Replit's Revenue Chief Would Rather Hire the AI Native Than the Sales Veteran
Replit CRO Ghazi Masood has interviewed more than 250 sellers, and the pattern he found changed how he staffs a revenue team where the product does most of the selling.
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Most revenue orgs still hire for scar tissue. The seasoned closer with a decade of quotas behind them and a contact list to match is the safe pick, the résumé that clears the bar without a second look. Ghazi Masood, the Chief Revenue Officer at AI app-building platform Replit, has interviewed enough of those sellers to stop trusting the reflex. He'd rather bet on the candidate who's fluent in AI and green at selling than the decorated veteran who can't work the tools.
Replit is the kind of company where that trade makes sense. People build working software on it by describing what they want in plain language, and the AI does the assembly. Most users onboard themselves, with no rep in the room. A revenue leader watching that every day thinks differently about what a seller is for.
Masood wrote in a LinkedIn post, "A common pattern: seasoned sellers are NOT AI literate. This is a problem." His answer to it, in the same post, is "You must master AI." Then comes the hiring rule that drew hundreds of reactions. "Personally? I'd prefer hiring someone advanced in AI & inexperienced in sales > someone advanced in sales & inexperienced in AI."
The seller's new edge
It's tempting to read that as provocation. But Masood is pointing at a shift in where a seller's advantage now comes from. Experience still counts. Relationships hold their value, and so does the read on a stalled deal. The manual work beneath that judgment moves faster with AI. Research, first-touch qualification, drafting, and follow-up run at a speed no rep matches by hand, and the job shifts toward directing that work.
The bet comes down to which of the two is easier to acquire. On the one hand, experience can be coached. A green hire who already thinks in AI picks up discovery, objection-handling, and the close inside a few quarters. Going the other direction takes longer. A veteran who has spent 15 years without the tools has habits to unlearn, and unlearning runs slower than learning.
Rebuilding the seat
An AI-led revenue org keeps its sellers. The seat gets rebuilt around AI absorbing the volume, with judgment staying wherever the account sits. At Replit, where the product reaches most of the market on its own, the accounts that still need a person go to whoever can direct AI across them with confidence. That seat carries more authority than the one it replaces, and it goes to whoever picks up the tools first.
The résumé that once looked safe now carries the risk. Masood would build a revenue org from the candidate who unsettles a traditional sales leader, fluent in the models and early in a career. Treating AI as a default coworker is the instinct he can't instill on a hiring timeline, so he hires for it directly.
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