Now Everybody
Kind of Has One.

The Purchasing Manager

Near the end of one long afternoon, Anthony and Ben are still trying to pin down exactly why customers are behaving so differently. They’re better prepared. They ask sharper questions. They seem less dependent on Sawtooth, or on any single seller, to tell them what matters.

“You know what this reminds me of?” Ben says.

“What?”

“Purchasing. Big companies have had purchasing managers forever — someone whose whole job is figuring out what the company needs, comparing suppliers, asking hard questions, making sure they’re getting what they paid for.” He taps his phone. “Now everybody kind of has one.”

For most of commercial history, sellers could afford to specialize with marketing departments, salespeople, and whole agencies built around persuasion. Large buyers could answer that with specialists of their own. Ordinary individual customers mostly couldn’t.

They stood on the far side of an increasingly sophisticated selling apparatus more or less alone.

That imbalance is what’s shifting. A personal AI can help someone figure out what they genuinely need, compare real alternatives, understand a spec sheet, spot a tradeoff, and check the evidence behind a claim — capabilities that used to make economic sense only for an organization with a purchasing department.

The bigger change in all of this may not be that AI helps companies sell better. It may be that AI helps everyone buy better.