701 - Why AI Makes You More Valuable, Not Less, with Sarah McDevitt
Why you should listen
- Sarah McDevitt, a HubSpot leader and first-time author, breaks relational intelligence into five practical signals (Awareness, Presence, Empathetic Structuring, Connection Capital, and Human Differentiation) you can use to become the partner a client cannot swap out for a tool.
- Learn how to be a "context miner" in every meeting: the way sharp partners use full presence to extract how a business actually makes decisions, then feed that context into their AI agents to get outputs generic prompts cannot match.
- Get Sarah's read on where the retainer money moves next as AI creates a wave of "vibe coded" messes, plus the governance and platform cohesion work partners can charge for when customers realize they need one person to own the whole stack.
You have spent years getting deep on the platform, and now AI can do a slice of that build work in minutes, so a quiet question sits at the back of your mind: what is a partner actually for now? In this episode, I talk with Sarah McDevitt, a HubSpot leader and first-time author of The Round Table, about relational intelligence, which she defines as the ability to build, sustain, and grow trust-based relationships that AI cannot replicate. We get into why the skills AI makes less scarce do not make you less useful, and why so many partners have their identity wrapped up in the exact technical work that is now being handed to agents. Sarah has spent years watching what separates the partners who stay in the room from the ones who get swapped out, and almost none of it is technical. If your value has always lived in the build, and you can feel that ground shifting under you, this conversation is about where your value goes next.
Key Highlights
- The Five Signals: Awareness, Presence, Empathetic Structuring, Connection Capital, and Human Differentiation, the practical markers of relational intelligence and what each one looks like day to day for a SaaS partner.
- Context Mining in Meetings: Why full presence, not note-taking, is how you pull out the decision-making context that makes your AI agents genuinely useful to a client instead of generic.
- Connection Capital Beyond One Champion: How tethering a whole account to a single point of contact leaves you exposed the day they move on, and how mapping stakeholders protects the relationship.
- The Retainer Nobody Sold Before: Why the "one and done" implementation model is breaking, and how constantly shifting business context turns the "evolve" stage into a never-ending retainer.
- Change Correction and Governance: Sarah's prediction of a vibe-coding implosion and loss of cohesion, and the platform cohesion and agent governance work partners can charge for when it hits.
About Sarah McDevitt
Sarah McDevitt is the Senior Director of Partner Strategy at HubSpot, where she leads a global community of more than 7,000 partners through AI transformation. A native of Sligo and now based in Dublin, Sarah is the creator of the Relational Intelligence framework and the author of her first book, The Round Table: How Relational Intelligence Will Become Your Human Advantage in the AI Age. Her core thesis, "RI + AI = Trust," argues that the smartest organizations use AI to strengthen human relationships rather than replace them. A TEDx speaker and advocate whose work spans hybrid team leadership and responsible AI adoption, Sarah helps partners see that as technical skills become less scarce, the ability to build trust becomes their most valuable and defensible asset.
Resources and Links
- Sarah McDevitt on The Paul Higgins Podcast: Episode 642 - Stop Being a Platform Expert - Why Business Growth Advisors Win in the AI Era with Sarah McDevitt
- Hubspot.com
- Sarah McDevitt on LinkedIn
- 20VC podcast
- Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier Call
- Book a Decision Session here
- Previous episode: 694 - The 60% Shift
- Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
- Join our newsletter
- Suggested resources
