What GTM leaders are saying about AI

“I don’t know if our job will exist in five to ten years.” — Anonymous revenue leader

I recently hosted a lunch with top GTM leaders. We had sales leaders, founders, operations directors, and product marketing experts at the table. There was some fear and trepidation, but mostly, it was a group of curious minds eager to learn how other teams are navigating these new, uncharted waters.

We also surveyed 40 marketing and sales leaders (CMOs, CROs, Heads of Marketing, and Heads of Sales), and 80% said they plan to use AI to help with sales and marketing, and almost 58% said their budgets are increasing. 

This gathering and survey helped crystalize some of the key GTM insights I’ve been hearing two years into the AI wave.

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1) We’re tired of buying multiple tools 

Best-of-breed tooling is dead. While GTM leaders were previously fine with buying multiple tools for different functions (recording calls, reporting, CRM, etc), more and more, I’m hearing the craving for one or two tools to do most of everything. For the next two years, GTM leaders at companies with talented technical teams will build the customization they crave. There has never been a better time to dive into APIs, fine-tune a model, and build what your team needs. 

However, as GTM tools get more consolidated, I can see buying coming back, but it’s not going to happen for a while.

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2) Customer support is getting automated first

80% of our GTM leader survey respondents said Customer Support would be the role most impacted by AI. This is bolstered by companies like Klarna sharing how AI is helping drive results and the demand that solutions from Sierra and Decagon are seeing from the market.

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3) Orgs are budgeting for AI but are impatient to see the ROI

While it’s early stages, 80% of the leaders we surveyed plan to use AI to help with sales and marketing. Right now, these leaders are planning to spend, on average, 13.5% of their budgets on AI tools to help their GTM functions.

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And when it comes to AI, GTM leaders are expecting fast results. Of those surveyed, almost 53% expect results in less than a year, and 30% expect results within months or sooner. If you don’t bake in the proof of how your solution can deliver value immediately, your customer may churn sooner than you think. In the age of AI, competitors are cropping up faster and from both startups and incumbents. 

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4) We’re never going back to the era of huge marketing teams

I’ve managed both small and large teams, and one thing I can tell from this AI era is that more nimble teams will win. That generally means smaller, leaner teams. Of the GTM leaders we surveyed, 28% expect AI to impact their headcount plans in 2025. Most believe it’ll allow them to reallocate resources toward other roles, and a smaller amount believe it’ll result in slower hiring or reductions. 

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Accomplishing more with less has never been easier. I’m hearing both from founders of small teams and larger organizations that the output of generative AI is helping step up the efficiency and stay on message. One early-stage founder eagerly described how AI has allowed him to build his GTM function from first principles and be more involved in sales and marketing for longer, which was radically different from a prior company he started. With great options for generative copy, images, and videos, GTM leaders should be looking to hire people who understand how additive AI platforms can be to their workflows.

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5) Customer success and revenue are becoming one team (again)

In this API-driven world, contracts are evolving. Many companies are moving to usage-based pricing or at least employing a usage-based component to pricing. AI is coming to eat your seats. There needs to be alignment on a goal—like API usage—if that’s what is driving the revenue, which means sales reps and solutions engineers are going to have to work together. This mirrors the pre-SaaS era when sales reps worked closely with customer success to produce results for their customers. As these teams combine again, a lot is going to change. You won’t be able to do pricing and quotas the old way anymore. Some companies are using a system that shares both bonuses and metrics between sales reps and customer success reps to ensure clients use the platform effectively. 

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6) Growth is your most important hire

While people have long debated which marketing expertise to hire for first—product, brand, or growth—the answer for most companies is growth—especially if you have a PLG sales motion. Growth hires are tied closer to the product and, therefore, to revenue. Whether or not they sit in marketing is not as important as finding the right person. One mid-sized startup leader described a recent growth role as being conceptualized as a sales hire, then moving to marketing, and finally landing in product, where they found the right pool of candidates. 

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7) Teach your team how to use AI, or they’ll use it poorly

You need guardrails and a human-in-the-loop to prevent a GPT-faux pas. Leaders we gathered unanimously agreed that AI do’s and don’ts and essential training were requirements. Some even shared how custom-built AI solutions (like searching through technical documentation and providing answers for reps) became so thorough that they decided to surface it directly to customers to help them support themselves immediately (see point #2 above). 

As a former CMO, one of the mandates I used to give my teams was to always be on the lookout for ways to reinvent processes to better achieve our goals. AI has changed the game and we are now in a moment to rethink how tactics can better serve a strategy, it can be taken as a challenge, or what it actually is—a magnificent opportunity.