Forrester: The Job RevOps Was Built For Doesn't Exist Anymore

Forrester VP/Principal Analyst Ross Graber argues RevOps needs a new mission, because the one it was founded on — standardizing go-to-market process across sales, marketing, and product for “consistency and efficiency” — no longer matches the environment it operates in. His framing: “revenue operations emerged to help organizations navigate complexity, but what has changed is the nature of the complexity itself.”

Three shifts drive that claim. AI-mediated buyer research is cutting into how much of the customer journey a seller can actually observe. Internal pressure to “adopt AI” is pushing teams toward deployment for its own sake rather than measured outcomes. And AI, in Graber’s view, will redesign operational work itself rather than simply automate the process RevOps already standardized. His recommendations follow directly: prioritize AI investments for customer value over internal efficiency metrics, build data quality and governance before layering on AI, and put resources behind transformative use cases instead of incremental tweaks.

The capital markets are already pricing that shift. Clay closed a $115 million Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation this month, citing 4x revenue growth and more than 17,000 customers — including 80% of the Forbes AI50 — for a platform CEO Kareem Amin describes as one that “predicts the next best action for your business and then helps you take it.” Clay isn’t RevOps software in the traditional sense; it’s signal infrastructure that agents run on top of, which is closer to Graber’s point than a coincidence. The money is flowing toward tools built for the AI-mediated buying environment Forrester is describing, not toward better versions of the dashboards RevOps used to standardize on.

Graber’s closing line is the one worth keeping: winning organizations won’t be the ones deploying the most technology, but the ones applying it toward customer value on top of a data foundation that can actually support it. Clay’s valuation says investors are betting on where that foundation gets built — the open question is whether internal RevOps teams are being funded to build it too, or just to keep adopting whatever ships next.