face. Pick the why first and the face second. That's how you defy the algorithm.
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Mick Hollison shared thisOn Saturday, September 12, the most valuable industry on the planet started telling the world 4 different stories about itself. It took 3 days. That Saturday, Dario Amodei published an essay asking the industry to deliberately slow the pace of AI capability gains, and within hours Sam Altman and Elon Musk said they agreed. On Monday the 14th at the All-In Summit, Jensen Huang said the doomsday predictions weren't grounded in science. Then the President of the United States called in to Jensen's session and said the whole thing was a hoax. The All-In team even titled one chapter of their Satya Nadella interview "The failure of AI CEO messaging." I'm not here to referee the safety debate, because that one deserves better than a LinkedIn post. My point is simpler, and it applies to every B2B company I talk to. When the leaders of a category can't agree on the story, the market writes it for them. Regulators write it, headlines write it, and oh yeah, the LLMs write it too, because they read every word of this and hand a blended version back to anyone who asks. Your category works the same way at a smaller scale. If you don't tell your story, somebody else will, and their version is the one that sticks. Pick one story and tell it the same way everywhere. That's how you defy the algorithm.
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Mick Hollison shared thisG2 surveyed more than a thousand B2B decision-makers this spring. 51% now start software research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google. Eleven months earlier that number was 29%. And 69% of them ended up choosing a vendor different from the one they walked in planning to buy. More than 2/3 of these deals moved on how a model described the field, not on anything a rep said. G2's Tim Sanders put it better than I could. Buyers have "moved from reference to inference." You used to sell to a buying committee you could name, call, and take to dinner. Now there's a seat at that table you will never shake hands with. It has read everything ever written about you, it has no relationship with your team, and it forms a view in about four seconds. I call what it forms share of model. How often, and how accurately, an LLM cites you when a buyer asks a question in your category. It's binary. It's cold and calculated. If you are cited, you exist. If you aren't, and you don't. Your competitors aren't outspending you there. Most of them have never checked their score, not once. Have you?
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Mick Hollison posted thisA former colleague of mine, Kurt Svenson, left a comment on my last post that moved my own argument forward. I had framed the problem as surfaces you own. Your site, your docs, your profiles. Get those to agree and the machine stops guessing about you. But Kurt has spent 20+ years in channel marketing. His point: in a partner-led business, most of the surfaces are not yours. Distributor pages. Reseller one-pagers. Alliance partner solution briefs. And what's worse is that most of it was written from a partner kit you shipped three years ago and have not opened since. He said he never once met a company that knew what its partner network said about it in aggregate. Neither have I and I ran global marketing at Citrix, where the channel was the business. That was OK when a buyer visited one or two of those pages, but now AI reads all of them and it does not weight the one you wrote. Kurt got to the answer before I did, it's fewer claims, not just better ones. The story that survives in the channel is the one short enough that a partner who does not work for you can repeat it identically without opening a deck. That is not a messaging project. That is channel enablement wearing a messaging costume. If you sell through partners, you have a narrative problem you have probably never measured. Defy the algorithm.
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Mick Hollison shared thisOn July 1, Gartner published a press release about agentic AI eating enterprise software. $234 billion at risk between now and 2030. 20% of all enterprise app SaaS spend. Here is the most interesting quote, "The shift to agentic AI will lead to a redefinition of 'Saaspocalypse' — the disaggregation of the legacy SaaS market as we know it today." Saaspocalypse. In a Gartner press release. In quotation marks, like a word everyone already knows. That's what happens to a category name that works. It stops being yours and starts being everyday language. That is a game that almost nobody plays, except maybe Benioff with Claudeforce! ;-) In any case, most B2B companies spend the year describing themselves inside somebody else's vocabulary, competing on a field a competitor defined, and wondering why the analyst brief reads like a rival's website. That isn't a messaging problem. It's a naming problem. If you don't name the shift, you're a footnote inside someone else's name for it. The companies that survive the next four years won't necessarily be the ones with the best agents. They'll be the ones whose word everybody else has to use to describe them. Defy the Algorithm.
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Mick Hollison shared thisREDLINE HOT TAKE · NO. 03 4 frontier models. 1 week. Anthropic. Meta. Google. OpenAI with GPT-6 Astra. And Nvidia closing the week by agreeing to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. CNBC is calling it model fatigue. CIOs now spend a growing share of their time comparing models that change under them weekly. But for most B2B companies, the question isn't which model won the week. It's whether your message survives any of them. Back in July I asked 4 models to describe SAP. I got 4 different answers → each one correct about a different part of the site → none of them the story SAP would tell. That was one company, on one day, with last month's models. Now the models rotate weekly. Every new model reads your site from scratch. Whatever headline it lands on, that's your positioning for the next 7 days. Which means the model race matters less every week. The message race matters more. "When the model changes on Tuesday, does your story change with it?" If you don't know, there's a way to find out.
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Mick Hollison posted thisThursday night at Bobby Dodd. 52,113 people. Tech leads 13-7 with 1:40 left, and then Colorado scores, and then our 45-yard kick to win it gets blocked as the clock hits zero. 14-13. Season over? No. Season started. I'm a Georgia Tech guy, so I watched that one through my fingers. But here's what stuck with me afterward. It wasn't the blocked kick. It was where the 13 points came from. Rahkeem Smith ran a kickoff back 100 yards. Aidan Birr kicked 2 field goals. That's it. The offense, the unit with the ball for most of the night, never scored a single point. Brent Key said it in the locker room: win or lose, there's a lot of lessons in that game. He's right, and the lesson isn't about the kick. The business version is that most companies play the same way. They move the ball. They put up yards. The pipeline looks fine, the traffic looks fine, the content calendar is full. And then the quarter ends 14-13 because the core offense never punched it in. Inside the 20, the field gets short and everything that worked in the open field stops working. Same in a deal. When the buyer gets close, generic stops working and only the thing you do that nobody else does gets you in. Yardage isn't the metric. Points are. So what do you do after a loss like that? You don't rebuild the offense. You fix the last 20 yards. You defy the algorithm that says more activity equals more results, and you go get the touchdown. Tennessee comes to Atlanta Saturday. I'll be watching, fingers off my face this time.
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Mick Hollison shared thisLast week, Marc Benioff declared the SaaSpocalypse was nonsense. This week, McKinsey published data showing the threat is real and measurable. In its new State of AI survey, McKinsey found that 32% of organizations have skipped buying at least one software product because their own teams could build it internally with agentic coding tools. In the technology sector, that number rises to 41%. Here is what that means in plain terms. Your newest competitor is no longer the vendor across the street. Your newest competitor is your buyer's own engineering team, equipped with a coding agent and a free afternoon. So was Benioff wrong? No, and the distinction matters. He never denied that buyers can build. He answered the threat instead of denying it, with a named partner, an equity stake in the model layer, and a product roadmap concrete enough to move the stock $38 billion in a day. The SaaSpocalypse is real for companies that ignore it. It is survivable for companies that answer it. I have seen both sides of this personally. In Field Report No. 2, I described building RedLine's scanning tool in days using Claude Code. I was part of that 32% before McKinsey ever counted us. The lesson for every software company is the same. If a machine can build your product, then a machine needs to be able to find your reasons why it shouldn't. Defy the algorithm.
Mick Hollison commented on a post
1d
Leslie Clavin nailed it. Gen X isn't calm about AI because we're fearless. We're calm because we've run this play before. The web. Mobile. Cloud. Every one of those felt like replacement right up until it became leverage.
So to the 52% of Gen Z who are nervous: that's a reasonable read. But confidence isn't the prerequisite for reps. It's the product of them. The 38% planning to build AI skills are buying the track record everyone else is waiting to have.
Use it to accelerate the work, not outsource the judgment. Judgment is still the job.
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Mick Hollison liked thisMick Hollison liked thisI like this rebrand. UserTesting is now Auros. The products stay the same: UserTesting and User Interviews are still the core tools, and Eric Johnson is still CEO. Contracts don't move. But the job is changing. Years ago, I sat on their panel testing a handset for a telecom company. The product team had video of my test the same day. Most research I see still waits weeks. UserTesting survived because they made human feedback fast. Today, their 7.6 million testers aren't just clicking buttons—they're checking whether AI responses actually make sense to a customer. Which AI workflow would you test with real people first? https://lnkd.in/dvbADHy9 #Auros #UserTesting #UserInterviews #ProductResearch #AIEvaluation #HumanInsight Susie Penner
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Mick Hollison liked thisMick Hollison liked thisGeorgia Tech is the No. 1 public university in the country for return on investment, according to The Princeton Review. This is the fourth year Tech has topped the list. We are also the top-ranked public school for career placement and for best value without aid. You are in the right place, Yellow Jackets! #WeCanDoThat 🐝 -- https://lnkd.in/erz8z8pi
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Mick Hollison liked thisWe're proud to support Claude for Business' Compliance API through integrations that extend data security, DLP, insider risk detection, AI runtime security, and Digital Communications Governance into Claude. Through these integrations, organizations can gain visibility into supported Claude activity, apply existing policies to AI workflows, and flag policy-defined sensitive prompts for review based on activity logs. For customers, the outcome is simple: a more consistent way to monitor people, data, and AI activity through the tools they already use. Learn more about Proofpoint's integrations with Claude: https://lnkd.in/eRhZkKUB https://lnkd.in/dDyYKCjzMick Hollison liked thisThe Claude Compliance API now connects to more than 100 security and compliance products, including DLP, SIEM, identity, eDiscovery, and AI security platforms. Security teams can review Claude activity in the tools they already use to monitor the rest of the company. Depending on the integration, those tools can pull in conversations, files, and projects from Claude Enterprise, along with admin activity from Claude Enterprise and the Claude Platform. Claude Enterprise and Claude Platform customers can connect a supported security platform today. Security and compliance companies can apply to build an integration. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eJEeMATi Current integrations: Above Security, Air, Airia, aizome, Akeyless Security, Akto, Alignmt AI, Apiiro, Artemis Security, Axonius, Bay, Beacon Security, BigID, Bloom Security, Bluebear Security, Bold Security, Brava Security, C1.ai, Capsule Security, Cato Networks, Check Point, CloudEagle.ai, Cloudflare, Clover Security, Concentric AI, Cribl, CrowdStrike, Cyberhaven, Cyera, Dash Security, Datadog, Daylight, Elastic, Eon, eSentire, Evoke Security, Exaforce, ForceAI Security, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Geordie AI, Glow, Grip Security, Hadrius, Harmonic Security, IBM Guardium, Island, KnowBe4, Lasso Security, Linx Security, Microsoft Purview, Mimecast, Mind Security, Mint Security, Netskope, Nightfall AI, Noma Security, Obsidian Security, Okta, Onyx Security, Opal Security, Opsin, Orca Security, Origin, Palo Alto Networks, Pi Security, Pluto Security, Proofpoint, Reco, RelativityOne, ReliaQuest, Reva.ai, Rubrik, Safeguard, SailPoint, Salt Security, Saviynt, SentinelOne, Sentra, Shield, Silverfort, Smarsh, Snyk, Sola Security, Splunk, Strac, Straiker, Sumo Logic, Surf AI, Sysdig, Tenable, Theta Lake, Token Security, Torch Security, Trellix, TrendAI, Twine Security, Valence Security, Vanta, Varonis, Vega, Vero Security, Willow, WithWings, Wiz, Zenity, Zscaler.
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Mick Hollison liked thisMick Hollison liked thisAuros is live, and our CEO Eric Johnson joined CNBC's Jon Fortt to talk about why now. From the evolution of UserTesting to the launch of Auros, Eric shares how our human network is expanding to support the teams building, evaluating, and improving AI. A big moment for the company, and an even bigger look at where we’re headed next. ✨ More from Eric on CNBC: https://cnb.cx/4xUaggc.
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Mick Hollison liked thisMick Hollison liked thisThe new rule of AI-native products is that you have to reinvent yourself roughly every 3 months (if you're lucky, 6-9 months). Ask yourself, "If we were starting from scratch, would we built our product this way?" If the answer is "No," buckle up. It's time to be bolder than you've every been. Again. It doesn't matter how many users you have, how much ARR, whether you're public, private, Series A or Series H. It doesn't matter if you're the hottest new AI assistant that hockey-sticked to a bajillion users in two weeks. It doesn't matter if you are an incumbent who's captured 90% of the F500. It doesn't matter if you've got the most cracked eng team on the planet or the most beloved brand in tech. And it definitely doesn't matter how risky it feels to shake things up. AI is moving faster than any of us can fully wrap our heads around. User expectations climb daily. Everyone is one great demo away from trying the next thing. So if you believe in your team, your right to win, and your ability to make a positive difference in the world, then you have to keep showing up. Fearless. Relentless. Ridiculously optimistic. In it for the love of building and the joy of discovery. Then you have to ship. We asked ourselves what we'd build if we were starting today. And Gamma 5 is our answer. Coming out of beta next week.
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Mick Hollison liked thisMick Hollison liked thisAI can build almost anything now. Knowing what's worth building? That's still on us At Crafted this week, the conversations that stuck with me weren't about tools... They were about judgment and knowing the customer well enough to know what's worth building in the first place 👀 That's the part AI can't do for us! Live from Crafted 2026 by UserTesting | ad
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Mick Hollison liked thisUserTesting is now Auros. For 20 years, we’ve built the infrastructure to find real people, verify who they are, and connect companies with their perspectives and expertise. As AI creates more of the products and content we interact with every day, verified human feedback becomes even more important for understanding how well those AI systems are actually working. Auros brings that experience and our network of 7.6 million verified people to AI training, evaluation, and research. Auros is built for what comes next. Thanks, Jon Fortt and CNBC for having me on to talk about why we made this next big move, and what the opportunity is ahead.Mick Hollison liked thisUserTesting has rebranded as Auros, casting itself as “the human network behind AI” as it expands from customer-experience research into AI training and evaluation for large enterprises and the labs building frontier models. CEO Eric Johnson tells me its vetted network has grown from about 1.5 million people to more than 7.5 million in two years. "They might need a cancer doctor, they might need a wealth manager, and they struggle to find those people," Johnson says. "We're effectively like the Uber of providing humans for feedback. We have a two sided marketplace and we have a bunch of technology that does it." A new tool, ARQ, scores AI agents across five dimensions, and customer demand is outrunning supply. Full Fortt Knox conversation linked in the comments:
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Publications
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Navigating the AI Revolution - Telling a Better Story
RedLine Advisors
See publicationRedLine is a bespoke advisory and consulting firm focused exclusively on the opportunities, challenges, and threats presented by the AI revolution. Our team is made up of former and current top leaders, board members, and operators. They can give you important strategic and operational advice on the best way to get your business on the AI train.
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http://www.inc.com/author/mick-hollison
Inc.
I am a contributing author on Inc. I focus on the subject of sales and marketing alignment.
Courses
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Fundamentals of Management Northeastern University
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Harvard School of Negotiation
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Multi Agent Systems
DeepLearning.AI
Projects
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Business Transformation
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As the head of business transformation at Cloudera, I assembled cross-functional teams to analyze business processes that could generate cost savings and accelerate growth. These efforts improved the size and quality of our sales pipeline, reduced our cloud spend, and improved our customer service response times. Ultimately, these initiatives helped us generate positive free cash flow and positioned us for a successful sale to private equity.
Honors & Awards
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President's Club
Citrix
First and only non-sales executive selected by the field sales organization to attend the President's Club. Chosen for direct (in-person) contributions to winning new business and establishing long-term executive relationships.
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Top Global EBC Award
Association of Briefing Program Managers
Awarded to the number one global executive briefing center program at Microsoft.
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Achiever's Club
IBM
Awarded for quota achievement in excess of 150% and exceptional contributions to the business. Received award in 1994, 1996, 1997, and 2000.
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President's Award
IBM
Awarded for top team performance in the sales organization.
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Summit Award
IBM
Lotus' highest recognition for individual sales performance. Also nominated in 1992 and 1997.
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Wizard's Award
Lotus Development
Lotus' highest recognition for achievement by a Systems Engineer.
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