Over the past few years, excitement surrounding the use of AI in go-to-market (GTM) has reached a fever pitch, with many leading voices predicting a fundamental shift in the way companies sell and market their products. To understand the degree to which this hype has translated into actual adoption today, we asked 63 GTM leaders in RevOps, SDR, Demand Generation, and Product Marketing about their present use of AI and its impact so far.
Unsurprisingly, given its novelty, we found that many organizations are still experimenting with the technology. In fact, most of the leaders we surveyed are still taking an ad-hoc approach to AI adoption, allowing individual team members to try out all-purpose chatbots and more specialized tools alike. However, though department-wide rollouts remain relatively few and far between, the majority (~90%) of our respondents are already seeing some impact from their present-day AI adoption, with ~20% seeing a strong or very strong impact.
Summary of results
- While most organizations surveyed are deploying AI in an ad-hoc, individual-led manner, ~30% of organizations are piloting, planning to use, or using AI department-wide.
- Among the organizations that are taking a department-wide approach, adoption is largely still in the early innings: roughly 50% are currently in the pilot phase.
- Only ~5% of respondents have substantially overhauled their function to make use of AI.
- Over 90% of respondents are seeing some impact from their adoption of AI tools. Though the vast majority report only a slight or moderate impact, a fifth of respondents are already seeing a strong impact.
- Respondents are experimenting with a fairly wide range of AI use cases. Roughly a third of respondent organizations are using AI to do each of the following: perform market research, generate customer-facing content, or search for patterns in customer or market data. Fewer respondents are pursuing more sophisticated use cases, such as campaign optimizations.
Key takeaways
- If your GTM org has yet to establish a department-wide strategy to extract value from AI, you are not behind. Most leaders are still relying on their employees to find (and tell them) what tools are most valuable.
- If you are not comfortable adopting AI to automate entire workflows (e.g., using AI as a sales/SDR co-pilot), start by encouraging your team to use it for discrete tasks like content drafting, market research, and data analysis. These are areas where other GTM leaders are already seeing success.
- If you have not yet seen a huge impact from your team’s AI adoption, you are not alone. As with any tool or technology, realizing AI’s full value will take time. However, working to join the ~20% of organizations realizing substantial value from AI today will set your team up for greater success in the future.
