Welcome back to the Founder’s GTM, with lean strategies to land new clients predictably.
We’ve spent the last few weeks deep in the weeds of email and LinkedIn: building signal lists, messaging and connection systems that actually go somewhere. Before we continue, I want to take a short break from tactics today.
Because there’s one topic we haven’t really touched yet: AI. That’s intentional. I don’t build AI-powered systems. I build AI-ready ones.
AI hype
Every founder right now feels pressure to do something with AI. Tools are everywhere, promising to write your messages, qualify your leads, book your calls.
But here’s what I keep seeing: people trying to automate parts of their GTM they don’t even understand yet.
The result looks smart from a distance: dashboards, agents, sequences. But up close, it’s just noise on autopilot.
The problem comes from poor judgment, not missing tools.
Automation without understanding is chaos
A recent study from Carnegie Mellon University found that leading AI agents failed nearly 70% of standard business tasks in simulation.
Another MIT and Fortune report claimed that roughly 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver expected value.
That stat could have been written about GTM. Teams collect tools like trading cards, then wonder why nothing compounds. They automate before they clarify, and chase the next integration while their positioning is still mushy.
That’s like hiring a salesperson before you know what they’re supposed to say.
Automation belongs to what’s already working, not what’s still unproven.
The AI-obsessed founder
I recently worked with a fintech founder who was in love with his AI sales system. He’d automated everything from data enrichment and message writing to follow ups. After 8,000 sends, he had booked only two meetings.
We tore it apart. His targeting was vague, chasing “enterprise finance teams,” his message packed with AI buzzwords, and none of it had been tested manually.
We rebuilt from the ground up. Focused on one clear ICP: operations leads at mid-market fintechs using Stripe. Sent 120 emails, tracked every reply, action, and refined the copy each day.
His meeting rate jumped from 0.03% to 1.3%. After scaling that working system, he landed 4 deals worth €48K ARR in six weeks.
He didn’t need more AI. Jus clarity.
What AI-ready actually means
Being AI-ready starts with structure: systems so clear they can be automated later without breaking.
When your process already works, AI becomes leverage. When it doesn’t, AI just multiplies the chaos.
AI won’t build your strategy for you. It can only build with you. It doesn’t know why buyers pick one product over another or what makes your story resonate.
Founders love to argue with that, mostly because it’s easier to believe AI can skip the hard parts. But AI doesn’t infer context it hasn’t lived. It can’t tell you why a deal slipped or why one message landed while another died.
Until you can explain your own logic clearly, giving it to AI just outsources confusion. It won’t invent clarity and only scales whatever thinking you’ve already done, good or bad.
That’s why I treat automation like delegation: never hand off what you don’t already understand.
Real business intelligence is still human
Here’s how I think about it:
Let automation handle what’s predictable: cleaning data, enriching leads, following up on inbound leads. Let humans handle what’s unpredictable: timing, testing, nuance, and real conversation.
Even major enterprise surveys show that most AI deployments struggle because teams lack structure and clarity, not because the tech is weak.
AI doesn’t replace human intelligence. It just reveals who has structure and who’s winging it.
Founders who get this use tech to multiply good judgment. The rest use dashboards to measure how efficiently they’re getting nowhere.
Takeaway
Before you build an AI-powered GTM, make sure it’s AI-ready. Prove your message, test your motion, and understand your buyers before you ever start automating.
That’s exactly why I started The Founder’s GTM: it’s a blueprint for building founder-led GTM systems that actually work before you scale them.
If your system is broken, AI won’t fix it. It’ll only make the cracks show faster: in your messaging, your targeting, and your process. It’s a race to the bottom.
This Substack exists to help you build judgment first, then efficiency.
Next week, we’ll return to the practical series and talk about how to turn your new connections into business partners.
Until then: keep it simple, stay human, and don’t let automation steal your judgment.
Jasper
Want help making your GTM system AI-ready? Book your outbound optimiser session. I’ll review your current setup and show you what to automate (and what to keep human).