There’s a temptation, in tech, to see size as synonymous with progress. Two companies join forces, their reach expands, their press releases swell with metrics that dazzle — $10 trillion in revenue under management, 1 trillion data signals ingested. But as with most mergers, the more interesting question is not how big, but how new.

Clari’s acquisition of Groove two years ago was framed as a step toward integration and innovation. The reality was messier. Those systems didn’t fully merge in any meaningful way. And that history matters, because it suggests the current Clari–Salesloft deal isn’t the beginning of something new so much as the continuation of a pattern: bolting together two mid-tier systems and hoping the combination becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The problem is structural. Sales engagement platforms — SEPs — are still largely point solutions: sequencing here, CRM there, dialer somewhere else. The AI layer is fragmented, which means context — the lifeblood of effective selling — is perpetually lost in translation. What worked in 2015 doesn’t work in 2025’s multi-threaded, AI-mediated buying cycles. And simply merging two companies in the same outdated mold doesn’t change that.

This isn’t unique to Clari and Salesloft. Outreach’s acquisition of Canopy, Seismic’s purchase of Lessonly — these were also billed as transformative. In practice, they created larger, slower, more complex platforms that struggled to deliver a coherent, integrated experience.

A next-generation SEP would look fundamentally different. It would integrate every sales motion — engagement, CRM, dialer, enrichment, analytics — into a single system with one AI brain, automating everything but the moments that require human persuasion. It would unify every touchpoint, every signal, every stakeholder into a single contextual thread sellers can act on instantly.

That’s not what’s happening here. This is a merger that reads like it could have happened five years ago — and maybe that’s the point. In an industry facing a generational shift toward AI-native, fully integrated revenue systems, Clari and Salesloft are trying to create relevance through consolidation. The question is whether that buys them time, or simply delays the inevitable.