Instead of searching marketplaces, a better acquisition strategy is to first offer a niche service using AI to firms in your target industry. This allows you to learn the business from the inside, build your AI agents on real work, and establish trust with owners, making you the obvious choice when one is ready to sell.

Buyers now use AI to arrive with a full research dossier on your product, pricing, and competitors. This changes the GTM role from persuading customers with clever messaging to enabling their decision-making. The new focus is helping buyers quickly experience your product's value on their own terms.

In the AI gold rush, the most valuable customers are often newly-formed, well-capitalized AI-native companies. A winning go-to-market strategy involves placing bets on these disruptors, not just targeting established enterprises who may move slower.

For fragmented, tech-averse industries, GC funds startups to first build an AI automation platform. Then, instead of a difficult sales process, the startup acquires traditional service businesses, implementing its own AI to dramatically boost their margins, providing immediate distribution and data.

AUTO1 prioritized creating a sourcing mechanism for dealers years before launching its consumer retail arm. This B2B-first approach provided a data and supply advantage over failed competitors like Kazoo, which focused prematurely on the high-margin but complex consumer market.

Many AI and PLG companies in a hot market are not actually selling; they're taking orders, much like early Salesforce. The companies that build a world-class, value-based sales organization now, even if it seems unnecessary, will be the ones who win when the hype cools and competition intensifies.

Vendor selection is shifting from passive search rankings to active execution. An AI agent will choose the vendor tool it can successfully use to complete a task via direct API calls or browser automation. The ability for an agent to execute with your product is the new discovery moat.

AI enables companies to sell outcomes rather than just product usage. To do this profitably, they need greater control over the entire delivery process. This is driving a trend of vertical integration, where companies expand into adjacent parts of the value chain to own the end-to-end experience and capture more value.

Unlike B2C purchases which are often low-cost and for leisure, B2B transactions are expensive and complex. This makes them ideal for AI agents designed to save time and streamline multi-step processes, rather than for "killing time" like consumer shopping.