I have been watching a pattern repeat itself in revenue organisations for almost fifteen years now, and I want to name it because the third turn of it is starting right now, mostly invisibly, and the function that ends up inheriting it has a small window to see it coming.
The pattern is simple. Every time a particular kind of resource gets cheap to produce, that resource sprawls. The sprawl creates a governance crisis. The governance crisis creates a function. The function inherits the chaos and turns it into infrastructure. We have done this twice already. We are doing it for the third time as we speak. And there is a fourth turn forming behind it that almost no one is talking about.
The first wave: content sprawl
Through the 2010s, content production got cheap. Tools made it easy. Outsourcing made it cheaper. Marketing teams started producing more decks, more one-pagers, more case studies, more battle cards, more recorded webinars than any sales team could ever absorb. The promise was that more content would help reps win more deals. The result was something different. Reps drowned. Nobody could find anything. The same case study existed in six versions, three of them stale, and there was no way to know which one closed deals.
So a function emerged to deal with it. We called it sales enablement, and at its origin it was a content function: someone had to organise the library, retire the dead assets, tag the live ones, manage the version control, and decide what belonged in the rep's workflow at what stage. Enablement was, in its first incarnation, the inheritance of content sprawl. The job existed because someone had to.
The second wave: tool sprawl
Then SaaS got cheap. Through the early 2020s, every revenue team accumulated tools the way they had previously accumulated content. Salesforce research found the average sales team uses eight tools to close a single deal. Outreach. Apollo. Gong. ZoomInfo. Salesloft. Highspot. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. A handful of internal apps. Reps overwhelmed by the technology stack they were required to operate.
Same pattern as content. Production got cheap, the resource exploded, and someone had to manage the chaos. The function that emerged this time was revenue operations the people who consolidated tools, killed redundancies, governed integrations, owned the data model that held the whole stack together. RevOps as a senior function exists because tool sprawl forced it into existence. Companies now hire heads of RevOps with the same seriousness they once hired heads of enablement, for the same structural reason: someone has to inherit the chaos.
Every time a resource gets cheap to produce, it sprawls. The sprawl creates a governance crisis. The governance crisis creates a function. We are about to do it for the third time.
The third wave is starting right now: skill sprawl
In the last six months, building agentic skills has gotten cheap. The protocols are open. The tools are accessible. Claude lets you build a SKILL.md file in plain English. Cursor lets a non-engineer compose multi-step workflows that used to require a developer. MCP made integrations interoperable. Every revenue rep who has spent thirty serious minutes with these tools has built at least one skill. Most have built ten. The good ones have built fifty.
And here is where the pattern repeats with frightening exactness. Each rep is building skills in isolation. There is no taxonomy of what exists. There is no governance of what is good. There is no retirement of what is stale. There is no shared library where Rep A's prospecting skill is visible to Rep B. Two reps in the same org are solving the same problem in parallel, building different skills, with no way to know whose version is better. Some of those skills are pulling outdated information. Some are duplicating expensive API calls. Some are quietly producing the wrong outputs on the wrong deals. Nobody is auditing. Nobody is curating. Nobody is retiring.
This is content sprawl, but for capability. This is tool sprawl, but for cognition. And the function that inherits it will be because it has to be the function that has already inherited the previous two waves of the same pattern. Enablement is about to inherit skills the way it inherited content.
That sounds like an expansion of the job. It is. But the more important point is structural: enablement is the function in the revenue org that has institutional muscle memory for governing proliferation. The meta-skill is taxonomy, curation, governance, retirement, lifecycle. The thing being organised changes content, then tools, now skills. The work of organising it does not.
The companies that will get this right are the ones whose enablement leaders are already starting to ask the next-order questions. Who owns the skill library? What is our taxonomy? How do we decide a skill is production-ready? How do we retire one when the model behind it changes? How do we know when Rep A's discovery skill is materially better than the org-standard, and how do we make hers the new standard? Those are not AI questions. They are governance questions. They are the same questions enablement asked about content a decade ago, in a different vocabulary.
The piece most people miss: this is positive-sum
There is a quiet conversation happening in enablement leadership rooms about whether AI is going to shrink the function. I understand the anxiety. Every AI vendor pitch deck has a slide about how their product reduces the need for enablement work. The version of that story I keep hearing in private is: “am I still going to have a function in eighteen months?”
The honest read is the opposite. The agentic era does not shrink enablement. It expands what enablement is responsible for. The function used to be the inheritor of content. It is becoming the inheritor of capability itself the skills, the standards, the curation of what good looks like in an agentic workflow. The leader who saw enablement as a content-distribution function will struggle. The leader who saw enablement as the function that governs how revenue capacity gets built and shared will thrive. The job got bigger, not smaller.
The leader who saw enablement as content distribution will struggle. The leader who saw enablement as the function that governs how capacity gets built will thrive. The job got bigger, not smaller.
And then there is the fourth wave
If the third wave is skill sprawl, the fourth wave is taking shape behind it already, and it is the one I am watching most closely.
Every agent has memory now. Every workflow accumulates context. Every rep is, knowingly or not, building a private context window around their own deals their notes, their prior conversations, their account-specific intelligence. Right now that context is fragmented across individuals, across tools, across model providers, across vendor platforms. There is no shared context layer for a revenue team. There is no canonical place where “everything we know about this account, this buyer, this deal” lives and is queryable by every agent and every human on the team.
That is a coming inheritance too. And it is structurally larger than the previous three combined, because content was a library, tools were a stack, and skills are a capability but context is the substrate the whole agentic stack runs on. Whoever owns the orchestration of context owns the most important asset in agentic revenue work, the way whoever owned the CRM owned the most important asset in pipeline-era revenue work.
My working thesis and I will admit I am still building the evidence for this one, is that the function that inherits skill sprawl is the function positioned to inherit context. The two work belong together. The meta-skill of governing what reps know and what reps can do is the same meta-skill. Enablement, in its agentic-era form, is the capacity governance function of the revenue organisation owning both the skills the team can execute and the context those skills run on. That is the job in three years. The leaders building toward it now are five years ahead of the curve.
Where this argument is going next
I am running a research project on this with the Enablement Leadership Council over the next several months, interviewing fifteen enablement leaders on the record about what they are seeing right now how their reps are building skills, where the governance is breaking, what they think the function looks like on the other side. The report lands in Q4. I will write up what we find honestly, including the parts that disconfirm the thesis I have just laid out. That is how doctrine becomes durable: by being willing to lose to the data.
In the meantime, the practical move for any enablement leader reading this is small and immediate. Start auditing. Run a quiet sweep of what skills your reps have actually built in the last sixty days. Find out where they live, what they do, who built them, and whether anyone outside the builder has ever used them. That audit will tell you, more clearly than any vendor deck, where you are in the curve. If the answer is “we have no idea,” that is fine. So does almost everyone else. But knowing you do not know is the start of the function's next chapter, and it is happening now whether we name it or not.
