"If you’re not an AI-native sales leader in the next 6-12 months, you’re cooked."
My internal AI urgency memo
I’m channeling my inner 🐐 Tobi 🐐 and publicly sharing a memo that I sent my leadership team earlier this month about the urgency of AI adoption. There’s a reason why leaders like Tobi Lukte, Micha Kaufman and Luis Von Ahn sent similar calls to arms to their entire companies urging them to accelerate their adoption of AI.
Here it is:
✍️ We’ve been talking about AI for a while now. I’m constantly nudging people on it. I’ve brought in speakers like Jordan Crawford. We are the earliest adopters (much of the time, the very first) of many great AI tools like Momentum, Avarra, Datalane, Crescendo, Pavlov, 1Mind etc. I’m hiring an AI GTM Lead to focus exclusively on this mandate… And yet, I can’t help but feel disappointed by the progress we’ve made on embracing AI more fully as a leadership team. There are certainly some bright spots but we’re far from fully embracing the most important technology shift of our lifetimes imho.
🚨 If you were waiting for a sign to dive head first into learning about AI, this is it! 🚨
During our keynote at SaaStr AI last week (starts at 12:29), Jason said:
If you’re a sales leader and not AI native in the next 6-12 months, you’re cooked. I’ll give them until June 30th to figure it out but after that point, start taking a sharpie to their name in the org chart.
Jason doesn’t mince words. 😬
I promise you, it’s worth it. I probably accomplish an extra 10-20 hours of work every week because of AI. I wouldn't be able to have the podcast without it or write content or build as much training as I do. It’s truly massive leverage.
It’s going to be really frustrating at first (which is likely where many of you stalled out). You’re going to try a bunch of stuff and it won’t be that great or it will hallucinate too much. Lots of your initial projects will be just barely not usable.
Keep going.
Once you can understand (from first principles) these tools’ primitives and capabilities and then how to prompt and chain things together, you will see the future. You just have to grind through that initial 10-30 hours of learning to start getting real value.
We’re doing a lot as a GTM organization to become AI powered (I won a fancy award for it last week) but I want everyone to step into the future now. Becoming an AI native leadership team has the chance to give us compounding leverage to accomplish our mission at greater scale. There is an exponential opportunity here that I want to seize.
Now that I’ve got your attention, here are some places to start your journey:
To better understand the gravity of the situation:
Micha from Fivrr’s letter to his team about how AI is coming for their jobs
Tobi’s letter to Shopify about how AI is a baseline expectation (this is a good representation of how I feel about AI)
Jason and my SaaStr talk (should start at 12:29):
Some early learning resources:
How do LLMs work by Andrej Karpathy (one of the greatest AI minds in the world):
How to use LLMs by Andrej:
Prompt engineering by Anthropic:
Jordan Crawford on the GTM Now pod:
The OG prompt engineering video that I used to suggest:
- - thank you for coming to my Ted Talk - - ✍️
If you’re a leader in technology and not using AI constantly throughout your day, you’re already behind and at risk of becoming irrelevant. This can’t be outsourced to rev ops or engineering. You need to lead the way.
Please let me know what resources you’ve found most helpful to learn about AI and I’ll add them to this post as a running repository!