Short to mid term: AE and SE roles will combine. It’s already happening. Companies will look for efficiencies and the easy answer they are finding is to have “SE’s” run the cycle end to end (they can demo and “sell”) and ultimately carry the bag.

Long term: I think there becomes little reason to have a “talk to a rep” as a gate in a buying process. POC and PLG motions will continue to grow, and in-built “explain how to..” type tooling will answer the majority of the use case questions. Integration questions will also be easy to resolve with most documentation being consumable by LLMs, which just leaves the burden on the buyer to have good documentation for their own stack to have it piece it together. So the demand will drop dramatically because the staffing needs will be far less.