Hello go-to-market (GTM) 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
Most common question after the work charts newsletter: “How do I actually organize my team this way?”
Here’s what you need to know:
- The structure is Journey Teams plus a Shared Expertise Pool. Journey Teams own Net New Revenue or Net Revenue Retention end-to-end. The Expertise Pool provides unified data, AI systems, and brand narrative that both teams build from.
- You’re hiring and developing for capabilities, not titles. Journey Teams need people who can generate pipeline, build messaging, drive adoption, enable sales, and orchestrate AI systems. The Expertise Pool needs people who can build unified infrastructure and own core narrative.
- Three capabilities separate who can make this transition from who can’t. Deep expertise in something that drives outcomes (with willingness to evolve), thinking in customer results instead of functional metrics, and ability to orchestrate humans and AI toward value.
- AI enables coordination that manual processes couldn’t sustain. Your teams can stay aligned without constant meetings because AI teammates catch inconsistencies before they reach customers.
- You don’t need to reorganize everything at once. Start by connecting one workflow across teams. Prove the model works. Let the results build the case for broader change.
AI Video Explainer and AI Podcast Versions of This Newsletter
To support different learning styles, this newsletter is available as an 8-min AI video explainer and a 12-min AI podcast with two AI hosts. If you’ve not seen these AIs in action, they’re worth a view/listen. The tech is advancing in amazing ways. I used Google’s NotebookLM to create these and personally reviewed them for accuracy and responsible AI use.
Captions are auto generatedPlay8-Minute AI Video Explainer
Why This Matters Now
McKinsey’s Mar 2025 State of AI report analyzed 25 organizational attributes and found that workflow redesign drives the biggest impact from gen AI.
As Alex Singla, McKinsey’s global leader of QuantumBlack AI, notes: “The organizations building genuine competitive advantage are thinking in terms of wholesale transformative change that stands to alter their business models, cost structures, and revenue streams, rather than proceeding incrementally.”
Yet only 21% of organizations have fundamentally redesigned workflows.
And the pressure is accelerating. AI isn’t just exposing internal gaps. It’s surfacing them to your customers.
“AI doesn’t just read what we say in our marketing, it surfaces customer reviews, employee feedback, and every other signal about our brand. Internal inconsistencies that used to be hidden are now visible to buyers.
To be recommended by AI, you have to be genuinely helpful and trustworthy across every touchpoint. You can’t polish your way out of broken experiences anymore.”
When your Marketing team says one thing, Sales delivers another, and CS solves different problems, AI surfaces that inconsistency to buyers. The gap between the job to be done and where the expertise resides becomes visible. AI doesn’t care about your silos. Neither do your customers. They only care about outcomes.
And your peers see this shift coming.
“I spent years focused on how work actually flows across teams and where it breaks down.
Now, advising CMOs at Hellman & Friedman portfolio companies, the conversation is shifting. Leaders aren’t just asking ‘how do we make our marketing function more efficient?’ They’re also asking ‘if we could redesign how work flows from marketing through sales to customers, what business impact becomes possible?’ That’s a fundamentally different question.”
The companies that eliminate these gaps will win. The question is how you organize your team to capture that advantage.
The Structure: Journey Teams + Expertise Pool
Work reorganizes around customer outcomes, not departments.
Journey Teams own complete customer outcomes end-to-end. No departmental handoffs. Each team unifies the capabilities needed to deliver their mission:
- New Customer Journey Team is accountable for Net New Revenue AND time-to-value (e.g., getting customers to see value within 90 days). This team includes pipeline generation, messaging, sales development, enablement, and early adoption specialists.
- Growth Customer Journey Team is accountable for Net Revenue Retention AND customer satisfaction (e.g., maintaining 90%+ CSAT while expanding revenue). This team includes account management, customer success, expansion enablement, and retention specialists.
Notice what changed. Marketing isn’t measured on MQLs. Sales isn’t measured on closed deals alone. CS isn’t measured just on renewals. The entire Journey Team is accountable for the customer outcome end-to-end. When everyone shares the same metric, the handoffs that used to break customer experience disappear.
A Shared Expertise Pool provides the infrastructure both Journey Teams build from:
- GTM Infrastructure delivers unified data, AI systems, and governance. The handoff from new to growth customer becomes a status change in one system, not a handoff between departments.
- Brand & Core Narrative provides the single source of truth for who you are and what you stand for. The foundation both Journey Teams translate for their specific journey.
AI makes this coordination sustainable. Your teams build AI teammates trained on the core brand narrative. These AI teammates flag inconsistencies before messaging goes live (“this promise conflicts with the onboarding experience”). They surface patterns from customer signals across both journeys (“sales is promising X, but CS reports X causes support tickets”).
Instead of constant alignment meetings, your teams focus on strategic decisions and the exceptions AI surfaces. The technology catches the gaps humans used to miss.
This is “No Daylight” in practice. Everyone builds from the same data foundation, the same brand truth, with AI ensuring consistency across execution.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Two real transformations show how this works.
Marketing Ops Evolves to GTM Infrastructure
A global cybersecurity leader transformed their marketing ops function into the enablement layer for the entire GTM team. Picture this as the GTM Infrastructure lead in the Shared Expertise Pool.
The 75 trailblazers across marketing built their own AI teammates using ChatGPT Enterprise. Everyone could create, experiment, and connect workflows within the AI platform.
But when workflows needed to cross platforms (connecting to CRM, marketing automation, internal repositories), marketing ops provided the technical expertise and governance. They created a governance framework called the “AI Network” to organize and track AI teammates. Not everyone should have read/write access to core business systems. Marketing ops prioritized these complex integrations, built them properly, and worked with Legal and IT to ensure responsible access and security.
The model: democratized AI teammate creation, centralized technical integration and governance. This scales without creating risk.
The work now supports 150+ people across marketing and beyond with 57 AI teammates in regular use. The team achieved significant time savings and improved campaign engagement by 2-3X through these innovative, connected workflows.
Integrated Campaigns Reimagines to Journey Orchestration
Megan Ratcliff worked herself out of a traditional job and reimagined her work into something that wasn’t possible without AI. She evolved from integrated campaigns to GTM Architect, orchestrating work across marketing, sales, and customer success.
Her work always spanned boundaries. AI gave her the tools to orchestrate at that level. “AI has unleashed my superpowers. I’m working across the entire GTM motion now.”
Picture Megan as part of a Journey Team, coordinating the capabilities needed to drive customer outcomes end-to-end.
Her team (25 humans and 63 AI teammates) achieved results that show what’s possible when you organize around outcomes instead of functions. Up to 75% faster content creation, 98% lead qualification accuracy, and 35% improved campaign performance.
Read about Megan’s journey here.
People who can orchestrate across boundaries and reimagine their work around customer outcomes are creating roles that didn’t exist before. Here’s an example:
Three Capabilities That Separate Who Can Evolve From Who Can’t
You have people on your team right now who can make this transition. Here’s what to look for.
1. Deep Expertise With Willingness to Evolve It
Deep capability in something that drives outcomes. This could be sales methodology, strategic positioning, customer psychology, data infrastructure, or AI orchestration itself. The key is willingness to evolve what “deep expertise” means as AI changes the work.
Deep expertise in competitive positioning translates to leading messaging across Journey Teams. Strong data systems capabilities become the foundation for unified infrastructure in your Expertise Pool. Understanding audiences at a strategic level evolves into orchestrating AI systems that generate pipeline at scale.
The capability that matters is understanding what drives results. The tactics change. The strategic thinking gets amplified.
2. Think in Customer Outcomes, Not Functional Metrics
A Harvard study with P&G professionals found that when specialists from different functions used AI, they experienced an interesting shift: “You stop caring as much about the normal boundaries of your job.” When AI helps people think beyond their specialized training, traditional silos break down naturally.
The people on your team who already think this way are ready to lead. Others can develop this capability with the right support and space to learn.
This shift changes how work gets measured. No more departmental KPIs where Marketing optimizes for leads, Sales optimizes for close rates, and CS optimizes for retention, while the customer experiences the gaps between them. Journey Teams own customer outcomes. Everyone succeeds or fails together.
3. Orchestrate Humans and AI Toward Value
Who on your team is already building and guiding AI teammates? Who coordinates across teams naturally? Who focuses on what drives value instead of what’s always been done?
These capabilities can be developed. The people who start learning now will have options. The people who wait won’t.
Your Job as a Leader
Invest in upskilling everyone. Shift mindset and behavior by showing them what’s possible with AI in use cases relevant to their roles. Provide hands-on training in collaborating with AI and building AI teammates. Give them space to experiment and learn. Create pathways for people to reimagine work and evolve into new roles. Make AI fluency a core capability, not optional.
Not everyone will move at the same pace. Some will lead the change, some will follow once they see it working, and some will need more time or different support. Have compassion for people navigating this transition and help them find paths where they can succeed.
Here’s the strategic choice you’re making:
By late 2025, the data confirmed it. While 80% of companies set efficiency as an AI objective, the highest performers set innovation and growth as objectives too.
They refused to choose between efficiency and growth.
Your Transformation Path
You don’t need to reorganize everything at once.
Start by connecting one painful workflow across teams. Maybe it’s deals that CS wasn’t prepared for. Maybe it’s messaging that doesn’t match the customer experience. Maybe it’s prospect insights that never reach the sales team.
Fix that one workflow. Build one AI teammate that connects it. Prove that eliminating the gap improves customer outcomes.
Beware of the trap of simply automating old processes, especially broken ones. When we automate broken workflows, AI amplifies what’s broken. It becomes a faster path to failure. And we can’t reimagine the future by simply automating the past.
Here’s how this might work.
A PMM team was frustrated that Sales never used their 5-page competitive battlecards. They realized Sales didn’t need all that detail. They needed a 1-page summary with the top 3 competitor gotchas and 2 must-win value props.
They built one AI teammate trained on all their battlecards with a single job to generate that 1-page summary on demand. The PMM and one SDR tested it together, refined the outputs, built trust in the system.
Once it worked, they shared the approach across the team and identified the next workflow to connect. Competitive messaging improved, handoff friction disappeared, and both teams moved on to fix the next gap.
The journey from here:
- First milestone – Fix individual handoffs. Learn to connect workflows
- Second milestone – Connect multiple handoffs. Build toward unified journey coverage
- Third milestone – Evolve team structure around journeys. Implement the full model
Each step moves you closer. The key is momentum without breaking your team.
The companies that eliminate the daylight between what customers need and what teams deliver won’t just be more efficient. They’ll do work that wasn’t possible before.
This is a journey, not a weekend project. Some companies will move through these stages in months. Others will take years. The timeline matters less than the direction.
What important is starting.
The companies making small moves today will have structural advantages when market pressure accelerates this shift.
Think big. Start small. Move fast with ongoing momentum.
What’s Next
Build the change infrastructure. Invest in upskilling and put hands on keyboard. Model the behavior you want to see. Make AI fluency a leadership competency. Give people space to experiment, fail, and learn.
Not every company will transform at the same pace. Some might stay at Stage 2 or 3 and that might be exactly right for their business. But if eliminating customer friction creates competitive advantage, and AI makes it visible to buyers, the market will decide how fast this matters.
The technology is ready and the patterns are becoming more clear. Control what you can. Start where you are. Put your team in the best position to compete.
The Practical AI in Go-to-Market newsletter shares learnings and insights in using AI responsibly. Subscribe today and let’s learn together on this AI journey.
For applied learning: Explore our applied AI workshops, offering both strategic sessions (use cases and roadmaps) and hands-on building (create AI teammates and workflows during the workshop). You’ll leave with either a clear plan or working solutions.
For team transformation: See real examples—a lean GTM team’s step-by-step playbook and a global cybersecurity leader scaling to 150+ marketers with 57 AI teammates integrated into daily workflows.
For speaking: Here are virtual and in-person 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.
