Varun Atrey at SaaSiest 2026: The more AI in your product, the more human your GTM

SaaSiest 2026, day two. Varun Atrey, Product Marketing Director at Legora, made a case that cuts against the current AI hype: the more AI you build into your product, the more human your GTM has to become. Legora is building "the agentic operating system for lawyers" and recently became the fastest-growing enterprise sales company to hit $100M ARR globally. He's not theorizing. He's reporting from the field.

The old playbook is dead on all four pillars

For the last decade, cloud-native SaaS companies scaled on four pillars: repeatable business processes packaged into software, predictable scaling costs, seat-based pricing, and product-led growth. Atrey's argument: AI is breaking all four simultaneously.

Buyers don't want repeat processes in software anymore. They demand intelligence and customizability. The bespoke feature you built for your biggest enterprise customer is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator.

Predictable scaling costs are gone. An AI agent can work for hours on one task and minutes on another. That variability makes pricing nearly impossible with traditional models. You end up overcharging light users to subsidize heavy users, which is a fundamental misalignment.

PLG still works, but the bar is 10x higher. Products must be built in partnership with customers. The roadmap has to stay open. Feedback loops have to be tighter.

The net effect: software and features, the primary things companies competed on, are becoming a commodity. A beautiful UI can be vibe-coded over a weekend. The moat of "hard to rebuild" is evaporating in real time.

The answer: three tactics

1. The legal engineer (a new role)

Every technological shift creates new roles. At Legora, it's the legal engineer, internally called "bilingual":

• They speak law. Ex-lawyers with deep understanding of how firms operate.
• They speak product. Strong at prompt engineering and evaluating AI output. You can't judge whether AI meets customer-quality expectations unless you've been on the other side.
• They host live training and onboarding, then bring learnings back to the product team.

The ratio that makes most B2B CFOs uncomfortable: 2:1 legal engineers to salespeople. But the sales role has changed. The job is no longer just to sell. It's to make sure the customer succeeds.

This is the moat. Every type of business will have its own version of this role. They're practitioners, expensive, hard to find, irreplaceable. They understand customer problems because they've lived them.

2. Multi-thread the room

The early AI assumption was that sales cycles would compress to "a human with a credit card sends an agent to buy your software." The opposite is happening.

Decisions in a law firm, bank, or any regulated entity are now more complex than before, because AI is genuinely transformational and genuinely risky. You have to convince more people: risk, procurement, IT, and users at every level.

Example: Schönherr (a top Central/Eastern European law firm). An average deal for Legora, not exceptional. Required influencing every level: C-suite, managing partner, innovation teams, procurement, down to people and culture teams, because the firm saw AI as something that would change how the firm operates. 10 to 15 in-person visits over 6 months to close. When asked why Legora won: deep trust, collaboration, and product.

The leverage point: automate the busy work around the work. Pre-call research, decks, proposals, CRM hygiene, competitive intel. Compress that with AI, which frees you to focus on in-person client visits, an extra hour after dinner, traveling to meet a skeptic for a coffee and a demo.

3. Brand, creativity, and distribution

During the Google and Facebook digital-marketing era, it felt like brand had stopped being the differentiator. In AI, where differentiation is harder than ever, brand is back.

Legora's examples:

• Field marketing: unique, memorable, deep experiences with prospects and customers.
• Her Council: an event inviting female leaders in law to share experiences in a male-dominated industry. The right cause plus attention to detail elevates a corporate event into something differentiated. These events take conviction, are expensive and hard to produce. That is the differentiator.
• Creative advertising: Atrey became the face of Legora's brand campaign.

The one-two-three punch of brand plus creativity plus distribution is here to stay, especially in hyper-competitive markets.

Why this matters

Atrey's thesis maps directly onto what we see working at Opmore:

• The legal engineer is the playbook person. Every company has someone who understands the customer's world better than anyone else. In most SMBs, that's the founder. The playbook extracts what that person knows and makes it usable by new hires and AI agents. Legora scaled it into a dedicated role. Smaller companies can scale it into a documented system.

• Multi-threading requires context. You can't influence 10 stakeholders if you're rebuilding your understanding of the deal every time. The context layer for each prospect, each conversation, each objection is what makes multi-threading possible at scale. Without it, you're relying on memory and gut feel.

• Brand is the last moat when features commoditize. This is the hardest one for founders to hear because it's slow, expensive, and non-linear. But Atrey's point stands: if anyone can build your product in a weekend, the only thing they can't copy is why someone chose you in the first place.

The paradox Atrey named is the one every founder should sit with: the more AI you build into your product, the more human your GTM has to become. Reinvest the time AI saves into the one thing it can't touch.

Three questions to take away:

1. What role in your company is the "bilingual" person who speaks both the customer's world and your product? Are they documented or just assumed?
2. How many stakeholders can you actually influence in a deal right now? What's stopping you from reaching more?
3. If your product disappeared tomorrow, would anyone choose you for the brand alone?