My first years in GTM were mostly execution. Building lists. Cleaning CRM fields. Setting up campaigns, writing email after email, pulling the Monday report. The buyer was someone I met in a persona deck.
Then came the tactical years: running campaigns, writing sequences, testing what worked. Only after that did I get a seat where the real decisions were made: which market to go after, how to position, why a deal was won or lost.
That was the ladder for most of us. Operational first, then tactical, then strategic. You earned your way to strategy by doing the execution well.
Agents are flipping that order. And it's the best thing to happen to GTM careers in a long time.
Three layers of GTM work.
How we climbed it, and where it's going
Operational
Data enrichment, CRM hygiene, lead routing, meeting notes and follow-ups, reporting.
Tactical
Signal-based outbound, intent and website-visitor plays, personalisation at scale, ABM orchestration, AI search visibility, testing.
Strategic
ICP and buying-group choices, positioning and narrative, pricing and packaging, GTM motion (product-led, sales-led or hybrid), pipeline planning, deal strategy.
Agents now run the first two layers.
Agents are faster and more capable than any of us at operational and tactical work. They enrich accounts and map buying groups in minutes, run signal-based plays at scale, keep the CRM clean and never miss a follow-up.
That time comes back to people. At Anthropic, one account executive said agent automations took over about 20% of their previous tasks; another said the freed-up time let them talk to 30% more customers. Its managers now hire for customer orientation more and execution skills less. (Anthropic, Oct 2026)
Stanford's payroll research shows the same shift across the economy: entry-level hiring is moving away from jobs where AI does the task, while roles where AI helps people do more are holding steady or growing. (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Aug 2026)
The first rung isn't disappearing. It's moving up, closer to strategy.
Back to the basics, done better.
With agents handling the mundane work, we finally get time for the basics of GTM, and the room to do them well: understanding a market, knowing a buying group, framing a problem, telling a story that moves a room.
The job market already reflects it. Communication now tops the skills employers ask for in job postings, ahead of coding (Fast Company, 2025). Leadership and social influence rose 22 points as a core skill since 2023, the biggest jump of any skill (WEF Future of Jobs 2025).
And these basics now work on two audiences. One line from Anthropic's research says it best:
"Writers who used language to drive human behavior are now using it to drive Claude behavior."
From Anthropic's research on its own workforce
- TO A BUYER
"Before we get into tools, what happens on your team when a deal slips?"
- TO AN AGENT
"Find accounts where a deal slipped last quarter. For each one, tell me what changed in the buying group. Skip anyone we've contacted in the last 30 days."
Same thinking: what you want to learn, the context, the limits, what a good answer looks like. Getting good at the basics is also the fastest way to get great at directing agents.
Call it the head start.
The question worth solving.
We used to build judgment through the execution. Hundreds of campaigns taught you what works. If the next generation skips that, where does judgment come from?
Matt Beane's research on surgeons training alongside robots (The Skill Code) points to the answer: skill grows through challenge, complexity and connection with experts, and automation removes them unless someone puts them back (MIT Sloan, 2024). Aviation did exactly that. When autopilot made flying safer, the FAA didn't switch it off; it told airlines to build manual flying into training and everyday operations (FAA SAFO 13002, 2013).
Learning no longer happens by default. We design it in.
The first job, redesigned.
Bring them into strategy early
ICP and buying-group reviews, positioning sessions, pipeline reviews, win/loss calls. Not to watch: to bring one point of view each time.
Give them a small bet to own
One segment, one signal-based play, one experiment. They set the hypothesis, agents run it, they present what they learned.
Let them write the agent briefs
Owning the instructions means owning the thinking: who, why now, what good looks like.
Review agent output together
Twenty minutes a week, senior and junior, going through what the agents produced and why some of it misses.
Hands-on reps, on purpose
Once a quarter, build one play by hand, end to end. Not for efficiency. For feel.
Tomorrow's leaders.
The people starting in GTM now will reach the strategy room years earlier than we did. And they'll already know how to direct agents, because they learned early how to frame a problem.
The career path is starting to look less like a ladder and more like a climbing wall, with a different route for each person. The route just starts higher now.
We learned GTM backwards. They get to learn it the right way round, as long as we build the first job for it.
Sources (6)
- Anthropic, "How employment is changing at Anthropic". 16 Oct 2026.
- Brynjolfsson, Chandar & Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence". Stanford Digital Economy Lab, revised 12 Aug 2026.
- Fast Company, on LinkedIn's skills data and the changing career ladder. 26 Jul 2025.
- World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025: Skills outlook.
- MIT Sloan, "The War Between Technological Productivity and Human Skill", on Matt Beane's The Skill Code. 12 Nov 2024.
- AVweb, "FAA Urges Maintenance Of Manual Flight Skills", on FAA Safety Alert for Operators SAFO 13002. Jan 2013.
Navneet Kumar
Building Neolism in the open.