Anthony Bream doesn’t talk about disruption like most people in tech. He talks about mess. The mess of bad data, overpromised products, and founders who think saying “AI-powered” is a business model. He’s not here to hype the future. He’s here to remind everyone that underneath the algorithms, there’s still a human trying to sell something to another human, and most of them are doing it badly.

Bream has spent years in the trenches of tech sales, helping founders who’ve built something brilliant but can’t explain it without drowning in jargon. The irony, he says, is that AI has made selling both easier and harder. Easier, because tools can find signals — hiring patterns, funding rounds, social sentiment — that hint a buyer might be ready. Harder, because everyone now uses those same tools, flooding inboxes and calendars with the same templated noise.

What he’s doing is part data science, part therapy. His firm, ribbit consulting, works with startups and scale-ups who’ve hit the post-funding wall — flush with investment, light on direction. They’ve automated outreach, built slick dashboards, and still can’t figure out why their close rates are flatlining. Bream’s diagnosis is simple: automation has stripped the soul out of sales. Too many teams chase metrics instead of meaning. They don’t understand the people they’re selling to. In fintech, for example, shouting about AI can actually backfire. Big banks hear “AI” and think “compliance nightmare.” They stall deals for six months just to check the security stack. Founders think they’re leading with innovation. In reality, they’re triggering institutional paranoia.

Bream’s antidote is realism — the thing his book Revenue Realism & Resilience is named for. He preaches that revenue only matters if it’s built on truth: the truth about who’s buying, what they care about, and when they’re actually ready. He’s built an entire scoring system around this idea, a six-part framework that measures power, pain, value, vision, control, and challenge. It turns intuition into arithmetic. Founders who score high close faster. Those who don’t learn why they’re wasting time.

But data, for Bream, is only the start. He’s obsessed with the psychology of buying — the cast of characters behind every corporate decision. The skeptic who kills deals quietly. The go-getter who champions the risk. The teacher who spreads the message internally. Ignore them, and you lose. Find them, and they’ll sell the deal for you. It’s a view that’s half behavioral economics, half trench warfare. Selling, he insists, isn’t about pitching. It’s about decoding.

He’s also ruthless about early success. In his world, the “first ten customers” are a trap. Too many founders land their first deals with friends, tweak their product ten different ways to please them, and wake up a year later with ten incompatible versions of their own software. The quick wins rot into long-term tech debt. Bream’s advice is brutal but fair: don’t build for exceptions. Build for scale.

Spend time with him, and you realize his version of optimism is strangely pragmatic. He believes AI can make sales better, but only for people willing to get honest about how it’s used. It’s not about replacing reps with bots. It’s about cutting through the fog — knowing which signals matter, which don’t, and how to bring back the human edge that tech has diluted. The best sellers in the AI age aren’t louder. They’re quieter. They listen, they analyze, they time their move.

Anthony Bream is one of those rare people who can talk about artificial intelligence without sounding artificial. He’s not trying to save sales; he’s trying to civilize it. And in a time when everyone is obsessed with being automated, his insistence on being awake — on being human — might be the most disruptive idea of all.

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