Jonathan Lister
For as long as I’ve been leading revenue teams, the fundamental purpose of GTM has been straightforward: put a dollar in and get more than a dollar out.
It was a factory floor model—input, output, measure and improve efficiency and productivity. Every new tool or system promised incremental gains. A faster way to book a meeting. Marginally improved win rates. A sharper forecast. Efficiency went up in small, predictable steps. The operating model focused on incrementalism.
That era is now over.
As RevGenius puts it, “The companies that will dominate the next decade understand that AI transformation requires rewiring the entire revenue engine, not just speeding up individual tasks. This means evolving from AI as a tool to AI as the business itself.” Agentic AI is not another add-on. It’s a reset. For the first time, revenue leaders aren’t being asked to make the machine run a bit faster; we’re being asked to reimagine it. That’s a fundamentally different mandate. One most organizations are unprepared for.
This is the moment to get intentional. Not about tools in isolation, but about a true transformation strategy.
The transformation mandate
The old GTM muscle memory doesn’t apply anymore. Our teams have always been measured on production. How do we produce more revenue—quarter after quarter, year after year. If process improvements happened, they were incremental. If new tools were added, they layered onto existing workflows.
The hands-on sales leader
Another major shift: the role of sales leadership itself.
A few years ago, most sales leaders operated “above the stack.” We coached, forecasted, and spent time with customers. RevOps and Enablement owned the dashboards and workflows; leaders consumed the outputs.
That’s no longer the reality. Most agentic AI tools aren’t yet built for prime time. Playbooks are incomplete, workflows break between systems, and friction hides in the handoffs. The result? Sales leaders are rolling up their sleeves—digging into data, patching workflows, and pressure-testing use cases themselves.
In the short term, this level of involvement has earned credibility with frontline teams. Reps can feel when their leaders actually understand the messiness of modern selling. But it’s not sustainable. An effective CRO can’t be both strategist and systems manager. They need to be close enough to the stack to shape it, but not so close that it pulls them away from customers, talent, and strategy.
The good news? 74% of revenue leaders say their trust in AI has grown in the last 12 months—a clear signal that if the technology is dead simple, integrated, and reliable, leaders won’t need to split their attention as they’ve been doing. Agentic AI, done right, gives leaders the ability to inspect without maintaining, to coach without rebuilding, and to drive transformation without drowning in the details.
But it’s not just about leadership. The broader GTM function itself is facing a new kind of pressure: for the first time, revenue teams need technical fluency to keep pace with the shift. And that’s a muscle many organizations haven’t built—yet.
The technical gap
GTM has never required deep technical staffing. We hired sellers, marketers, customer success pros, analysts, and operations experts —and we were right to do so. Now, though, many orgs are scrambling for GTM engineers, contractors, and borrowed developer hours to wire up integrations, maintain automations, and keep complex systems alive.
This is a temporary phase. As with every technology wave, the tooling will mature faster than the org charts. We’re already seeing a shift from brittle, bespoke builds to composable, self-serve capabilities: native actions in your CRM, one-click connectors, automation primitives exposed through UI instead of code. The design goal is simple: empower non-technical teams to launch and run powerful workflows safely and consistently.
If you’re leading a revenue organization, plan for both realities:
- Short term: you may need borrowed technical capacity to bridge gaps, document processes, and de-risk critical flows.
- Medium term: prioritize platforms that collapse technical complexity and expose business-level controls—so your teams can move at the speed the market now demands.
The lesson here isn’t “become a software company.” It’s “select software that lets you remain a revenue company.”
The future of revenue
Put these threads together and a coherent picture emerges.
The future of revenue will be built on systems that make speed, relevance, and trust the default—systematically, not situationally. This is what we’re building at Vidyard.
Our Video Agent, when deployed across the full revenue funnel, automates the repeatable 60% of tasks that drag revenue teams down. By replacing that body of work with video experiences that feel human and timely, it gives your teams the space to build better customer relationships. In our vision for the future of revenue, Video Agent is not a point solution, it’s a new operating layer for how modern GTM teams engage, convert, and grow.
A recent conversation with a Chief Strategy Officer overseeing thousands of sellers puts this reimagined system into sharp focus. He told me how he’d been wrestling with heavy, custom-built personalization for years until he realized the future wasn’t about stacking more tools. His vision was clear: combine raw data with agentic AI, automate the repeatable, and free his team to lead where they’re irreplaceable. “We want to defy the impossible,” he told me, “and we need partners to pioneer with us.” That’s why he chose Vidyard. And it’s that level of clarity that will propel the next generation of revenue teams forward.
The opportunity—and the responsibility—now sits with you. How will you equip your teams for a world where agents act and humans lead? Are you building a transformational motion that is faster by design, more personal by default, and more trustworthy at scale? Or are you still stuck in the incrementalism of the past? The future of revenue is already in motion. Those who architect it will lead. Those who inherit it, will fall behind.
