The pressure to implement AI in your go-to-market strategy is real. Every GTM leader is facing the same question: how do you leverage AI and automation to scale revenue without accidentally burning through your total addressable market?

You're currently being sold on revolutionary AI agents that will transform your GTM motions overnight, but nobody's talking about what happens when those agents run wild on misaligned systems, dirty data, and broken workflows.

In this article, I'll take you through the critical problem many of us are facing, namely the gap between AI's promise and its practical implementation in GTM. By the end, you'll know how to audit your existing tech stack before adding AI, how to build a business case framework that prevents costly mistakes, and why your technology decisions should always put your revenue team first.

Because the truth is, your foundations aren't solid, AI will simply scale your inefficiencies faster than you can fix them. And that's an expensive lesson nobody needs to learn the hard way.

The business case framework that keeps AI from going rogue

Before I begin, it's important to say I'm an AI enthusiast through and through.

I genuinely love finding ways to automate and augment marketing operations. But I've also seen what happens when an AI agent runs wild: it can burn through your entire TAM if you're not careful. That keeps me up at night (and it should keep you up at night, too).

So here's how I approach it: I put every AI implementation through my classic business case framework.

Boring? Maybe. But it works.

Let me walk you through a real example from the past few months. We wanted to reach out to prospects showing third-party intent signals (think 6sense and similar platforms). We also wanted to personalize outreach to website visitors, specifically people from companies that kept coming back to our site.

The easy route was just to unleash an AI agent and let it rip. But here's what I did instead:

First, I manually uploaded data between systems. Yes, manually. I wanted to understand every step of the process before automating it.

Then I tested personalized messaging based on ABM insights (again, manually). At the same time, I ran an AI personalization tool in parallel, but kept it in sandbox mode. I wasn't letting it touch real prospects yet. I was studying its output, understanding its patterns, learning where it might go off the rails.

Why all this extra work? Simply because I needed to understand the pitfalls before integrating everything. I interviewed vendors selling outreach agents. I saw how they actually work under the hood. Most of them are just workflows connected to LLMs, churning out "personalized" messages that sometimes miss the mark spectacularly.

Your tech stack is secretly running the show

Let's talk about something that most GTM and RevOps teams don't realize until it's too late: your tech stack isn't just supporting your go-to-market playbooks. It's actually defining their boundaries. Let me explain.

Whether you're running ABM campaigns or scaling outbound outreach, your technology sets the framework for what's possible. And while vendors are constantly pushing updates and new features, go-to-market teams often stay stuck in the past.

The reason is usually a communication breakdown. The person who bought the tool left the company. Nobody really owns it anymore. And the documentation? What documentation?

The worst part is that you typically don't discover these problems until they're causing real damage. Maybe your user experience is already suffering. Maybe prospects are getting frustrated. Maybe customers are churning because of tech issues nobody knew about.

The four pillars of a proper tech audit

I've run tech audits for startups, SaaS businesses, and Fortune 500 companies, both in-house and during my agency days. The businesses may be different, but the problems are universal.

Company size doesn't matter. Everyone has the same issues hiding in their tech stack.

Core marketing and sales infrastructure

Start with workflows. I can't tell you how many times I've found leads sitting untouched because they're assigned to someone who left the company six months ago. Or territories that got reshuffled, but nobody updated the routing rules.

Then there's your CMS. When was the last time you checked your security updates? I've seen companies unknowingly let bot traffic inflate their conversion numbers for months. Their ad algorithms were optimizing for fake conversions while they celebrated their "success."

And please check your landing pages. As a marketer, it physically pains me when I click an Instagram ad and hit a 404 page. I message those companies immediately. You're literally paying to send people to dead ends. I'd estimate one in ten companies I check have this problem somewhere in their funnel.