The Widening Gap Between AI-Natives vs. AI-Nots
The Signal
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I’m energized to (re)discover the GTM playbook that *actually* works in 2025, through the lens of AI and automation. There are new tools, new roles, and new methods. It’s chaos. And a blast. And AI is at the center of it all. I’m lucky to be talking/working with many of the best founders and GTM operators in the world.
Today’s post explores what I’m seeing on the frontlines.
[Please excuse any bluntness/harshness.]
Alright, let’s get into it.
The Widening Gap Between AI-Natives vs. AI-Nots
My journey in AI continues.
I have previously shared how my AI journey wasn't one big lightbulb moment, but instead 100 small sparks. And, how my conviction grows stronger every month around the fact that building "AI-native" is the biggest opportunity of this decade.
Today, I’m sharing what I’m seeing unfold in real-time as the gap widens between companies—and people—who are building AI-natively, and those who are not.
I stole some quotes from Jason Lemkin and Kyle Norton’s talk at SaaStr Annual this year—AI, Sales + GTM in 2025/2026: This Changes Everything—which I highly recommend watching:
-If you’re a sales leader and not AI native in the next 6-12 months, you’re cooked.
-I’ll give them until June 30th to figure out [how to use AI], but after that point, start taking a sharpie to their name in the org chart. I know it’s mean, but they had their chance.
-Your team should be scared, and like a kid in a candy store.
Candidly, I could not agree more.
I haven't been on a learning curve this steep since my first day as an SDR in 2011—opening Salesforce.com in a cubicle in Charleston, SC, slanging Loan Origination software to bankers (fake it til you make it, right?).
It’s hard to (re)learn how to work.
It’s scary and intimidating.
It’s time-consuming to experiment.
But boy, oh boy, are there tasty opportunities in this candy store.
3 examples of AI-native encounters in the wild
Example #1 → I was on a call with someone who is custom-building agentic workflows for companies. He reminded me of a quote by Sam Altman from an interview from a year ago, where he said: “The only framework I’ve found that works is this: you can either build a business that bets against the next model being really good, or one that bets on it getting better and benefits when it does.” We talked about what might be possible, and he simply said: “Let’s build it, we’ll have it ready in two weeks.” AI-first builders ship fast, thanks to the leverage of new tools.
Example #2 → I’m working with a Series C company, helping them modernize their outbound engine, and the head of marketing mentioned they had plans to improve a specific landing page (a “lead magnet”) in Q3. I spent 10 minutes in Lovable, and vibe-coded a working prototype for them.
Example #3 → Last month, an AI-native company reached out to me to do a consulting project for CRM enrichment stuff for them, and I was going out of town for a week (I went backpacking in Colorado for 5 days, was fully offline). Their head of security was responding to my emails on a Saturday morning to get the deal done. The speed of these AI-native companies is just different.
AI-native companies/workers move faster.
Their gut reaction isn’t to put together a deck or Notion doc to review in next week’s call. They aren’t creating OKRs in Asana to do next quarter. Instead, the first reaction is simply to build and ship something, usually during the meeting where the discussion is happening.
The gap between idea and execution is collapsing, thanks to AI.
The GTM leaders who understand this are running circles around their competitors.
“Move fast and break things” is back - but this time with 10x output and 1/10 the mess.
-Elena Verna
Wild times ahead
It’s a scary time. I’m knee deep in this stuff (and highly incentivized to stay up-to-date on all of it) and yet, I’m still intimidated by it and scared I’m too set in my ways to compete with these AI-native 20-year olds who are hopped up on Zyn and Celcius, vibe-coding their own personal CRM because they can’t work unless they have dark mode.
Confession: I was pretty bored of B2B SaaS GTM from ~2016 to late 2022*. Because the playbook was well-known. And, to me, executing is less exciting than exploring a new playbook. Exploration is the point of this newsletter — to curate and create the future GTM playbook.
*Specifically, November 2022 when GPT-3.5 dropped. This moment slowly, but surely, has re-ignited what I initially fell in love with about go-to-market — figuring out the unknown. Testing, iterating, breaking things, then finding breakthroughs. This is the exploration I fell in love with when I started my career. When I realized the ‘scalability’ of SaaS. That 1+1 could equal 3. This magic was lost somewhere along the way.
This is all changing in real-time now.
And I couldn’t be more excited about the next couple of years.
Join the adventure with me.
Still not convinced? Read more here:
The Cultural Divide Between AI Startups and SaaS Veterans by Topline (Pavillion)
"If you’re not an AI-native sales leader in the next 6-12 months, you’re cooked.” | My internal AI urgency memo by Kyle Norton
The rise of the AI-native employee | Managers without vertical expertise, this is your extinction call by Elena Verna
Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify by Tobi Lutke
An AI glossary | The most common AI terms explained, simply by Lenny Rachitsky
Why Building AI-Native is the Biggest Opportunity of this Decade by yours truly
👀 Featured Jobs:
Nathan (Co-founder & CEO) from Freckle is hiring a Head of GTM/Growth. They are building the Clay-alternative for SMB & MM, and just closed their $4M seed round. If interested, reach out to nathan@freckle.io.
David (Co-founder & CEO) from The Swarm (I wrote about them back in November) is hiring a Growth Manager. He’s open to contract-to-hire options, too. If interested, reach out to david@theswarm.com.
Helen (Senior Director, People Operations) from Hover is helping find a Senior Director, Growth Strategy & GTM Engineering (it’s an epic jd).
PS: If you'd like to feature a job on The Signal, reach out to me on LinkedIn.
That’s it for today!
Thank you for your attention and trust — I do not take it lightly.
See you next time,
Brendan 🫡
Insightful read👍🏼