On February 12, Highspot and Seismic announced they’re merging. The combined entity will operate under the Seismic brand, controlled by Permira, with Highspot founder Robert Wahbe moving to the board.
The press release called it “a shared ambition to continue innovating in sales enablement.”
I want to unpack that sentence. Because what it says, and what it doesn’t say, tells you everything about where this industry is heading. Especially now, when AI is rewriting the rules of what a revenue team can accomplish faster than any merger can integrate.
What mergers actually optimize for
I’ve been through this pattern before. Twice.
When two market leaders merge, it’s almost never because they want to build something new together. It’s because neither could win alone. The math stopped working, and consolidation is how you buy time when organic growth stalls.
Here’s what typically happens next. The combined company spends 18–24 months on integration. Engineering teams reconcile two codebases. Product leaders negotiate which features survive. Support gets stretched across two customer bases. And the roadmap, the thing customers were actually paying for, freezes.
In any era, that’s painful. In the agentic era, where AI is fundamentally changing how sellers research, prepare, engage, and close, 18 months of frozen roadmap isn’t just painful. It’s a generation. By agentic era, I mean a selling environment where AI systems don’t just assist, they anticipate, decide, and activate inside live workflows.
The Permira angle makes the pattern even clearer. Private equity acquirers optimize for a specific sequence: reduce redundancy, cut costs, boost margins, prepare for exit. Customer innovation takes a backseat to financial engineering. Not because PE firms are villains, because that’s the model. It does what it’s designed to do.
So when the press release says “continue innovating in sales enablement,” the question worth asking is: innovating how? With what roadmap capacity? On what timeline? And in a world where AI agents are becoming part of every selling motion, can a combined legacy platform evolve fast enough to matter?
The real signal isn’t the merger. It’s the category.
Here’s what I think most people are missing.
The conversation has been about Highspot vs. Seismic. Which brand survives. Which features get deprecated. Whether customers should stay or switch.
Those are all valid questions. But they’re the wrong frame.
The bigger question is: why did two companies with multi-billion-dollar valuations, backed 1.9 billion in funding, with 15+ years of market presence, reach the point where merging was the best option?
It wasn’t a failure of execution. Both companies built impressive platforms with large customer bases. The problem is structural. The category they built, sales enablement, was designed for a world that no longer exists.
Sales enablement was the right answer for 2015. Give reps a central place to find content, training, and tools. Build a portal. Make it searchable. Measure adoption.
It’s not the right answer for 2026. AI has changed what’s possible. Reps don’t need another place to go. They need intelligence that shows up where they already are, inside the CRM, inside the email, inside the conversation. They need systems that detect deal signals, anticipate what’s needed, and deliver it before anyone asks. That’s not a portal problem. That’s an architecture problem. And no amount of merging two portals together solves it.
The merger doesn’t change that. It just means there’s one fewer vendor trying to change it.
Unified complexity is still complexity
Both Highspot and Seismic were already criticized, fairly, for being complex to implement and hard to adopt. Seismic’s average time to ROI, according to G2 data, is 17 months (by some not all). That’s not an implementation timeline. That’s a capacity tax.
Merging two complex platforms doesn’t simplify anything. It creates a Frankenstein of features, workflows, and technical debt that engineering teams will spend years reconciling.
Both companies have added AI features to their platforms, chatbots, content recommendations, analytics assistants. But bolting AI onto portal architecture is like adding a copilot to a library. The copilot can help you search faster. It can’t change the fact that you’re still searching. The fundamental interaction model, human goes to platform, human searches, platform returns result, doesn’t change. It just gets a conversational interface.
The press release says “both platforms will continue to be supported.” Anyone who’s been through a merger knows what that means: one platform gets sunsetted in 18–24 months. The question is which one, and whether your team is on it.
If you’re a Highspot customer, you’re wondering if your platform survives. If you’re a Seismic customer, you’re wondering what bloat is coming. If you’re a prospect evaluating Highspot or Seismic, you’re wondering if you’re buying a product or buying into a merger.
All fair questions. None of them have answers yet. And that uncertainty is itself a cost.
What this means if you lead a revenue team
I’m not writing this to tell you to switch vendors. That’s your decision, and it depends on factors I don’t know, your contract, your team, your priorities.
But I do think the merger creates a moment worth using, not to panic, but to ask better questions. Questions that matter whether you stay, switch, or wait.
The architecture question. Your enablement platform is an application your reps visit. What if it was infrastructure that showed up inside the tools they already use? Not a sidebar. Not a browser extension. Infrastructure that speaks an open protocol and works natively inside any AI tool your reps adopt - Claude, ChatGPT, whatever comes next. Applications wait for humans to visit. Infrastructure meets them where they are.
The attribution question. Can you trace a line from enablement activity to deal outcome? Not content views. Not training completions. Actual causal chains: this signal triggered this activation, which changed this behavior, which influenced this deal. AI makes this possible now - tracing the full path from insight to action to revenue. If your current platform can’t show that chain, the merger won’t change the physics.
The capacity question. How much revenue capacity is buried inside the team you already have? Not productivity - capacity. The difference matters: productivity asks “how do I make reps faster at what they’re doing?” Capacity asks “what could reps accomplish if the friction between knowing and doing disappeared?” AI has made this a real question, not a theoretical one. For the first time, teams can unlock revenue capacity without adding headcount. The question is whether your infrastructure is designed for that, or still designed for an era where the answer was always “hire more reps.”
It’s worth modeling that capacity before assuming headcount is the answer. The Revenue Capacity calculator can help frame that discussion.
These are the questions that led us to build something fundamentally different at GTM Buddy. Not better enablement. A different category entirely: Revenue Activation.
Revenue Activation operates across five execution levers: Ramp Acceleration, In-Flow Activation, Content Velocity, Coaching Precision, and Revenue Proof. The difference isn’t feature depth. It’s architectural orientation toward execution.
While they consolidate, we innovate
I’ll be transparent about our position. We’re 44 people. We compete against companies with 1,000+ employees. We don’t win on headcount or budget or brand.
We win on capacity, the same buried capacity we help our customers unlock. AI isn’t just in our product. It’s how we build the company. It changed how I think about strategy, how we create content, how we respond to competitive shifts, and what 44 people can accomplish. The agentic company doesn’t just use AI. It’s organized around the belief that capacity is always larger than headcount.
I co-founded Gainsight in 2011. We named “Customer Success” before the market had language for it. There were no CS teams, no budgets, no category. We named it, then built the infrastructure.
I’m seeing the same pattern now. Revenue Activation didn’t exist until we named it. And the enablement category’s largest players just told you, through their actions, not their press release, that the old model needs consolidation to survive.
We think it needs evolution instead.
What happens next
For the next 18 months, Highspot and Seismic will be integrating systems, reconciling roadmaps, and managing the organizational complexity that every merger produces. That’s not a criticism, it’s just physics.
During those same 18 months, AI will continue to reshape how buyers research, how sellers engage, and how deals are won. The companies that move will have an opportunity that doesn’t come often: the giants are distracted, customers are questioning assumptions, and the narrative is genuinely up for grabs.
What happens next isn’t consolidation.
It’s evolution.
The hiring spree is over. Capital efficiency is the mandate. AI has made it possible to do more with less, not as a slogan, but as an operating model. The question is whether your revenue engine is designed to unlock the capacity that’s already there, or whether it’s still optimized for an era that has passed.
That’s the question worth sitting with. Whether you answer it with us or without us.
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