VPs Must Roll Up Sleeves for 2026 GTM Skills
by Jason Lemkin on January 1, 2026
The AI revolution is fundamentally changing sales and go-to-market, requiring leaders to embrace a future where AI agents handle routine tasks while humans focus on high-value work that demands expertise and relationship building.
Jason Lemkin transformed his SaaStr sales organization from 10 humans to 1.2 humans plus 20 AI agents, maintaining the same performance levels. This wasn't about eliminating jobs but about responding to a painful reality: "I'm not gonna hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what SaaStr does. I just can't do that one more time." His experience reveals that AI is primarily replacing jobs people don't want to do and displacing mid-tier performers.
For leaders, the key insight is that all the traditional sales "plays" still work—outbound, webinars, podcasts, events—but the playbooks are broken. The world has bifurcated: traditional SaaS companies struggle with decelerated growth while AI-native companies can't keep up with demand. Both scenarios create incentives to leverage AI, either for efficiency or to handle overwhelming inbound interest.
The most practical leadership approach is hands-on experimentation. Jason advises picking one painful problem, selecting a leading vendor who will actively help with implementation, and doing the work yourself: "Train the agent, ingest the data, do the iterations, understand how this damn thing works." Leaders who delegate this work entirely are setting themselves up for failure.
This requires a shift in how teams are structured. Rather than entry-level SDRs qualifying leads, AI can handle initial outreach and qualification, allowing human salespeople to focus on higher-value activities. Jason suggests we should have "$250,000 a year SDRs but they'd be like at Vercel they'd be managing 10 agents not 10 people."
For individual contributors, the implications are clear: embrace these tools rather than fight them. The best performers will use AI to become more productive and valuable, while those who resist will find themselves at risk. As Jason puts it, "If you can go do this and get it live into production, you're hyper employable."
The future requires a new orchestration role—someone who spends hours daily managing these agents, correcting mistakes, and ensuring quality. This isn't a job for traditional salespeople but for "nerds who like marketing and sales and are quant." Leaders need to grow this resource internally rather than trying to hire externally for a role that doesn't yet have veterans.
Perhaps most importantly, leaders must be honest about the changes AI brings. While it makes the best people more productive and even more valuable, it will change some roles fundamentally. The biggest impact won't be layoffs but rather not backfilling positions when people leave. As Jason notes, "We didn't fire... when they go, this time we just said now it's the agents."