The Crossfire.

A sales leader I know called me a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing he said wasn’t about a deal.

He said his batteries are recharged. Twenty-plus years in, and he’s excited to sell again. Then he said the part that stuck with me: “It’s all because of AI. If it hadn’t been for this, I’d be dreading it every day.”

He didn’t get a new territory. He didn’t get a new comp plan. He built his own operating system for his job, on the AI his company already pays for, and it took the weight off.

I want to talk about what that weight actually is, because I think most companies have it backwards. And then I want to talk about what happens to the people standing next to him.

What actually burns people out

I’ve led sales teams for thirty years. Here’s what I’ve seen, and it’s my read, not a study.

Burnout in sales doesn’t come from selling. It doesn’t come from the meeting where you help a customer think through a hard problem, or the day you close the deal you’ve worked for six months. That part fills the tank.

The tank drains somewhere else. The CRM that has to be updated. The forecast call that needs a deck. The QBR that takes a week to build. The upline report that restates what you already said in the last upline report. The five platforms that each want five minutes, every day, forever.

None of that is the job. All of it is the job’s paperwork. And for most of my career, there was no way around it. You just carried it.

That’s what my friend put down. His operating system carries it now. He talks, it drafts, he reviews, he sends. The selling came back because the paperwork left.

Burnout doesn’t come from the work. It comes from the work around the work.

Two circles

In The Blast Radius, I wrote about how far AI’s effect travels from where you sit. Ask it questions and the blast goes straight down to your own desk. Instruct it, connect it, and it moves sideways to your peers, across the building, down the org chart, and eventually up.

That essay was about one person’s radius. This one is about what happens when two of them overlap.

Picture two people in different parts of the same company. Say a sales manager and a finance analyst. Both have crossed the line. Both have built their own operating system around their own job. And both, every month, have been producing the same thing: a forecast of what’s going to close this quarter.

The sales manager builds it from the pipeline. The analyst builds it from the pipeline, the bookings history and the billing system. Two desks, two versions, one meeting where somebody reconciles them by hand.

Now both of them are doing it with AI. Each one hands the task to their own system, and each one gets a finished forecast back, without asking anyone for anything.

That’s the overlap. Draw their two circles and the space where they cross is the crossfire.

What the overlap proves

Here’s what most people miss about that overlap. It isn’t a turf fight. It’s a finding.

When two people on two different desks each get the same task done end to end, without handing it to anyone, they’ve proven something together: that task doesn’t need a human handoff anymore. Not in theory. In practice, twice.

So the first time, the work gets done twice. The company notices, and it gets done once. And eventually somebody asks the obvious question: if two people’s systems can each do this without help, does it need a person at all?

That’s the question every company is about to ask, function by function, and the overlaps are where it gets asked first. If I ran a company today, I’d go looking for them on purpose. Map the circles. Find where they cross. Each crossing is a task you’ve already proven can run without a handoff.

Standing in the crossfire

Now the hard part. Who’s standing in the overlap?

Not the sales manager. Not the analyst. They’re the ones doing the work, and their circles just got bigger.

The person in the crossfire is the one who used to do the work in between. The one who took the two forecasts and reconciled them. The one who built the deck from both. The one whose whole day was the handoff.

And here’s what makes it dangerous: their blast radius is zero. Not because they’re bad at their job. Because they haven’t crossed over. They’re standing in the space between two people who did, and they may not know it yet.

Here’s the test. If the task you do can now be done by more than one other person in the company, without needing you, you’re in the overlap. Think of a Venn diagram. Two circles cross, and you’re sitting in the middle while two other people do your job without asking you for anything.

That’s the shift I want people to hear. The risk isn’t that you didn’t learn AI. The risk is that the people around you did. If you haven’t drawn your own circle, the one that shows what you’re worth, someone else will draw theirs right over you.

I’m not cheering for that. I’m describing it. If someone’s entire job is a task that two other people’s systems now finish on their own, that job is at risk, and we’re lying to ourselves if we say it any other way.

Some tasks leave desks

Let me be precise, because this is where people get scared, and fear makes for bad decisions.

Most jobs are a bundle of tasks. Some of those tasks are about to leave your desk. That’s not the same as your job leaving. My friend didn’t lose his job when the paperwork left. He got his job back.

The difference is whether you’re the one handing the task to the system, or the task that gets handed.

And handing it over doesn’t mean letting go of the wheel. The rule in my own operating system is the same one I wrote about last time: the AI does everything up to the point where a human has to be accountable. It stops at the send button. It stops at the pay button. Nobody ever finds out after the fact that the AI sent something on their behalf. The judgment stays with the person. The work doesn’t.

That’s not a limit on what the system can do. It’s the reason you can trust it with everything before that line.

It stops at the send button. The judgment stays with the person. The work doesn’t.

Your circle is a force field

There’s another side to the blast radius, and it’s the one that keeps you employed.

Your circle isn’t only how far your work reaches. It’s a protective bubble. Call it a force field. Once you’ve built your own system, you don’t just do your job. You make a whole bunch of other people’s jobs easier, sideways, down and up. You’re better at what you do, you reach further into the company, and the people inside your circle need you to keep doing it.

That’s the protection. Not a title. Not tenure. The fact that removing you would make other people’s work slower.

And if you’re the one standing in the middle today, there’s a version of this where you win. Cross over, and your circle can reach both sides of the overlap at once. The person who can work the left and the right beats the people who can only work one.

Your circle is your force field. Take you out, and everyone inside it gets slower.

Sitting still isn’t an option

So what do you do if you’re reading this and wondering where your own circle is?

I see two roads, and both of them have some pain.

The first: your job changes. You cross the line, you build your own system, some of your tasks leave your desk, and you spend the time on the part of the work that only you can do. That’s uncomfortable for a few weeks. My friend would tell you it was worth it.

The second: you wait. And the company’s clock speeds up around you. The people next to you start delivering in an afternoon what used to take a week, and you’re still doing it the old way. You don’t get fired for that, at first. You just start to look slow. Then overloaded. Then like the handoff nobody needs.

There isn’t a third road where nothing changes. Sitting still isn’t an option anymore.

A lot of people think they’re already there because they get great answers from AI. That’s still ask-and-answer. The blast goes straight down to your own desk and stops.

Here’s the good news, and I mean it. You don’t have to learn AI. You don’t have to learn how the models work, or which app does what, or how to stitch five tools together. You have to learn to run your job with it. That’s a different thing, and it’s a much smaller thing than people think.

Find your circle

Start with one question: what’s the paperwork in your week? Not the work. The work around the work. Write it down. That list is where your circle starts.

Then look at the people next to you. Where would your circles cross? That’s where the crossfire is going to be. Better to be one of the people drawing the circles than the one standing between them.

That’s what One Window is: your job, run from one place, with the AI doing the work around the work and you keeping the send button. The software is free.

If you’re drawing your own circle, start there: kerzie.ai/one-window

If you lead a sales team and want every circle on it drawn at once, we build that with you: kerzie.ai/services/sales-teams

Watch

This essay as a video on the Kerzie AI channel.