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.

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.

Unlike the slow denial of SaaS by client-server companies, today's SaaS leaders (e.g., HubSpot, Notion) are rapidly integrating AI. They have an advantage due to vast proprietary data and existing distribution channels, making it harder for new AI-native startups to displace them. The old playbook of a slow incumbent may no longer apply.

In the previous SaaS era, emulating giants like Salesforce was a common but flawed strategy for startups. In the new AI era, there is no playbook at all, forcing founders to rethink go-to-market strategies from first principles rather than copying incumbents.

GTM leaders no longer need to delegate strategy implementation. With tools like ChatGPT, their spoken words can become code, allowing them to rapidly prototype and test complex, data-driven prospecting campaigns themselves, directly connecting high-level strategy to on-the-ground execution.

AI's power is not in creating successful strategies from scratch, but in scaling your existing best practices. An AI agent cannot make a broken process work. First, identify what messaging and campaigns are effective, then use AI to execute them at a near-infinite scale, 24/7.

SaaS playbooks for sales, marketing, and success were designed for annual product changes. AI-native products iterating every 30 days require a complete organizational rethink, as old go-to-market motions cannot keep pace with the product's rapid evolution.

The idea that GTM playbooks are broken is a dangerous myth. Veteran B2B leaders are successfully running top AI companies using the same fundamental plays (inbound, demos). The difference is adapting to new tools and overwhelming demand, not reinventing the core strategies that have always worked. The 2021 version is obsolete, but the fundamentals are not.

Core GTM tactics like outbound, events, and content marketing remain highly effective for AI companies. The failure isn't in the plays themselves, but in using outdated, generic playbooks. Success comes from applying these same plays with more intelligence, scale, and AI-driven personalization.