Instead of hiring a 'Chief AI Officer' or an agency, the most successful GTM AI deployments empower existing top performers. Pair your best SDR, marketer, or RevOps person with AI tools, and let them learn and innovate together. This internal expertise is more valuable than any external consultant.

The key for go-to-market leaders to stay relevant is hands-on experience with AI. Instead of delegating, leaders should personally select an AI tool, ingest data, and go through the iterative training process. This firsthand knowledge is a rare and highly valuable skill.

As AI tools become operable via plain English, the key skill shifts from technical implementation to effective management. People managers excel at providing context, defining roles, giving feedback, and reporting on performance—all crucial for orchestrating a "team" of AI agents. Their skills will become more valuable than pure AI expertise.

Don't start by asking for a budget or hiring an AI expert. The critical first step for any CRO or CMO is to roll up their sleeves, pick one tool, and personally manage the 30-day training and deployment process. This builds essential, foundational knowledge.

Companies are replacing traditional, siloed sales assembly lines with a centralized "GTM Engineer." This technical role uses AI and automation tools to build revenue systems, absorbing the manual research and prospecting work previously done by individual reps. This allows for rapid learning and scaling of creative ideas across the entire team.

It's nearly impossible to hire senior product or engineering leaders who are also fluent in AI. The advice for experienced managers is to step back into an Individual Contributor (IC) role. This allows them to build hands-on AI skills, demonstrating the humility and beginner's mindset necessary to lead in this new era.

Unlike older sales tools, AI agents shouldn't be handed to individual SDRs to manage. This approach leads to failure. Instead, centralize the strategy: a core team must own agent training, contact routing, and performance tuning to ensure a consistent and effective GTM motion across the entire organization.

You can't delegate AI tool implementation to your sales team or a generalist RevOps person. Success requires a dedicated, technical owner in-house—a 'GTM engineer' or 'AI nerd.' This person must be capable of building complex campaigns and working closely with the vendor's team to train and deploy the agent effectively.

This emerging role applies engineering and AI to GTM functions, building agents to automate tasks like lead qualification and personalized outreach. This dramatically increases efficiency, allowing one person, with an AI agent, to do the work of ten.