What AI Agents Mean for How You Build and Sell Software with Brian McCarthy

Summary

Podcast Summary: Revenue Builders – "What AI Agents Mean for How You Build and Sell Software"

Guest: Brian McCarthy (President of Global Revenue & Field Operations, Cursor; former CRO, Rubrik)
Hosts: John Kaplan & John McMahon
Date: July 5, 2026

---

Main Theme and Purpose

This episode delves into the explosive evolution of AI in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), focusing on the shift from autocomplete tools to fully autonomous, agent-driven development environments. Brian McCarthy shares insider perspectives on Cursor’s unique multimodal approach, the fast-changing landscape of AI competition and product strategy, and the operational implications for sales execution and account management in this new era.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolution of AI in Software Development

• AI's Initial Role:

  • Early AI tools acted as engineering assistants—comparable to autocomplete for coders, increasing efficiency by suggesting or completing code.
  • “It started off… with what we would call engineering assistance. Originally it was tab. So it was like think about autocomplete on your phone... that was the start of co-generation.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 01:21)

• Cursor’s Breakthrough:

  • Cursor surged ahead by mastering code completion, rapidly gaining over 3 million engineer users through a self-serve model.
  • “That’s why Cursor like blasted onto the environment. We had 3 million engineers using it. We were the best at anticipating code completion... And you didn’t need sales to do that.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 02:23)

2. Rapid Technology Disruption

• Speed of Change:

  • Innovation cycles that once lasted years now mutate within months or even weeks.
  • “These lifespans in technology in our world used to last five years, six years… Now it gets disrupted in a year or months or weeks.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 03:46)

• Next Frontier – Autonomous Agents:

  • Transitioned from code suggestion to agents that autonomously generate and build code (“agent development environment”).
  • Market competition now revolves around building the best agents powered by the best underlying models.

3. Model Competition & Cursor’s Multimodal Advantage

• Competitive Landscape:

  • Not just about one model: Frequent “leapfrogging” as models (e.g., Opus, Claude, Composer) overtake each other rapidly.
  • “Every few weeks, models jump each other… Composer 2.0… was inarguably better.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 05:55)

• Cursor’s Unique Value Proposition:

  • Model Agnosticism: Cursor lets users choose from various models (Claude, Opus, Codex, Cursor’s own, etc.) based on use case, performance, and cost.
  • “Cursor is agnostic to what model you use... You can use Claude... you can use our model... it doesn’t matter—based upon capability and pricing.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 06:41 & 07:09)

• Market Impact:

  • Cursor is not locked into any hyperscaler’s ecosystem, consuming vast portions of model usage (e.g., 40% of OpenAI’s new model consumption done via Cursor).
  • Cursor positions itself as a vertical expert in SDLC, likened to “selling the picks and shovels for the gold rush” (09:23).

• Strategic Partnerships, Not Competition:

  • Sees AI model companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) as partners, enabling them to reach the massive SDLC market, while Cursor specializes in building AI agents optimized for software development.

4. Sales Strategy & Account Management in an AI-Driven Market

• New Account Segmentation:

  • Brian restructured sales and account management for focus and customer experience.
  • “I segmented the business… created an enterprise strategic vertical that no rep had more than four accounts… opened up 80 reqs to hire 80 reps across five verticals for just North America.”
    (Brian McCarthy, 09:45)

• Empowering Sellers:

  • Smaller territories, deeper engagement: Reps now have fewer but better-defined accounts, increasing personalized attention and ability to shape value-based AI adoption.
  • “It’s the only time in my entire life I’ve ever segmented business and taken accounts away… nobody complained... Every single person said, ‘Thank God. Now I can do my best work.’”
    (Brian McCarthy, 11:27)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Disruption Pace:
  “These lifespans in technology in our world used to last five years, six years… Now it gets disrupted in a year or months or weeks.” (03:46)

• On Multimodal Advantage:
  “Cursor is agnostic to what model you use... based upon capability and pricing.” (06:41 & 07:12)

• On Market Position:
  “You’re almost selling the picks and the shovels for the gold rush, right?” (John Kaplan, 09:21)
  “Exactly.” (Brian McCarthy, 09:23)

• On Sales Team Restructuring:
  “Every single person… said, ‘Thank God. Like, now I can do my best work. You're helping me.’” (11:27)

---

Timestamps & Segment Highlights

• 00:55–02:56: Brian explains AI’s journey from autocomplete to widespread adoption at Cursor.
• 03:11–05:55: Discussion of rapid industry disruption and emergence of agent-driven environments.
• 06:41–09:23: Unique elements of Cursor’s multimodal approach and implications for competitive strategy.
• 09:45–11:58: How sales/account management must evolve for the AI era—segmentation, focus, and culture shift.

---

Summary Takeaways

• AI for software development is in an unprecedented acceleration phase—the next wave is about autonomous agents, not just smart assistants.
• Cursor’s model-agnostic strategy positions it as a flexible platform, able to leverage and consume best-in-class models from across the industry.
• B2B enterprise sales in AI requires sharper segmentation, deep technical understanding, and proactive account focus to guide customers through their AI journeys.
• The winning formula is aligning rapid technical innovation with aggressive, customer-centric sales execution.

---

(All highlights and quotes are presented verbatim where noted; speaker annotations and timestamps in MM:SS format.)

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Today's clip features Brian McCarthy, President of Global revenue and field operations at Kerser and former CRO at Rubrik where he helped scale the business from 118 million to $1.5 billion in ARR. And in this segment, Brian breaks down the rapid evolution of AI and software development from simple code autocomplete to fully autonomous agent driven environments and what that shift means for competition, product strategy and go to market execution. He also explains how Cursor's multimodal approach creates a unique advantage in a fast moving market and why aligning that innovation with focused sales execution is critical to winning. Let's dive in.

[C]

The AI space is like this. So first one, not the AI space. Let me be very, very specific about this AI space. A massive space that does a lot of things. Our world is very in particular to the sdlc. It's the software development life cycle. It is about helping companies deliver and ship software or applications, whether that's tech companies or big banks or whatever, build applications faster and deliver them higher quality faster and with lower, with less cost. So improve the productivity of an engineer to be able to do more with less. And that space is not a binary space. So if you think about it, what's required to in this space you need a. It started off this space started off with what we would call engineering assistance. Originally it was tab. So it was like think about autocomplete on your phone, right? You're texting and a word comes up and it just auto completes it. Was that for engineers? It essentially is hey, you're in there writing code and it knows what you're going to write and it completes the code. So that was the start of co generation. It was like. And the companies that did that best were the ones that had deepest understanding of the code base and most engineers using it. And because the engineers used it, they had the best ability to anticipate what they were going to write and complete the code. That's why Cursor like blasted onto the environment. We had 3 million engineers using it. We were the best at anticipating code completion. Like it wasn't a comparison. And so we, it exploded. And you didn't need sales to do that. It was just get engineers using it. It's self serve.

[D]

And they did that Brian, at the AI level, at the task level. Right, that's that. So they're, they're basically the reason why there's very little competition I think right now is because it was Done at the task level. The AI was built right there.

[C]

Yeah, totally. So essentially, you know, as people were building and building code in what would, what was referred to in as an idea, which is the individual development environment.

[E]

Right.

[C]

And so their environment is in there, they're in there writing code and they're going out getting like searching for code in the code base, bringing that back and then auto completing that. And that was happening in Cursor and would change, which pivoted from that. That was, I would say,

[E]

you know,

[C]

these lifespans in technology in our world used to last five years, six years get disrupted. Something comes along. Now it gets disrupted in a year or months or weeks. And so this was the most innovative thing in the world. Every engineer in the world wanted it. It was like nutty. And then it went and got disrupted in months. And so then what happens is Claude comes out and the next frontier is, all right, do you even, you know, you don't need to go ahead and complete the engineering test because you don't even need to be a linguist anymore. The agent can build the code on its own. And so that pivot took place. And now you see companies like Cursor that are just leapfrogging in that space and what they're doing is they're creating instead of an ide, an adequate, an agent development environment where agents are building code on its own. And so this then is the carrot model that we're in. And this becomes like a little bit of a competitive market currently. But the way the market is competitive is this, those agents are going against the model. And that model is what there is, fine tuned to be able to generate the code. So it goes in through the model, pulls it out. So if you think about models like OPUS and anthropic model, Claude going against OPUS to go build the application or generate the code for the application, Cursor came out with its version Composer. This is probably more than everybody, super interesting, but it's just, it's really interesting how quick the place moves. And so in Cursor, it has its own agent build and its own model that comes. And what happens is Every which has 3 million users. Yeah, exactly. And so every few weeks models jump each other. Opus 4.6 was the best model in the world. And then OpenAI came out with the best model in the world. And by the way, Cursor just came out Composer 2.0 and that proved to be the best. Like objectively measured on performance, ability to generate the code, completeness of code and quality of code, amount of code kept, it was inarguably better. So every time the models keep jumping and then you have Devin from Windsurf or the Cognition folks, you have Deepseek and the open source models, you have Google and you have Microsoft models. So all these things are being built and what Cursor did, that's very different. Here's where I'm saying this space is super wild. Is Cursor is agnostic to what model you use?

[E]

Yes.

[C]

So if you're Claude and you're a Claude user, you're going to consume an anthropic model. When they reduce the model, you're only locked into that model. However, you can use Claude and you can use anthropic models in the, in the cursor harness you could use Codex. In the cursor harness you can use codec against their model. In there you can use our model, you can use our agent build, you can go directly it's term, it doesn't

[E]

matter which based upon capability and pricing.

[C]

Exactly. So what we, we provide essentially a very differentiated solution. And this is where we're almost like more like frenemies right now with a lot of the competition. More Anthropic is consumed through Cursor than anywhere else in the world. In fact, when OpenAI announced, I think they said like you know, 5 exabytes were already consumed like a week ago or two weeks ago of their new model. 40% of that was consumed through cursor, 40% of all their model usage. So what that means is that Cursor is giving the engineer the unique ability to be able to pick the right model for the right use case. Because not everything might need an Opus 6. And there's a cost trend, a cost trade off between speed, quality and, and, and the dollars it takes to go build that and agent build. And so Cursor is giving people the ability to automate that process, to auto select the right model for the right job. And in that way we see this space slightly different. This is where I was getting to John around the competitive thing. We look at anthropic and an OpenAI is going to be our best partners in the world for a long time. That's why I talk with Paul and Brad regularly. I'm engaged with these guys, you know, and I look at them as the hyperscalers and we're the snowflake data bricks of the world in that we're building the vertical expertise for sdlc and they are building models and agents to solve maybe the largest TAM in the history of Time, human work, which is a $50 trillion TAM. They're trying to build models for poets and actors and voiceover and nurses and lawyers and everything else. We're just building agents for SDLC and do that better and faster than anybody in the world. And in doing so, we're going to consume and burn down more anthropic usage than I believe Claude will burn down in due time. We'll burn down more OpenAI usage than Codex.

[E]

You're almost selling the picks and the shovels for the gold rush, right?

[C]

Exactly. So that gives everybody a little bit of.

[E]

Oh, that's really good.

[C]

Amazing talking about that though.

[E]

And you have all these deals. Where does account management fit? Your reps are, you know, trying to figure out if they're doing the best deals, the one million dollar deals. Otherwise I can't get out of bed. Let's say. Yeah, where's management fit into this picture at all?

[C]

Totally. So one of the things we did right after I heard that comment about getting out of bed, I segmented the business. So I segmented the business. It took me seven days on the job. I segment the business like this. I created an enterprise strategic vertical that no rep had more than four accounts and I was. And I opened up 80 wrecks to go hire 80 reps across five verticals for just for North America. They could have no more than one existing customer and three prospects. And now that becomes a forcing function to go execute and run like both give our customers and our prospects an incredible experience, a buying experience to understand their needs and be able to help them through their AI journey properly and give them the right attention and focus. And it also lets a seller exercise what they love to do better than anything, right? Like they actually have to go do PGA and go build business value cases and understand the business value justification and meet the engineer and the top down together in the middle where you're having, you know, value based conversations as well as, you know, the bottoms up approach. So we did this and a lot of people you all know, we've now ended up hiring. I then segmented the enterprise business to go from 50 accounts down to no more than 18 and they could have no more than three existing customers so they couldn't chase. Then I created another segment, what we call geo. They can have no more than 30 accounts and they can have no more than five existing. Then I created a commercial and they are Basically everything under 250 engineers and, and it. John it's the only time in my entire life that I've ever segmented business and taken accounts away and changed the entire structure and nobody complained. In fact, every single person in seats said, thank God. Like, now I can do my best work. You're helping me. Like, nobody complained that their territory got smaller. They all said, this is I've been begging for a calvary to come so that we could do better work.

[F]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.

[A]

Sam.