We've Reached the Performative Era of AI in GTM

We’ve reached the performative era of AI in GTM.

By now, most companies have implemented a “context brain” that ties together and describes all your internal data and have built agents and skills on top of that data. This has been the most important step change I’ve seen, and has unlocked a ton of productivity improvements across GTM teams including at incident.io.

So that part, I buy. You get the internal data described in one place, you build agents and skills on top of it, and the team stops starting from zero every time. I’ve seen that productivity show up, including here. What I’m bored by is what came after.

But now all I read on LinkedIn and X are these performative use cases for AI that don’t seem to solve any real problems other than showing off how great you are at deploying whatever harnesses the cool kids are talking about on X (looking at you Grok Bot).

Some of them are fun. I’m in this stuff all day. But are these use cases really helping us grow faster? Most of those posts show you the setup and never say whether anything grew.

Apple will have perhaps its most important launch ever next week, with iOS 27 / AI Siri, a foldable iPhone, and likely a bunch of other rumored stuff. Apple isn’t winning because they have the best AI CMO or hired the most marketing engineers. They win because they a) deeply understand their customer b) build fantastic products for them c) are the best ever at communicating the value of those products d) and have a tiering model that offers something at most every pricing level.

I never took marketing classes in college but I think this sounds like the “4 p’s of marketing” (maybe Dave Gerhardt can correct me?). I’m as AI-pilled as it gets, but marketing is more than Clay waterfall enrichments or AEO automations in Profound. Those can be part of the work. I don’t think they’re why Apple wins, or why anyone else does.

/r/UnpopularOpinion: I’ll take Al Ries and Jack Trout or the GOAT David Ogilvy over a bunch of fancy marketing engineers any day all day. Even in 2026.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.