GPT Wrappers in Gucci Pricing: Exposing the ‘AI for Sales’ Feature Fake-Out

“Most ‘AI for Sales’ startups are just overpriced features.” I've said it before and the DMs are still sizzling, so let’s double-click.

The dirty secret nobody prints in the pitch deck

Nearly every seed-stage “revenue copilot” today is built on the exact same large-language models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, take your pick. The upside: founders can spin up a demo in a weekend. The downside: your prospective customer’s intern can copy that demo in a weekend.

Speed without scarcity is just a faster race to commodity.

If your value prop stops at “We fine-tuned GPT-4o on 500000 sales calls,” congratulations: so did the five companies pitching after you. Proprietary data and embedded workflow, not model access, separate a franchise from a feature.

From copy-paste code to copy-paste companies

1. Shared brains, no moat. When the core reasoning engine lives in someone else’s API, your “secret sauce” is a prompt template. Great for hackathons, terrible for defensibility.
2. Micro-feature inflation. Because the tech is cheap, every minor pain point becomes its own startup: one for call summaries, one for objection handling, one for email tone. Each is beautifully niche, and equally disposable.
3. Buyers feel the whiplash. RevOps now juggles so many LLM wrappers they need an LLM to remember log-ins. That’s how we ended up with >1000 sales-tech logos and a procurement team whose default setting is “No.”

Four plays to turn “just another GPT wrapper” into a real company

1. Weaponize data gravity. Stripe didn’t win on prettier checkout; it holds merchants’ transaction histories hostage (in the best possible way). Ingest data that can’t be rebuilt from CSVs. If ripping you out of nukes forecast history, you’re sticky.
2. Become the workflow, not the widget. McKinsey & Company 's 2025 AI report credits workflow redesign with 60 % of enterprise GenAI ROI. Translation: if reps can finish their quota-critical task without touching your app, you’re optional. Embed into the daily motion, auto-populate CRM fields, trigger commission calculations, drive QBR decks, anything that breaks if you’re gone.
3. Charge like a partner, not a landlord. Seat licenses are easy to slash. Tie pricing to value captured, pipeline dollars influenced, risk dollars avoided, hours returned to selling. Partners who share upside rarely get churned during budget season.
4. Engineer pain of disconnect. Fifteen-minute onboarding feels magical until renewal time. Bake in compliance hooks, lineage trackers, or forecasting dependencies that make off-boarding feel like spinal surgery, not USB eject.

Operator’s due-diligence drill (now with teeth)

1. Kill-switch simulation – Turn the trial off for 48 hours; see what breaks and who screams first.
2. Data-export interrogation – Ask how you’ll get your historical data back. If the answer is screenshots, walk.
3. Workflow ownership map – Trace prospect → QL → deal → renewal. If the tool owns just one isolated click, it’s a feature.
4. Outcome-aligned SLA – Make the vendor place revenue at risk if targets aren’t hit. People protect what hurts their wallet.
5. Model-dependence audit – If their “IP” is merely reranking the same OpenAI output you can prompt yourself, negotiate like you’re buying a commodity because you are.

Founder reality check

Your roadmap still lists “Finish Salesforce integration” as next quarter’s moonshot? Time to choose: own the end-to-end workflow or prepare to be swallowed when the consolidation wave hits. Feature companies exit early or quietly dissolve; platforms write the M&A checks.

The punchline

LLMs made software cheap to build. They did not make defensibility cheap to earn. Speed gets you to the starting line, scarcity keeps you in the race.

Operators: Which AI tools actually moved the revenue needle, and why couldn’t you live without them?

Founders: What non-GPT moat stands between you and the next prompt-engineer with a Stripe account?

Let’s trade real-world scars below. The sharpest tactic wins a coffee on me, and saves us all from buying another shiny widget.

#AIForSales #ProductStrategy #FeatureFatigue