Why the AI era has made GTM alignment worse (and how to fix it)

I caught up in March with an investor I know from one of my old companies. He was one of my favourite board members. Always fair, asked smart questions, and was happy to connect me with people. They haven’t all been like that.

This time, he was looking to connect a CEO who had taken investment last year. It was one of those conversations where you start nodding your head as they talk you through the situation. I’ve heard the same story enough times now. Growing category, early but competitive product, achievable targets. Commercial performance lagging behind plan.

My conversation with the CEO followed a familiar pattern. He saw friction between Sales, Marketing, and Customer success as being the cause. He wasn’t as confident anymore that they were all the right people. My GTM audit certainly identified opportunities to improve, but their big problem was GTM alignment.

They, like a lot of companies I have spoken to, thought they had good enough GTM alignment. Their approach to AI had also made things worse. This is a more recent trend. Marketing was adopting AI, Sales was adopting AI, Customer Success has new AI tools. They were all producing more, but they were looking at things differently to each other.

I don’t think AI creates GTM misalignment, but it does expose it. I see the ICP that was written up in an offsite, but never really agreed. The persona doc Marketing wrote that nobody actually reads. The knowledge that turned out to live entirely in the head of the early employee who left. None of these were AI’s fault. AI just multiplies what people can do. Increasing the impact, good or bad.

AI needs the human to give it context and direction. When each team, each person, is feeding AI different versions of the truth you end up with a growing margin of error. You might not immediate notice people pulling in different directions, but your prospects and customers will. It shows up in the deals you don’t close, the campaigns that don’t land, and the product features that aren’t adopted.

This isn’t an AI problem. It’s an alignment problem that AI has amplified.

The fixes that don’t work

Most companies have tried at least one of four standard responses. None of them solves the actual problem.

The traditional B2B SaaS bow tie. It looks like alignment because every function has its stage, its handoffs, and its metrics. But aligning people around their job description is not the same as aligning them around the customer. The bow tie aligns around your process. That’s a different thing.

More meetings. The reflexive response. Get everyone in a room, talk it through, get on the same page. The cost of running cross-functional alignment meetings every week is enormous, and the alignment they produce evaporates by Wednesday. Everyone knowing what everyone is doing isn’t alignment. It’s awareness with a calendar invite.

Hire a CRO to fix it. Put one person in charge. Empower them. They’ll make everyone fall into line. The problem is that alignment isn’t a position. It’s a property of the system. A new CRO can drive activity. They cannot install structural alignment by sheer force of will.

OKRs. OKRs give comfort because they temporarily align around an issue, a metric, around action. They don’t create deep structural alignment. They’re useful for execution. They’re not a substitute for the foundational work that should sit underneath them.

The reason all four fail is the same. They align around the company’s own work. The activity. The org chart. The process. The people doing the doing.

The thing they’re not aligning to is the customer.

The framework to align GTM

Alignment literally means “a line”. Picture it. Narrow. Specific. Pointing in one direction.

The reason most GTM alignment work fails is that companies are trying to align around the wrong thing. They align around their org chart, or their funnel, or their internal process. They are pointing in the wrong direction.

High-performing GTM is pointing at the customer.

It is pointed at a customer you deeply understand, not at internal process. The hard work isn’t aligning marketing, sales, product, and CS around how the company operates. The hard work is aligning all GTM functions around the same shared, deep, specific understanding of who the customer is and what they’re trying to do. Marketing’s understanding. Sales’s understanding. Product’s understanding. CS’s understanding. All pointing at the same customer.

It is narrow and specific, not fuzzy and broad. This is where the difficult decisions live. Most companies have an ICP that includes everyone they’ve ever closed a deal with, which means they don’t have an ICP, they have a sales history. Real alignment requires choosing, and saying out loud, who you are not for. That decision is uncomfortable. It is also the decision that makes everything downstream sharper: the messaging, the campaigns, the discovery questions, the product roadmap, the pricing.

It is built into the GTM operating system, not produced at an offsite. The customer is not static. The market is not static. AI has accelerated both. Alignment isn’t a document you produce in Q1 and refer to in Q4 if anyone remembers it exists. It is a continuously updating shared model that gets sharper week by week, across all four functions, as the team learns.

Alignment is not a deck. It is a discipline.

Here is how to test whether you have it, and how to start building it if you don’t.

Five steps

Step 1. Test how aligned you actually are.

Pull together your GTM leaders, your product leadership, and your exec team. Ask each of them, individually, the same four questions:

1. Who is our ideal customer?
2. What makes them a great fit?
3. What makes a similar-looking company a bad fit?
4. Who is the most important person to speak to inside one of those accounts?

Listen for consistency and specificity. If the answers come back sharp and similar, you are aligned. If they come back lacking in specifics or related but materially different, you are not. The gap between them is the gap your people and AI tools are compounding with everything they do.

This can be done in a day and tells you more about the state of your GTM than most quarterly reviews.

You can take it further and ask the whole GTM team. Run those transcripts through AI, and you have the whole picture.

Step 2. Enable the team to deeply know the customer.

Three audiences need different things.

Marketing rarely talks enough to prospects and customers. They are almost never enabled on how to deeply understand them. Swipe my Deep Customer Understanding playbook for B2B Marketing. The link is at the end.

Sales and CS know the customer day-to-day, but they are heads down on individual deals and accounts. They need to come up from the detail and listen across the whole journey, not just their bit of it.

And product is part of GTM. If your product team is building personas that don’t match the personas your GTM team is selling to, you are in real trouble. You’re not running one customer-aligned company. You’re running two, and pretending. Product is building the value the customer experiences today and the value they will experience in two years. If they aren’t aligned to the same customer the rest of GTM is aligned to, the alignment isn’t real.

Step 3. Agree the ICP and personas, together, in the same room.

This is a company strategy decision, not a GTM working session. The CEO needs to steer and make the calls. Most companies do this exercise in silos: marketing produces a deck, sales nods politely in the all-hands, nobody changes how they actually work. The hard version is doing it in one room, surfacing the disagreements, making the trade-offs explicit, and committing as one team. With the CEO holding the line on the difficult decisions.

Step 4. Document it deeply.

Use video recordings of real customers and prospects to bring the personas to life. Then put those clips in front of everyone at the company. Drop them in Slack. Play them at the all-hands. Reference them when product makes a roadmap call. The whole company should be plugged in to what your specific customer is actually saying. A persona that lives as a video clip the whole company has watched is worth ten that live in a slide deck nobody opens.

Step 5. Build alignment into your GTM operating system.

Not a workshop. A cadence. A repeating loop where the team listens to customers, updates the shared model, and adjusts the work.

AI helps here, but only after you’ve done the foundational work. AI without context produces generic results. AI fed with deep, current customer context produces sharp, specific, continuously updated alignment that lets the GTM team move as one.

Skip the foundation and AI gives you fast generic. You are moving fast, but not in the right direction. Build the foundation and AI gives you fast specific. The difference is the entire ballgame.

This is what GTM alignment looks like.

What it feels like.

When GTM is aligned around a deeply understood customer, two things change.

The first is what most leaders are looking for.

Execution gets sharper.

The product roadmap, the messaging, the campaigns, the pipeline, the way customer success delivers value, all start pointing at the same thing.

Friction between GTM teams drops.

The second is the more important one.

Deep customer understanding doesn’t just sharpen what you do today. It tells you where the customer is heading.

Their world is changing faster than yours.

The buyer who signed last year is being asked to make different decisions this year. The pain point that sold the deal in 2024 may not be the pain point that wins the renewal in 2026.

In the AI era, you have to build for where they are heading. Not where they have been.

Josh Morse, Demand Karma

My Deep Customer Understanding playbook for B2B Marketing

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