AI Governance & Humanity in GTM

Simon Daniels and Louis Fernandez opened their summer interview series with a conversation about what happens when a clean investment thesis meets the messy reality of a real B2B buying committee. I told them the reps who thrive today can't lean on heroic selling or gut-feel forecasting anymore -- they have to actually understand the investment thesis and be able to explain it back, not just chase the number.

We spent a lot of time on where AI actually fits. It's genuinely useful for research, call transcription, and reporting -- work that used to eat 30 hours of a CRO's week just building the forecast instead of figuring out what to do about it. But I told them the story of my own little apartment balcony garden: a few pots of tomatoes I photographed and jokingly called the "Chicago Bell Garden" on Instagram. Some vendor's sales algorithm scraped it, decided I was a restaurant and a vegan food influencer, and started shipping me cases of vegan cookies and 120 pounds of steak rub. A human in the loop would have looked at three tomato plants on a balcony and known in half a second this wasn't a prospect worth chasing.

That's the line I want GTM leaders to draw: AI can automate the research and the reporting, but it cannot replace trust, judgment, or the interpersonal work of navigating a real buying group. I talked about this at length in my TEDx talk, and it's the same argument running through the AI Handbook -- the technology raises the bar for leadership, it doesn't lower it.