Every now and then, a wave of disruption comes along that doesn’t just change how business gets done—it redefines the competitive landscape entirely. For sales organizations today, that wave is artificial intelligence.
AI is already transforming the way customers discover, evaluate, and engage with brands. It’s influencing how sellers interact with buyers, how leaders allocate resources, and how companies build their go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
And yet—despite its accelerating impact—many organizations are reacting like it’s a curiosity. A useful new tool. Something to keep an eye on. But we’ve been here before.
This isn’t a brand-new story. It’s a sequel.
In the early 2000s, eCommerce entered the scene. Most brands treated it like an experiment—a digital side hustle to support their brick-and-mortar core. The assumptions were:
- Customers will mostly still shop in-store.
- Online sales might grow, but not enough to upend our model.
- There’s time.
And then? Amazon scaled. Shopify democratized. Mobile-first experiences changed consumer expectations almost overnight. Suddenly, the store wasn’t the primary channel—the screen was. Brands that treated eCommerce as “just a tool” didn’t just lose market share. Some lost relevance entirely.
We’re seeing the same signals today with AI.
Like eCommerce in its early days, AI is being mischaracterized as incremental. Leaders are thinking in point solutions—an AI assistant here, a smarter dashboard there—when the shift is system-wide.
The danger is in treating AI like a feature, when in reality, it’s a forcing function. It’s not just about what you sell—it’s about how your entire commercial engine works.
Sales teams are already at the center of the shift
Sales organizations sit on the front lines of this transformation. They’re already seeing how AI can:
- Accelerate pipeline generation
- Sharpen targeting and forecasting
- Personalize engagement at scale
But while many are experimenting, few are reorganizing their GTM strategies around the new reality.
This is where forward-thinking leaders are getting ahead:
- They’re moving from enablement to reinvention.
- They’re embedding AI not as a feature, but as a capability that reshapes how teams compete and grow.
The Real Impact Comes from Connection, Not Addition
We’re seeing this play out in real time. The most effective sales transformations are happening not through standalone capability building, but through integrated change. As Jason Davis puts it, “The most valuable transformations aren’t about adding new capabilities in isolation—they happen when capability building is tied directly to go-to-market methodology and initiative execution.”
Said another way: It’s not about piling on new technologies—it’s about weaving AI into the core of how your commercial engine operates. When AI is embedded into the systems and processes that already drive performance—target setting, customer engagement, deal qualification, seller coaching—it becomes a force multiplier. It enables organizations to execute smarter, faster, and more consistently across the board.
Start small, learn fast, move forward
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once.
Just like the eCommerce shift didn’t happen in a quarter, becoming an AI-enabled sales org is a journey. But it’s one that starts with momentum.
Teams that thrived during the last disruption didn’t wait for perfect clarity:
- They ran pilots.
- They iterated fast.
- They learned faster.
That same mindset applies today. Start by identifying friction points in your GTM system:
- Where could AI create lift?
- Where can you test, learn, and adapt?
In this phase, momentum matters more than perfection. The speed at which you learn and change will be a critical differentiator.
The Cost of Inaction Is Real
As AI becomes the new baseline for high-performance sales organizations, the cost of doing nothing will compound quickly. Teams that delay risk being left behind—not just by their competitors, but by their customers, whose expectations are already shifting.
Buyers are already experiencing what AI can deliver: greater personalization, faster responsiveness, and more intelligent solutions. Organizations that don’t evolve in parallel will increasingly feel out of step with the market.
Sales leaders who recognize this shift early—and who take deliberate steps to reimagine their GTM strategies through an AI lens—will stay competitive, and they’ll help define what great looks like in the next era of commercial excellence.
