How the AI wave is rewiring sales, SDRs and the way we communicate

Before the AI hype cycle, before OpenAI went mainstream, before every sales team had a custom GPT model sitting inside their revops stack, Mo Chahin was already building Twain.

The idea wasn’t a technical one. It started with something human. Mo grew up moving countries, switching languages and never quite feeling fluent in any of them. What felt like a weakness at the time eventually became a superpower: an obsession with nuance, tone, and how people shape meaning when they write.

Years later he would discover sales in the most unforgiving way imaginable: cold calling restaurants, going door to door, getting rejected in person, and learning in real time how much words matter when you only have a few seconds to land them.

After seven years building and leading sales at his first company, something clicked. Everyone struggled with writing. Not the grammar—Grammarly was already solving that—but the sales language. The emotional clarity. The painful effort of staring at an email draft after six back to back meetings, trying to sound sharp when you feel half dead.

That is where Twain comes from.

Building an AI company when AI wasn’t cool

Most founders today can’t imagine building an AI product before AI became a global religion. Mo didn’t have that luxury.

When he started Twain, large language models were still early and unreliable. There was no plug and play infrastructure. There was no guarantee anything would work. Hiring engineers felt like convincing people to join a moon landing mission without a rocket.

Then ChatGPT launched.

Everything changed overnight. Users flooded in. Investors flooded in. Curiosity exploded. But the product wasn’t ready yet, which made the pressure both surreal and suffocating.

And yet, that chaos created the conviction Twain needed: the world finally understood the problem Mo had been staring at for a decade.

People want to communicate better. People need to communicate faster. And salespeople, more than anyone else, burn the most energy doing it.

Twain wasn’t a grammar tool. It was a cognitive energy tool.

AI is rewriting sales, but not the way LinkedIn thinks it is

Mo said something in the episode that every founder and sales leader should sit with: AI helps with clarity and speed long before it helps with automation.

The mistake most teams make is assuming AI will replace their process. In reality, it simply removes the friction that keeps reps from doing the work they already know they should do.

One example Mo shared was striking

Twain didn’t advertise better deliverability. They weren’t trying to solve it. But customers began reporting that their email deliverability improved dramatically when every message in a sequence was uniquely AI written instead of templated.

Why? Because spam filters can spot lazy templating instantly. The more unique the messages, the healthier the inbox reputation.

In the early pilot tests, teams doubled or even tripled reply rates. Not because the AI was magic, but because it made humans finally do the follow ups, variations and clarity-based writing they previously avoided.

Speed, momentum, clarity—this is where the real AI impact begins.

The human stays in the loop—even if AI SDRs are coming

Mo is careful when talking about AI SDRs. He sees the hype, understands the potential, and also knows how hard the underlying problem is.

From data quality to language generation to legal constraints, building a fully autonomous SDR is an enormous technical and ethical challenge. And while the value proposition is undeniable—lower headcount, higher output—Mo returns to a principle that guides Twain:

The human must stay in charge.

He predicts AI SDRs will absolutely work one day. Technologically, their rise is inevitable. But trust, account ownership, legal oversight, and brand responsibility won’t disappear. Companies won’t blindly delegate communication to an agent without human oversight.

This is why Twain 2.0 is built around collaboration, not replacement.

Cold calling is back (and AI is partly to blame)

One of the most fascinating parts of the conversation was Mo’s take on channel saturation.

AI has made it too easy to send email and LinkedIn messages at scale. Which means both channels are now flooded with automation shaped noise. As inboxes get louder, the old school channels suddenly start breathing again.

Cold calling is resurging.

Not because SDRs love it, but because it actually works. People answer. People respond. People remember the conversation. And it boosts the performance of every other channel that touches the same account.

Mo’s take is simple: if you use the phone, support it with instant messaging follow ups. A text. An email. A short LinkedIn note. The call gives you momentum and context. The follow ups make sure nothing slips.

This is the new hybrid model

old fundamentals supported by new intelligence.

Twain 2.0: rewriting sequences one human-level email at a time

The biggest shift Mo revealed is Twain’s next chapter.

Until now, most outbound tools sit on two ends of the spectrum: templated emails written once and blasted at scale, or fully automated AI SDRs trying to replace humans.

Twain 2.0 sits in the middle.

Mo’s team rebuilt Twain so users can upload a lead list of any size, see exactly how their full sequence will look for each prospect, edit it creatively like they would in a doc, and then let Twain generate unique human-grade messages for every single contact.

No templating. No spintext. No silly personalisation. No automation without accountability.

The objective is clear

keep the human in the loop and let AI do the work that drains the human.

Twain 2.0 makes every outreach sequence feel like a one-to-one message—even if you’re sending to a thousand accounts.

What Mo is really trying to solve

Underneath the tech, the features, and the long-term AI roadmap, Mo’s mission never changed.

He wants to make communication easier for people who carry the weight of imperfect language. People who move between cultures. People who get tired after five meetings and still have twenty follow ups waiting. People who need clarity but don’t always have the energy to create it.

Twain is built for them.

The long-term vision is huge, but the heart of it is simple: reduce cognitive load and help humans express themselves with confidence and precision.

That’s the AI revolution Mo is quietly building.