RESEARCH: The advantage is not the AI tool. It's the AI connecting tools to everything else.
IN PRACTICE: Why "what can AI do" is the wrong question — and what to ask Monday instead
EVENTS: A first look at our new AI certification course, and the Impact roadshow expands to Europe
GROWTH INSIGHTS QUESTION OF THE MONTH: Which functions have reached AI maturity in your organization?
NEW COURSE!AI FOR GTM: Turn an underused AI license into a daily go-to-market advantage
KEY RESOURCE: A three-part operating model for governing growth like a system, not a guess
REVENUE ACADEMY COURSES: Enroll in upcoming courses across the Bowtie
RESEARCH: The Advantage Is No Longer the AI Tool. It's the AI Wiring.
Inside the most advanced go-to-market teams, a quiet pattern is emerging. The winners aren't ripping out their stack and replacing it with AI. They're starting with what they already have — Salesforce, Slack, Gong, Clay — and using AI to stitch it together.
New research from WbD Founder and CEO Jacco van der Kooij makes the case plainly: connectors and APIs turn separate tools into a working system. AI is the layer threaded through it, carrying context between tools and performing the handoffs that used to fall to people. This isn't a new arc. It's the same one that played out in manufacturing in the 1980s, software development in the 2010s, and supply chain in the 2000s. Each time, the companies that won combined people, process, and technology into one adaptive system. GTM is now in year one of that same evolution, and van der Kooij's research maps five shifts defining it:
From funnel to Bowtie. Enterprise stacks were built layer by layer — CRM, marketing automation, conversational intelligence — and none of it was designed to operate as one system. The deeper problem: a funnel ends at the sale, but in recurring revenue, most growth happens after it. The fix isn't a better funnel. It's replacing it with a structure that spans the full lifecycle.
AI as the connective layer, not the next tool. Most companies treat AI as one more application to add to the pile. The advantage is using it as the coordination layer instead — the thing that carries context, links workflows, and orchestrates handoffs between the tools you already have. Protocols like MCP are making this concrete: a signal in one system now triggers action in the next without a human in the loop.
Data replaces the CRM as the center of gravity. For a decade, the CRM was the operational core and every tool built around it. That's inverting. Data is decoupling from the apps that capture it and moving into a central layer the apps draw from. The CRM becomes a consumer of that data, not its owner. Applications are rented. The data is owned. From linear funnels to growth loops. A funnel spends a dollar to acquire a customer and stops. A loop turns the output of one stage into the input of the next — advocacy feeds acquisition, expansion feeds itself. AI is what makes loops run at scale, learning from behavior and orchestrating handoffs continuously instead of waiting on manual effort.
GTM becomes a single system with one output: growth. As the pieces connect, marketing, sales, and customer success stop being separate functions optimized locally and become layers of one operating system. Signal flows up from the customer journey; guidance flows back down from board metrics. When the layers connect, a small gain at the base compounds all the way to investor outcomes. When they don't, the board is steering on numbers it can't trace.
– Bottom Line – The companies pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most AI tools. They're the ones treating GTM as a system — people, workflows, data, and AI architected to work as one adaptive engine. Tools are bought. Systems are designed. Only one creates a competitive advantage. These insights are drawn from an Executive Brief by Jacco van der Kooij, Founder and CEO of Winning by Design, published through the Growth Institute. If you’d like to contribute to go-to-market research, consider joining the Institute.
Figure 1: An orchestration layer, connected via MCP, turns separate tools into a working system.
IN PRACTICE: Managing AI Coworkers, Not AI Software
Most executives are still asking "what can AI do?" The more useful question, according to serial founder Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, Nira), is "how do I manage it?" Those aren't the same question, and the gap between them is exactly where the compression AI promises — doing the same work in a fraction of the time, not by moving faster but by restructuring how work moves — gets lost. Shah's argument: most teams bolt AI onto workflows built for human constraints — weekly check-ins, draft-review-revise cycles, approval gates designed for slow feedback. AI doesn't have those constraints. Wired into a human-paced workflow anyway, it just waits in the same queue humans do. Three changes actually create compression: Write down what matters, immediately. AI doesn't hold context the way people do. Teams keeping a living record of current projects, commitments, and decisions get a faster, shared source of truth than teams re-explaining context every session. Decompose work into parallel pieces, not sequential ones. A complex request handed to AI in one pass leaves performance on the table. Breaking it into five or six independent pieces and running them simultaneously turns a 40-minute project into an 8-minute one. Design for iteration speed instead of approval gates. Weekly review cycles were built for slow feedback. AI can iterate every 30 seconds. Holding it to a human review cadence is the single biggest reason companies aren't seeing compression. The piece most companies skip: explicit decision authority. Shah's rule with his own AI assistant is simple and written down before it's ever needed — strategic direction is his call, execution optimization is the AI's. Without a rule like that in place in advance, teams end up relitigating the same disagreement every time a human and AI see something differently. That gap compounds at scale. When a CMO, a CRO, and a VP of Product each wire AI into their function with a different approval process and a different bar for "good enough," the result isn't three functions moving fast in parallel. It's contradictory outputs colliding at the handoff, with nobody able to say why. – Bottom Line – AI only compresses work when the operating model around it changes too — explicit decision rules for who decides, a shared living record instead of scattered context, and iteration measured in minutes, not weeks. Get that right on one project and you'll see 2–3x compression. Get it right across functions, and the wiring holds even as the org scales.
These insights are adapted from an article authored by Hiten Shah, CEO of Crazy Egg. The full piece can be found in our Growth Journal - subscribe here (or read here if already subscribed).
Figure 2: Photo of Hiten Shah, CEO of Crazy Egg, beside his quote reflecting his belief that output speed enabled by AI should be prioritized over initial output quality.
EVENTS: A Preview of Our Newest Course + 8 In-Person Events!
- LIVE WEBINAR: THE GTM TEAMS THAT BUILD WITH AI ARE ABOUT TO PULL AHEAD | JULY 29, 2026 | VIA ZOOM / Some GTM teams are already using AI well. Most are guessing, and almost nobody on the team is working from the same playbook. Dan Smith (Chief Learning Officer) and Patrick McGrann (Impact Architect) preview WbD's new AI for GTM Certification Course — with curriculum built around producing enduring, useful AI workflows, including a daily brief, overnight research, SPICED-based discovery, and a reusable Skill reps build once and run forever. If you're the one accountable for your team's AI adoption, and you're tired of it depending on who happens to be curious, this is where you start.
- IMPACT SUMMER SERIES | Q3 2026 | BAY AREA / Three rooms. Three growth questions. One summer to rewrite what’s working. The best growth ideas don’t come from stages. They come from the side conversations afterward. The Impact Summer Series is the off-summit version of our flagship Impact Summit: smaller rooms, sharp topics, and a spirit of collaboration. At each event, we bring together a hand-picked group of GTM leaders to work through one question that actually matters this quarter.
- IMPACT SUMMIT 2026: BRASIL | SEPTEMBER 2 | SÃO PAULO / The Summit heads to South America for a full-day executive event of content and networking for GTM leaders, focusing on scalable growth architecture in high-pressure and complex scenarios. Jacco van der Kooij returns to Brazil, alongside renowned panelists and speakers from the market, to demonstrate how to integrate AI into operational logic, strengthen execution governance, and transform experimentation into predictable and sustainable growth.
- NOW LAUNCHED: IMPACT ROADSHOW EUROPE | OCTOBER, 2026 / We're retiring the single-day, single-location Impact Summit Europe in Ghent in favor of something bigger: a 4-city roadshow across the continent, kicking off this fall. Half-day events. Tailored rooms. Intentional discussions, not keynote-and-out. October 5 in Amsterdam >Request an invite October 6 in Ghent > Request an invite October 7 in London >Request an invite October 12 in Stockholm >Request an invite
GROWTH INSIGHTS QUESTION OF THE MONTH
Which function in your organization has actually reached AI maturity, meaning it runs on AI-powered workflows day-to-day, not just occasional chatbot use?
When you're behind on revenue, what's the first lever your leadership pulls?
Add pipeline / increase acquisition spend - 30%
Improve conversion rates mid-funnel - 24%
Defend retention and reduce churn - 20%
Diagnose the constraint before deciding - 26%
* Revenue Architect’s Answer – D. Acquisition, conversion, and retention are all valid interventions. But pulling the wrong lever at the wrong time compounds the gap. Diagnosis is not delay. It is the fastest path to the right intervention.
KEY RESOURCE: The Operating System for Growth Governance
Growth systems are shaped by two forces in tension: compounding investments that build long-term value, and near-term accountability to this year's number. Left unwired, those forces sit with different people, pulling in different directions with no shared view of the whole. The Growth Governance model connects them through three linked parts: The Growth Matrix finds the constraint across key dimensions — acquisition, retention, expansion, mapped against segments like SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. Growth Mapping carries that constraint forward, showing how it compounds or corrects over time. Growth Planning converts the mapping into a probability, not just a target — turning a static forecast into a live signal the organization can actually steer by. The model only works because each part is wired to an owner. Revenue Operations builds the Matrix and Mapping. The VP of Growth drives Planning from those outputs. The Executive Team and Board use Planning and Governance to make investment calls. Break any one connection, and the board ends up steering on a number it can't trace back to the system producing it.
Use it to find where your own organization's ownership wiring is loose, or bring the shared vocabulary — matrix, mapping, planning — into your next conversation about the number everyone's already agreed to chase. A complete Growth Governance Guide is available for download here.
NEW COURSE! AI FOR GTM COURSE: Turn Your AI License Into a Daily Advantage
Most reps have an AI subscription. Almost none have a system for using it every day. AI for GTM is WbD's new certification course teaching revenue teams to build four working AI systems against their own real pipeline — not demo accounts: a daily prioritization brief, an overnight account research report, a SPICED-based discovery plan, and a proposal generator saved as a reusable Skill. Every output is anchored in SPICED, so it's structured, coachable, and CRM-ready — and keeps running long after the course ends.
Four live sessions over two weeks. Certification on completion. $800 per person — special launch price.
