The commercial manager in 2026: four regimes in six years

Chronology of an acceleration

A young salesperson starts his first job in September 2008. Suit and tie mandatory. On his desk, in a noisy open space, an Alcatel Premium Reflexes and a laptop. That's it. The CRM is homegrown, the dashboards run on Excel, and some signed contracts still arrive by fax. No LinkedIn to prepare his calls, no way to know who his contact really is before dialing a number. He calls switchboards trying to reach someone, line after line, with a batch of 500 contacts already worked over by his predecessors.

Eighteen years later, a commercial manager opens his dashboard on a Tuesday morning in June 2026. He reviews, in this order: a synthesis of interviews produced by a qualification agent during the night. A pipeline health score calculated by a model that learns continuously from its own corrections. A map of weak signals emitted by strategic accounts, aggregated from fifteen sources, seven of which weren't connected three months earlier. A briefing produced by an orchestrator agent that itself coordinated three subagents while he slept. And a stream of asynchronous conversations where messages mix without visual distinction, coming from humans present in the office, humans connected from three time zones, and agents asking him questions because their own orchestration is stuck.

Between these two scenes, a career. Mine. And within it, four managerial regimes in succession that no manager had seen coming in 2008.

Forty years to move a single notch

The commercial manager's craft, as it structured itself from the 1980s onward, evolved slowly over thirty years. Sales methodologies settled in one after another. SPIN in the 1990s, Solution Selling by the end of the decade, Challenger in 2011, MEDDIC installed everywhere from 2015. None of these methods broke with the previous one. They sedimented, layer over layer, in a continuity that gave the craft time to digest what it was learning.

This slowness had a rarely noticed consequence. It gave a manager the right to expect that the gestures learned in early career would remain relevant until the end. Skill accumulated, wisdom deposited itself, transmission between generations made sense. You could train someone in the methods of their era knowing they would still hold twenty years later.

That temporality is what has just disappeared.

The incremental decade (2010-2020)

Between 2010 and 2020, the craft evolved. It did not break. The nuance is decisive because it's the one we easily forget when looking back from 2026.

Three things shifted noticeably during this decade. The technology stack digitized deeply. Salesforce imposed itself as standard, HubSpot emerged, sales engagement platforms like Outreach or SalesLoft appeared around 2015. The 2020 manager coordinated a stack of five to ten integrated tools, whereas the 2010 manager still ran things with an often homegrown CRM, a few Excel dashboards, and rudimentary telephone statistics.

But those tools weren't what made management. The 2010 manager had a pipeline on Excel and a count of outbound calls, nothing more. What he actually used to lead his team was his presence. He sat next to his salespeople in the open space. He heard the tone of a call before he heard the words. He saw a rep lose energy on a third follow-up without anyone having to report it. He accompanied his AEs to meetings, almost always in person, and debriefed in the car on the way back. Management happened through physical proximity and direct reading of commercial dynamism. Dashboards were only a complement.

LinkedIn became, during the same period, the infrastructure of professional prospecting. The transition wasn't spectacular. It happened through accumulation, a few years watching the platform rise as a complement, then a few years discovering it had become central. The beginner I was in 2008 went hunting with a phonebook and a telephone. Ten years later, that approach already seemed from another age, without anyone having decreed it.

Sales enablement structured itself, finally, as an autonomous discipline. What existed in dispersed form became a recognized function, equipped with its own tools, its own KPIs, its own literature.

These transformations changed the tools, the cadences, the way of counting work. They did not change the nature of the craft. A VP Sales in 2010 and a VP Sales in 2019 were both organizing the management of humans present in the same space, around a documented pipeline, with stable methodologies and a predictable temporality. They were fundamentally doing the same job with more sophisticated instruments.

A 2019 manager could still explain his craft to a 2010 manager. From 2020 onward, that conversation becomes impossible.

This continuity stopped in March 2020.

First rupture — the distant (2020-2023)

The remote work imposed by the pandemic wasn't an evolution. It was a rupture. And that rupture revealed something that forty years of stability had left invisible.

Everything that, in the previous movement, was read through physical presence ceases to exist all at once. The dynamism of calls heard from the neighboring desk. The energy of a rep on his fourth follow-up. The team tension that resolved itself without words. The informal debrief in the car on the way back from a meeting. What remained implicit in daily practice suddenly becomes the whole that is missing.

Managers discovered that half of their craft rested on things they had never formalized. They had to relearn how to sense without watching, how to correct without being present, how to create cohesion without a common room. It wasn't an adjustment. It was the invention of new gestures, often by trial and error, with the mistakes and exhaustions that this entails.

The distant didn't simply displace the manager. It made visible what he was doing without knowing it.

Three to four years were necessary to digest this rupture. Some organizations never fully recovered their collective productivity from before. Others discovered that distance allowed team configurations that would never have been possible in person. But in both cases, the manager's craft had changed. And this time, it knew it.

What no manager had seen coming was that this rupture was only the first.

Second rupture — LLMs enter the workflow (2024)

In 2024, the adoption of large language models tipped over. Not among the early adopters, who had been on them since 2023. Among structured commercial teams, in established organizations, in daily workflows. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot stopped being curiosities and became cognitive layers integrated into production.

What this rupture did to the manager runs deeper than it seems. He continued to manage humans. But those humans produced differently. The SDR who used to draft twenty cold emails a day now drafted fifty. The AE who used to synthesize a call report in thirty minutes now did it in five. The analyst who used to prepare an account plan in a week now prepared it in a day.

The manager had to learn to evaluate work whose reference points he no longer had. What used to take time no longer took the same time. What was worth the effort was no longer necessarily what demanded it. He had to reinvent his quality criteria, his control rhythms, his productivity expectations, in real time, without a manual, at the same time his teams were themselves discovering what the tools allowed.

Managers of 2024 are the first to have had to evaluate work they no longer knew how to measure.

One year to integrate this into practices. One year to understand that the ratio between effort and production had just changed nature. One year, when the previous rupture had demanded four.

Third rupture — AI-augmented Sales (2025)

In 2025, the dominant discourse shifted once again. It was no longer only about using LLMs in workflows. It was about AI-augmented Sales, a broader, more ambitious promise, carried by a stack of AI tools dedicated to the commercial function.

Automatic call transcription with sentiment analysis. Revenue intelligence that scored every deal in real time. AI-driven sales engagement that sequenced prospecting. Qualification agents that filtered inbound leads. Assistants that drafted, summarized, predicted. Every week, a new category of tool came promising transformation.

The 2025 manager led teams using a dozen integrated AI tools, coordinated contradictory dashboards, arbitrated between competing recommendations. He no longer managed only humans, nor only humans equipped with LLMs. He led a team augmented by a stack.

This period produced its own pathologies. The illusion of modernization by stacking tools. The confusion between time saved and coherence gained. Spending that grew without collective performance following proportionally. Many organizations burned cash believing they were buying a system, and bought expense.

AI-augmented Sales was the regime that made people believe the stack could replace the doctrine. It produced above all the opposite demonstration.

One year, again. One year to integrate a new managerial layer. One year to discover that AI-augmented Sales by tool-stacking had its structural limits.

Fourth rupture — real agentics (2026)

Then in 2026, something else arrived. It was no longer another layer. It was a new category of entity to coordinate.

Autonomous agents aren't tools that the manager deploys for his teams. They are entities that execute, decide within their scope, orchestrate themselves among each other. A prospecting agent that identifies its own targets, adapts its own messages, prioritizes its own follow-ups. A qualification agent that queries other agents to complete its analysis. An orchestrator agent that coordinates three subagents and reports back to a human.

The 2026 manager discovers a managerial situation without precedent in the history of the craft. He coordinates simultaneously four categories of entities. Humans in person, in the same offices. Humans at distance, in other time zones. Autonomous agents that execute tasks under his supervision. And, the most radical layer, agents that manage other agents, with their own orchestration logic.

This last category changes the nature of management. When the orchestrator of a work chain is no longer human, the question is no longer only "what do I delegate" but "to whom do I delegate the act of delegating." The manager no longer coordinates executors. He architects systems that coordinate other systems. It's a new craft, one that has no name yet, and that most management books do not even mention.

We no longer delegate to executors. We delegate the act of delegating.

The craft hasn't stabilized since 2020

Thirty to forty years of relative continuity. Then six years. The distant in 2020. LLMs in 2024. AI-augmented Sales in 2025. Agentics in 2026.

It isn't the speed of the transformations that is the real subject. It's that none of them stabilized before the next one arrived. A 2026 manager has never lived, since 2020, a year in which he could take for granted what he had learned the year before.

The craft is no longer learned. It is relearned continuously.

The beginner I was in 2008 could reasonably expect that the craft he was learning would still hold thirty years later. That was true, and it was true until 2020. No manager starting today can make that bet.

This absence of stability is not an accident. It is the new normal condition of the craft.

We no longer learn a manager's craft. We learn to inhabit its ruptures.

In 2010, a commercial manager coordinated humans in a room. In 2026, he coordinates humans in person, humans at distance, agents, and agents that manage other agents.

The craft did not evolve. It changed nature.

And this change of nature raises a question I have not treated in this paper, because it deserves a text of its own. What does a manager become, concretely, when he coordinates these four categories of entities simultaneously? What does it change in his daily gestures, his briefings, the way he evaluates and delegates? And above all, how does one evaluate the work of a system whose orchestrator is no longer human? That is the subject of the next paper.

Article 1 · Commercial management triptych · July 2026