How OpenAI and Google see AI changing go-to-market strategies

For years, startups have had a number of traditional playbooks available to them when it came time to start selling their products. But like many other things, AI is changing the way companies prepare to go to market.

Max Altschuler, general partner at GTMfund, told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt last month.

However, the challenge for founders and business owners is threading the needle. While there are stories of startups hiring more savvy developers who don’t understand typical GTM problems, more domain expertise is still needed, he said.

“When you have a good advisor by your side, you can learn some of the tried-and-true strategies. Those things haven’t gone away yet. I think there’s still a need for a general understanding of how and why certain things work in marketing,” Altshuler said.

Alison Wagonfeld, Google Cloud’s vice president of marketing, said marketing skills remain in great need.

“You do need AI knowledge, you need AI curiosity, you do need technical talent, but you also need to understand marketing objectives, understand customer insights, do research, and understand what good creative looks like,” Wagonfeld said.

But teams with AI can move faster, “sending more messages faster, and then thinking more holistically about what metrics they’re aiming for,” she added.

Mark Manara, Head of Startups at OpenAI, has found that while many startups are incorporating AI into their GTM strategies, they are not necessarily focused on minimizing the resources they devote to AI.

“There is certainly a movement to do more with less, but it can also be very focused depending on how you do it,” he said. “The degree of personalization and signal tracking that can be done using AI is now differentiating.”

Specifically, he said there are tools to help build leads that are much more sophisticated than before. AI prompts help startups find leads that meet very specific requirements, rather than just queries in a database.

Inbound marketing is also changing, and using the results of these prompts to qualify and score inbound leads “might have been more accurate in the past,” he added.

When it’s time for startups to start developing their go-to-market strategy, Wagonfeld said it’s important to consider what qualities they want from their GTM team.

“This is a shift in the way we look at recruiting. In the past, it was more about hiring specialists, people who were really knowledgeable, sometimes like subspecialties in marketing or sales. Now we’re hiring for curiosity and understanding,” she said. “Right now, this is pretty much the top recruiting candidate.”