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The year is 2028.

You’re sitting in a robo-cafe with free 3Gbps Wi-Fi.

Your AR glasses ping you a notification – you've just closed a $270k deal with a client you’ve never even met.

While you were focused on training a new digital employee, your AI sales agent handled objections, negotiated terms, and handed over to your AI customer success agent who already drafted a custom implementation plan based on the client's tech stack.

You finish your oat flat white and leave a generous tip.

Life is good.

(Now let’s take a look at how Attio is making this dream a reality).

Attio’s AI strategy

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Today's companies face an uninspiring choice: continue with legacy CRMs that bolt AI features onto dated architectures, or cobble together a patchwork of standalone AI tools alongside their existing CRM. Both approaches create fragmentation, complexity, and ultimately diminishing returns.

Despite two decades of innovation rhetoric, most GTM teams still operate like clerical staff from the 1990s, manually logging every interaction and spending more time 'managing work' than 'working'.

Attio is transforming CRM from 'a place you manually update data' into 'an intelligent command centre' - built from the ground up with an AI-native architecture and philosophy.

Unlike legacy competitors who are forced to ask 'How can we make our current CRM better with AI?' Attio asks: 'What is the best possible version of an AI CRM?' and then builds precisely that.

The result is several compounding advantages:

• Against legacy CRMs: Traditional CRMs force intelligence into preset structures built for human data entry, not AI capabilities. Attio's flexible data model inverts this paradigm completely - creating a system where intelligence flows naturally through workflows rather than appearing as disconnected "AI features" that create additional steps in already cumbersome processes.

• Against standalone AI tools: As the central hub for GTM teams, CRM is uniquely positioned to eliminate context-switching by embedding intelligence directly into existing workflows. By combining unstructured email, calendar, and call data with structured CRM data, Attio's AI capabilities benefit from rich context that standalone AI tools simply don't have. 

The result is what no CRM has achieved before: a system that genuinely works for you, not the other way around.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  AI-platform beats AI add-ons

Years before the AI explosion, Attio invested heavily into building a flexible data-model to differentiate from rigid architectures that pigeonhole legacy CRM users into a fixed way of working. 

Today, this strategy proved to be the foundation for one of their biggest advantages.

Unlike competitors forced to retrofit AI onto opinionated databases, Attio's platform allows any data point across the system to be intelligently generated and processed. 

Their release of AI Attributes reveals Attio's core philosophy - AI shouldn't be a separate feature you access, but a natural extension of your existing workflow. 

This approach dramatically reduces context-switching; teams can instantly research companies, classify prospects, or generate summaries without leaving their CRM.

The benefit of Attio’s agent army goes a step beyond 'saving time' - it multiplies your output. Users can direct Attio's agents to research 1000s of companies and immediately move onto the next high-value task.

Then, each of the resulting intelligently generated data points can be intelligently processed too, using them in automations, reports, and other AI-native capabilities across the platform.

2. Turn data and context into a concentric moat

Attio has a unique advantage that comes from its ability to combine structured CRM data with unstructured call, email, and calendar data - creating a contextual understanding that competitors can't easily replicate.

Their Call Intelligence release demonstrates this perfectly: when analysing a sales call, it already knows the people involved, company details, deal context, and prior interactions. 

While other call tools analyse conversations after they end, Attio's native AI works alongside you during the conversation itself, inside the CRM environment. It surfaces exactly what matters to your specific role in real-time through customisable templates, allowing different team members to track distinct takeaways simultaneously:

• Sales representatives can track primary objections of each person involved

• Customer success managers can monitor changing satisfaction signals

• Product teams can capture new feature requests

This contextual understanding also enables Attio to build features standalone call-recording tools simply can’t, like drafting context-aware follow-up emails that consider the deal stage, prior emails, etc (not just the conversation points from the call).

Allow me to indulge in the natural logical extension of this concept: 

Based on what was agreed in your call…

• the deal automatically moves to the next stage in your pipeline

• a new contract is generated from a template and emailed to the customer

• the draft contract is attached to the account record

• another call is scheduled with the customer's finance team

• your customer success gets notified of their auto-generated follow-up tasks

• the customer’s seat limit on your product is increased

Imagine getting off a call and the CRM has already listened, understood context, sent follow-ups, and actioned tasks for you.

AI trapped in a box < AI with contextual knowledge < AI with limbs

3. Design for magical moments

A specific tactic I’ve noticed Attio leverages that appears to contribute to how they’ve assembled such a vocal user-base: deliberately targeting small moments of friction that, when solved, create outsized emotional responses.

Beyond their major AI capabilities, they consistently ship delightful surprises tucked away in different corners of the product:

Workflows that name themselves automatically based on their function

Email sequences that quietly reschedule themselves when they detect out-of-office replies

These "magical moments" create an emotional attachment to the product beyond just time or efficiency savings. They're the types of quality-of-life conveniences you never want to give up once you have them.

The philosophy: build features that users never knew they always wanted.

That’s all for today’s breakdown, this one was a blast to write - hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did writing!

— Tom

P.S. In 2028, Strategy Breakdowns will be known more for this new project than our newsletter.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Redifining CRM ↗

[1 minute read]

For two decades we've accepted the false dichotomy between power and usability. Attio's manifesto breaks down exactly how they're eliminating this trade-off by redesigning what CRM should be in 2025 (and beyond).

Go for the bold vision, stay for the magic page design. Attio’s clutch designers up to their old tricks again with this one.

Introducing Call Intelligence ↗

[2 minute read]

Attio's Call Intelligence represents the natural evolution of CRM systems from static databases to dynamic relationship partners.

No separate tools. No manual work.

Your conversations become part of your CRM, understood and actionable in real-time.

How Attio builds-in-public ↗

[9 minute read]

The most exciting startups today are ‘Building-in-Public’ (“BiP”), because it makes for magnetic marketing, organic growth flywheels, and identity-forming products.

But I can count on one hand the number of companies doing BiP exceptionally well.

Attio is one of them. Here’s how they do it.

That’s all for today’s breakdown - what did you think? Reply to this email and let me know, I try my best to respond to everyone!

— Tom

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