Why Go-To-Market is next in AI’s crosshairs.
Software engineering has been totally disrupted in the first quarter of 2026, and no software engineer today works without an AI co-engineer.
Sales teams already live inside a crowded tool stack full of ERP, CRM, engagement platforms, billing systems, forecasting tools and customer platforms.
The same pattern is about to repeat in go-to-market. Sales teams already live inside a crowded tool stack full of ERP, CRM, engagement platforms, billing systems, forecasting tools and customer platforms. Most of those systems are excellent at recording what humans did. They are not built to do the actual work. That is the opening for agent driven workflows to change the game.
Now every week is followed by another headline of layoffs in tech. This frankly surprises me, and I must wonder if boards really understand the opportunity AI brings. There seems to be this obsession with AI replacement of people to reduce cost, and we are dangerously entering the territory of peer pressure where boards are laying off people because others are doing it, not because it makes any commercial sense.
Think of it this way. When building something becomes cheaper and faster, the natural reaction is not to hire fewer people. The natural reaction is to build more. The same will happen in revenue. Agents will not shrink the work. They will expand what can be done.
What agent driven GTM actually does
An agent plans and then executes across systems, measures outcomes and improves over time. In plain terms an agent can
· Orchestrate a sequence of actions across systems.
· Send outreach, update records, create quotes and trigger approvals.
· Learn from results and adjust tactics without human babysitting.
The result is a revenue engine that runs deeper and more consistently than a human team alone can manage. Imagine a top rep cloned into software that never forgets a follow up and never needs coffee. That is the practical upside. The comedic upside is that the clone has no empathy of the end customer, and the real humans will have more capacity to get out of the admin forest and into the addressable customer base.
I challenge any CRO or CEO to tell me that their reps work across every prospect and customer in their assigned territories at the same degree of depth and intimacy. I’ve never seen it and I built and ran revenue teams my entire career. This notion of the agent doing the admin, managing the scheduling, driving the strategic engagement, in context, and the revenue teams doing the part humans have done for centuries – understanding and working empathetically with other humans to create value (i.e. sales), excites me beyond belief.
Teams should be hiring right now, not laying people off, because the opportunity to capture market share combined with agentic AI is greater than it’s ever been.
Real world outcomes
We are working with companies right now on redesigning their GTM function – and in 0 cases, has our work resulted in layoffs.
Examples from anonymized deployments include
· Quote and order orchestration agents that cut manual work from hours to minutes and removed error driven margin loss. How many account execs love their CPQ tool.
· Autonomous demand generation agents that run continuous experiments and outreach and produces qualified leads at scale.
· Revenue recovery agents that found missed charges and reclaimed meaningful revenue.
· Revenue expansion agents that direct account execs with probability matching to the next logical purchase in every existing customer.
· Customer usage agents that analyse customer usage and predict potential churn by comparing usage and support ticketing.
None of these replaced sellers. They amplified sellers and freed them to focus on high value human work. The best sellers will still close the hardest deals. The best agents will make sure the acquisition, expansion, retention motions are operating 24/7 at scale, and nothing falls through the cracks.
How to move forward with confidence
Automate the repeatable, measure the impact, then scale. That approach keeps the CFO calm and the sales floor productive. Also keep a sense of humour. If the dem gen agent starts writing poetry in outreach messages, it is probably time to (re)boot the agent.
The GTM shift
For decades enterprise systems recorded work. The next era will have systems that do the work. This is about giving people better tools to do what people do best. Think of agent driven go-to-market as better plumbing for revenue. It is not glamorous, but it makes everything else work. Start small prove value then scale… and show your teams some love. The layoff headlines are giving everyone the heebie-jeebies.