By Tim RuttenAI-Native GTM: All the Way or Not at All
My honest answer to the question every CMO and CRO is asking right now.
Hi — Asad here! People love to credit SaaS with inventing the BDR/SDR role and Customer Success. But on both counts, they’re wrong. Lead generators have been around for generations, and Customer Success was actually born at Vantiv in 1996 — well before SaaS.
What SaaS did do was popularize them. Salesforce gets the lion’s share of the credit, with Gainsight on the podium for Customer Success (CS). And the reason CS really took off in the SaaS era is simple: the game became about recurring revenue, and CS — done well — helps make revenue recur.
By the end of the SaaS era, though, CS had become the function everyone loved to beat up on. “Not commercial enough.” “Too transactional.” “Doesn’t work hard enough.” Some of it was fair. But so was the pushback: CS had been treated as a cost center since its Vantiv days, and was never resourced to deliver its real value.
Now, in the age of AI, CS has an opportunity to reset. The post-sale motion matters more than ever, because customers need to be taught how to use technology they don’t really understand — and every time a model updates, you reconfigure and reteach. It’s a lot.
So, does CS emerge as the big winner of this era, or do FDEs eat up the responsibility and the budget? The latter would be a death knell for the function. The former depends on CS leaders doing things differently — and doing them while exhausted from the war they just fought in SaaS.
I don’t know the answer, but I can tell you, I would bet on leaders like Sam Slevin every day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
And now, let’s take a look at a real-life example of a CMO who’s walking the talk on the AI-native front. Tim Rutten, take it away.
The Rewrite That Needed to Happen
Account coverage per ABM marketer up 10x. New and Qualified Pipeline up 85+% YoY, while average deal size increased by 60+% YoY. Marketing budget optimized by 25%. ABM platform, integration stack, reporting stack — all absorbed into something we built ourselves. Off Salesforce as a workspace, and mostly headless.
We didn’t get here by bolting ChatGPT onto the workflow. We rewrote the GTM function, including architecture, operations, structure, roles, from scratch.
That rewrite is what this moment is about.
I get asked the same question constantly by peers, by people on my team, by customers trying to figure out their next move: “How do I bring AI to life in my org and deliver ROI?” My honest answer: It’s either all the way or not at all.
Most who ask are still toe-dipping, held back by red tape, compliance, budget, or healthy skepticism about the hype. They have ChatGPT or Claude open, they’re running Copilot, and wondering if that’s the whole thing. Others see the noise on LinkedIn but can’t find a path to real value. Some have convinced themselves they’re making progress by automating bits of output here and there.
I understand the instinct. I had versions of it myself. But after several quarters of doing this with intensity at Backbase, I can say with all honesty that none of those approaches are really “doing AI.” They’re useful — it’s not nothing! — but they’re not the rewrite.
Committing to it is a different kind of work. It means changing tried-and-true processes, getting the board and your teams aligned, sunsetting systems, telling your team the truth about what’s changing. It’s a complete rewrite of how the GTM function operates, and it’s happening right now, whether any of us have made peace with it or not.
Blank Page, Real Stakes
Last July, I made what some would consider a crazy decision to shake up my status quo. I asked myself: If I had to fulfill the CMO role from scratch, with zero headcount, zero infrastructure, and no legacy commitments, how would I do it AI-native?
I started calling this the “Shadow CMO organization.” Start from a blank page. Architect everything around what AI can actually do now. Add humans only where they’re genuinely needed and uniquely valuable. It was a thought experiment with a destination I didn’t fully see at the time: the operating environment we’d eventually need to build to run that organization for real. We now call it our “GTM OS” — more on that shortly.
The trigger was a four-year mandate from our founder & CEO: become an AI-native company. We couldn’t credibly tell the biggest banks in the world to become AI-native if we weren’t walking the talk ourselves. I took it personally.
The Shadow CMO organization is the single most useful thing I’ve done as a CMO this year. The moment you start from zero, you realize how much of the current marketing operating model exists for reasons that no longer hold. Reporting layers. Cadences. Slidedeck shuffling. MarTech middleware. None of it survives the rewrite.
The first material move was in Q3 2025, when I went all-in on Claude Code in the terminal, well before it was everywhere on the feed. It became obvious quickly that this was the “aha” moment my senior leadership team needed, so I gave it to them. Within weeks they were (sleep deprived and) rebuilding their own functions inside Claude Code, learning to think in systems, experimenting with agents, and producing real value. They went on to champion the new way of working inside their teams.
On change management, we moved early and got lucky.
That said, none of the above scales. It was the spark for transformation, not an actual system.
Sparks Don’t Scale
The actual, scalable system takes deliberate building, and it starts with a much smaller team than anyone expects.
To start, you need only three roles:
A visionary executive who holds the line on the North Star and provides political cover when the organization’s immune system pushes back — and it will.
A senior strategist who deeply understands the business and has the functional view of what the AI transformation should deliver.
An AI architect/distinguished engineer who can actually build. Someone who ships real capabilities that hold up at scale.
Working as one unit, that trio gets you over the hill. Everything else comes after.
Their first target deliverable is your “landing zone,” a governed environment where we deploy workflows, automations, and agents that are compliant, secure, and auditable. It’s unglamorous by design. (Case in point: It hosts our GTM OS — the internal platform we treat as a product.) Without a landing zone, you can’t make real progress.
And yet the build was the easy part. It was the internal resistance (or confusion) that required addressing: compliance, IT, procurement, some of your own team. Many will push back, and they aren’t wrong to. The new operation runs on different assumptions and economics, and looks unfamiliar from where they’re sitting.
You can’t debate your way through this. The only thing that works is showing value as fast as humanly possible. Ship something real. Demo working workflows in front of the right people. The moment I could show the GTM OS we were building (even an early, limited version), the same people who pushed back were knocking on my door, asking how they could apply the patterns to their function.
Generalists, Amplified
The shift in conversation was inevitable. The most interesting change has been organizational. The team is collapsing into far more logical clusters, built around outcomes rather than functions. The crafts that marketing has been organized around and siloed into for decades (content, digital, product marketing, demand gen, brand, ops), each with their own rituals, tools, and handoffs, are challenged with a better alternative.
This allows the role of the marketer to evolve into something way more interesting: the all-around operator who has seen every craft in their career, now amplified to take on accountability they never could before. They run the motion from end-to-end at a quality level that used to take a whole team. They offer craftsmanship across every domain, with the eye to tell good from great in every part of the GTM motion. That gives them high leverage on the GTM OS: no handoffs, no orchestration overhead, no status meetings, no spreadsheets or decks held together with hope.
ABM is where I see it most clearly today. A laser-sharp 1:1 ABM motion now has every craft fused into one flow of execution (content, digital, product, design, campaign orchestration), all coming together at a level I’ve never seen in my career to date, run by a single ABM Manager. The “Signal Engine,” one of the core capabilities of our GTM OS, is the spine of that motion. It’s GTM-aligned by design, and wired into how sales, marketing, and CS attack the market together.
The impact is hard to ignore:
Account coverage per ABM marketer is up roughly 10x, while massively improving quality and strategic depth. Account plans come for free.
What used to be a weeks-long, multi-function prep cycle is now a 30-minute agentic workload, delivered at a quality level that no human can outperform.
Reporting and interpretation are instant, even for complex quarterly board or business reviews across our regions.
But the deeper story isn’t any single number. The whole GTM function runs through one OS — execution aligned by design. Workflows live in the system, not in spreadsheets every region cooks up its own version of. Alignment moves from orchestrated to architectural. That’s what scales.
We’re Mostly Headless Now
Our proprietary Signal Engine went live at the end of Q3 2025 and immediately replaced our ABM platform. North of $100,000 in licensing saved. Since then, the GTM OS has absorbed our integration platform and reporting stack, and moved us off Salesforce as a workspace. The net effect speaks for itself.
The biggest story is inside the team. More than two-thirds of my marketers are having the best stretch of their careers right now, operating natively inside the GTM OS, learning at a pace they’ve never experienced, and redefining in real time what world-class marketing looks like. The rest are somewhere on the journey in, and my job isn’t to shame anyone; it’s to make the path forward clear and worth taking. The destination isn’t optional.
The question remains: Are you doing the work of two, three, or five classic FTEs, but still feel relaxed at the end of the day? If that’s you, you’ve got the operating model right. If not, the AI-native rewrite is waiting for you.
Remember: All the way or not at all.
Enjoy the ride.
Tim Rutten is CMO at Backbase — the €2.5 billion FinTech behind the AI-native Banking OS, used by 120+ leading banks worldwide. With 12 years at Backbase across solutions engineering, strategy, and executive leadership, Tim brings a rare operator’s perspective to marketing. He is one of the few GTM leaders building and running AI-native marketing at scale inside a category-defining technology company.
