Liza Adams

Hello go-to-market leaders, strategists, and innovators! 👋 Thank you for dropping by to learn practical AI applications and gain strategic insights to help you grow your business and elevate your team’s strategic value.

Quick Take

GTM functions are converging. The silos between sales, marketing, and customer success are breaking down, especially in the AI era.

• The leaders who rise will think about entire customer experiences and naturally bring people together across boundaries

• Five GTM leadership traits that now matter more than scaling experience

Your buyers don’t care about your org chart. Neither does AI. But most GTM teams are still led like it’s 2015.

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The Convergence Is Already Happening

Future GTM leaders will think customer-first, collaborate across department lines, and run their teams like integrated businesses instead of separate functions. The Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index Report noted that “teams form around goals, not functions, with AI helping employees do more and work faster.”

Ethan Mollick, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab at The Wharton School, shared insights from a Harvard study with P&G professionals. Cross-functional teams working with AI experienced an interesting finding:

“You stop caring as much about the normal boundaries of your job.”

There are distinct differences between what works before and what works now.

These changing expectations require fundamental shifts in how GTM leaders think and act.

Everything we’ve been measuring and rewarding in GTM leadership – the scaling credentials, the functional expertise, the proven playbooks – matter less than traits most companies aren’t even screening for yet.

The Five Traits That Define Future GTM Leaders

These five traits better position GTM leaders for success in the AI era.

1. Adapt to New Buyer Behaviors and Expectations

AI is changing how people find and choose vendors. Beyond searching, they’re asking AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity who’s best suited to solve their problem and who they should trust.

That change has real consequences. According to a recent Semrush Study, AI search visitors convert 4.4x better than regular organic traffic because they arrive educated and ready to buy. But AI forms opinions about your brand before humans do, crawling every touchpoint from your website to employee review sites.

Great GTM leaders think about both the human buyers and the AI influencing them, too. That means making sure your brand is easy to understand, credible, and recommended by both people and machines.

Today’s buyers expect more from every interaction. Leaders need to balance:

• Automation with the human touch

• Personalization with transparency

• Convenience with privacy

• Efficiency with empathy

• Innovation with ethics

Making sure this balance happens is not trivial but the leaders who get this right will rise.

Where to Start: Want to see how AI recommends you vs. competitors? Use the Deep Research functionality inside tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. This prompt works well to simulate how AI evaluates vendors and makes recommendations:

“I’m the [TITLE] at a [COMPANY SIZE/TYPE]. We’re dealing with [TOP 2-3 PAIN POINTS]. Please evaluate the top 3 solutions that can help. Evaluate them on criteria most important to [TARGET MARKET]. For each competitor, please provide 1-5 ratings for each criterion plus overall in a table and include your rationale. Give pros/cons, which fits best for our situation and why. Also output 3 questions I should ask each competitor in areas that are limitations or challenges for the vendor.”

Use this to see how your brand stacks up, what’s showing up as your perceived strengths and gaps, and how the AI is telling your story.

For more insights on how to become more relevant in AI search and help AI understand for situations you company and products are most suitable, check out:

• Make Your Brand Sourced and a Top Result in AI Search: Practical Strategies for Marketers

• When AI Judges Your Brand Before Humans Do

2. Shift from AI Tools to AI Thinking Partners

Many teams use AI for emails, social posts, and basic content creation. More AI-forward teams do that AND use AI to pressure-test decisions, do scenario planning, identify and analyze gaps, and spot new opportunities. The gap widens daily between teams using AI as a strategic thought partner and those primarily using AI to write blogs.

Where to Start: Pick one decision your team made last month. Ask AI to play devil’s advocate, identify risks you missed, or suggest alternative approaches. Share the results with your team to show AI’s strategic potential.

Below are some examples of strategic AI use cases to get the ideas flowing.

Dive deeper into the topic here, Beyond Q&A: Using AI as a Thinking Partner.

3. Fix the Foundation Before Your Try to Scale

AI amplifies whatever you have. Poor product-market fit plus AI-powered campaigns equals faster path to failure. Plus it’s a waste of time, budget, and resources. But with good product-market fit, AI can speed up growth. Just like we can’t out-exercise a bad diet, we can’t out-campaign a bad product-market fit.

Where to Start: Complete the interactive Trust & PMF Assessment based on recent customer feedback. Know which quadrant you’re in to inform strategy and before you scale with AI.

Here’s another quick check: If your product hasn’t changed much in the last few years, it might be worth checking whether you’re still solving the right problems for your customers.

4. Measure What the Business Cares About

Kate Bullis, Global Marketing and Sales Practice Leader at ZRG, sees this in her executive search work.

“The most successful GTM leaders aren’t just functional experts, they’re business leaders who think like CEOs. Among other things, this means they think outside-in, so they optimize their departments by thinking first about optimizing the entire customer experience.  They understand that their org chart is only as good as the market’s experience and results.  This has always been the case but AI has made this increasingly important.”

Where to Start: Pick your biggest challenge in delivering customer success. Write what success looks like from their perspective. Then ask each department (marketing, sales, success) what metric they’d use to measure it.

You’re looking for misalignment. When different teams use different metrics to measure the same customer outcome. These gaps show where you’re thinking like separate functions instead of one business.

What you’ll typically find:

• Marketing – “20% more qualified leads”

• Sales – “45-day sales cycles”

• Success: – “Under 5% churn”

What you want:

• Everyone – “First value in 30 days with 90% satisfaction”

Those misaligned metrics are your roadmap for bringing teams together around shared customer outcomes. When everyone measures the same result, they naturally start working as one business instead of competing functions.

To learn more about the hidden cost of misalignment, check out AI Will Force Marketing and Sales Alignment: The Revenue Gap You Can’t Hide Anymore.

5. Develop People Alongside the Tech

The hardest part of AI transformation isn’t AI, it’s the human side. Leading through convergence requires understanding people’s fears, motivations, and passions. You’re asking teams to change how they’ve worked for years while navigating messy politics and ingrained culture.

Christine Heckart, CEO of Xapa, focuses on conscious leadership in the AI era.

“The most expensive AI deployment is one where people don’t know how to use it effectively. You have to meet people where they are and bring them along. The focus can’t just be on training machines. It has to be on investing in humans so people can guide AI responsibly and ethically.”

Where to Start: Several shifts to consider…

• From: Driving AI adoption To: Developing AI-ready careers

• From: Giving people tools To: Giving people space to learn

• From: Mandating use To: Inspiring possibilities

• From: Early wins at any cost To: Building confidence that lasts

Choose one shift above. This week, have one conversation with a team member about how AI could enhance their career.

We’re already seeing these traits used in practice especially in how teams are moving from physical handoffs to human–AI partnerships. I’ve shared how GTM leaders are breaking silos, connecting AI teammates, and building organizations that operate across functions instead of around them.

If you missed those, check out The End of Handoffs: How AI Teammates Work Together and Leader’s Playbook: How a Lean Team Transformed Into a Human–AI Powerhouse for real examples of what these leadership shifts look like in action.

The Human Side of Convergence

A few months ago, one of my 2025 predictions is that the GTM engine will begin to converge and that there are key leadership traits for those who will lead this unified org successfully. Today, it’s becoming more of a reality.

As expected, the human side matters more. People first, AI forward. That’s the formula that works.

This shift requires two things: GTM leaders developing these new capabilities, and organizations recognizing and hiring for them. The transformation happens faster when both sides evolve together.

The leaders who thrive will be those who remember that behind every metric, workflow, and optimization lives a human being trying to do their best work.

That’s worth celebrating.

The Practical AI in Go-to-Market newsletter is designed to share practical learnings and insights in using AI responsibly. Subscribe today and let’s learn together on this AI journey!

For those who prefer more interactive learning, explore our applied AI workshops, designed to inspire teams with real-life use cases tailored to specific go-to-market functions.

We also guide teams through their AI transformation journey. Check out this team transformation case study and step-by playbook of how we helped transform a lean GTM team into a human-AI powerhouse with human and AI teammates.

Or, if audio-visual content is your style, here are virtual and in-person speaking events where I’ve covered a variety of AI topics. I’ve also keynoted at many organization and corporate-wide events. Whether through the newsletter, multimedia content, or in-person events, I hope to connect with you soon.