GTM Engineering is the real secret moat since AI has reduced the barrier to creating products. Finding a unique signal, carving out a proprietary channel, and the ALPHA, these add the necessity to solve the growth maze from a different lens.Andrew Chen wrote a piece on this a few months ago: https://lnkd.in/gF3wJxUNClay created the GTM Engineering role. And Maven created lightning sessions to learn about this fast. If you're in ops and not adding this to your reading/learning list, you're missing out.

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Super excited to announce that UserEvidence has acquired Zealot, and raised an additional $7M (bringing our total to $21M) to fuel our product development and help B2B enterprises deliver customer proof across the entire funnel - from customer evidence, to advocate engagement, and 1:1 references.When Ray Rhodes and I met Sam Farber, Srikar Chava, and Brandon Jakobson back in May - we were instantly stoked on the potential. Their product instincts, speed, creativity, AI-native approach to building, and the incredible traction they had made in a short amount of time blew us away. Big congrats to the Zealot team!Customer content, advocate engagement, and reference management are not inherently distinct concepts. In fact, they are inextricably related and supportive of each other. Yet - there were different technologies in each of these 3 pillars, and arms-length integrations often fell short of their potential.Bringing these 3 pillars together under the same platform creates a massive opportunity for #customermarketers to holistically engage and harness and organizations most important asset - their customers.In an age of increasing noise and complexity when it comes to choosing the right vendor - substantive, credible, specific proof - whether delivered as content or delivered through live connection with a reference - is going to be the key to inspiring buyer confidence.Customer Marketers will be at the center of the organization, and UE + Zealot will power the future of #customermarketingRead more about the news here - https://lnkd.in/gd5Dygu8

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Last week at Zoomtopia, I sat down with innovator, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen. Marc’s insights are highly relevant to how we approach AI at Zoom, moving at the speed of today’s ‘tech revolution’ to apply the latest AI advancements to how we connect and collaborate.Here are my top 5 takeaways from our conversation: 1. The next tech revolution is here: Every generation has its own tech revolution, from the Internet to cloud computing to AI – the eras that matter yield entire industries and new ways of doing things.  2. AI is the new Internet, on hyperspeed: Today’s AI era is what the Internet era was 30 years ago– but happening at a much faster pace.  3. AI + industry evolution = invest: The companies to watch are those harnessing AI while their industries rapidly change- think the intersection between AI and crypto or AI and biotech. 4. Hands-on learning, at work: Urge employees to experiment with AI, freeing up time so they can try new ideas and prototype new systems. 5. Equipping the next generation: Students must learn how to responsibly use AI, both in K-12 and higher ed. We couldn’t agree more at Zoom and have pledged $10M to bring this to life. Marc shared a great example of his son coding on his own, then using AI to debug the code. Students still need to learn the fundamentals, but AI can help them learn, improve and grow.For more insights from Marc and other speakers, check out the Zoomtopia replay at  https://zoomtopia.com/ 

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It’s funny to think about now, but we started Opstream before AI was on everyone’s radar. Just four years ago.Back then, I sat down with my co-founder, who in one of her key roles was VP of Operations and Professional Services at Taboola. She brought up the fact that she hates waiting.Waiting for legal reviews.Waiting to find the right vendor status.Waiting because a missed renewal meant sitting on a bad contract for another 12 months.Waiting for someone to dig up the right doc, the right number, the right answer.The cost of that waiting both in time and money was staggering.When you are a doer, the last thing you can afford is waiting.So we asked ourselves:What if every company’s operations could feel instantaneous?What if everything you needed was just one question away?Get the data you need — NowFind the right doc — NowVendor intake status — NowCompliance review updates — NowRisk scores — NowSee where approvals got stuck — NowBut the real insight?The problem wasn’t the people. It was the search for information.So we flipped the model: instead of employees hunting for data, the data should activate the team.That’s what we’ve built with Opstream.Autonomous workflows that are moving the business forward without the wait.Why did we start Opstream?Simply put, we were tired of waiting.

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Launch day! Continuing the drum beat on new provider integrations: today we're announcing a native integration with Anyscale! Anyscale kicks off a series of AI-specific provider integrations we're going to be announcing for the remainder of the year. When I started Vantage, I had a belief that companies were going to be using more and more third-party providers beyond the main three hyperscalers to run their infrastructure. Today, AI has materially accelerated that trend. Each of these AI providers has their own bespoke pricing structure that we need to work with to provide the single pane of glass view into total cost of ownership for an organization. As companies leverage these AI providers, they expect that their Finops platform has support accordingly. As with the ~25 other native integrations Vantage currently supports, Anyscale costs will support all the #FinOps features you know and love across cost allocation, budgeting, forecasting and beyond. Getting starting is as simple as providing an API key and we do all the heavy lifting from there. To see all the details, check out the blog post below.

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Today, Box is announcing major new AI agent capabilities to let customers tap into the full value of their unstructured data.First, we’re announcing all new updates to the Box AI Studio to make it even easier to build AI agents that tap into your enterprise content for any job function, business process, or industry specific use case. We are also expanding our set of foundational agents that customers will be able to use to work with their enterprise content, including new features like search and research on unstructured data. Next, we’re announcing Box Extract to enable customers to use AI agents seamlessly for complex data extraction from any type of document or content. This makes it easier than ever to pull out data from contracts, invoices, research data, marketing assets, medical charts, and more.Finally, we’re introducing Box Automate, a new workflow automation solution within Box that lets you deploy AI agents across enterprise content-centric workflows. With Box Automate, you can design your business process in a simple drag and drop builder and then drop in AI agents at any step in the process. This ensures agents execute tasks at the right steps in a workflow every time.Best of all, our AI agents and workflow tools are designed to work across any system our customers work within, whether it’s leveraging pre-built integrations, Box APIs, or the new Box MCP Server.Ultimately, all of these capabilities come together to transform how companies can work with their enterprise content.Software has historically only been good at automating work that deals with structured data, which is why ERP, CRM, and HR systems have been mainstays of enterprise software for so long. The data in these systems fits neatly into a database, and the workflows are very ripe for automation.But it turns out most of the work in the world deals with unstructured data. It’s ideating through research documents, working with a client on contracts, reviewing details for a new product launch, looking at a patient’s healthcare record to make a diagnosis, working through due diligence documents for an M&A deal, and so on.For the first time ever, we can begin to bring all new insights and automation to this work with AI agents. At Box, we’re incredibly excited to be on this journey to help customers transform how they work with their most important data. Learn more at: https://lnkd.in/gSNHmYbA

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Incredible The Josh Bersin Company case study has just launched detailing how HiBob supports team.blue across 60 different portfolio companies spanning 20 counties to deliver💡 AI Insights at scale 👏 84% adoption across all global employees✍ 95% reduction in manual tasksLink to complete case study in comments

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Newton Research’s oversubscribed $9M Series A, alongside Greycroft, Bessemer Venture Partners, S4S Ventures, and LiveRamp Ventures.Newton is redefining what agentic AI can do for marketing analytics, enabling brands and agencies to:- Run customer 360 journey analysis across touchpoints- Segment audiences and build predictive models- Automate attribution, incrementality, and media mix modeling- Generate dynamic, natural language-driven reporting- Save up to 126 hours/month and achieve 10x analytics outputTheir pre-built “blueprints” let non-technical teams securely run advanced analytics on their own data with just a few clicks.John Hoctor, Matthew Emans, and Steven Bennett have successfully built and exited multiple companies. We love to back repeat founders on their most ambitious ideas, like Newton Research. Link to more in comments.

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Today marks a new chapter. I’m proud to share that Optimum7 has been acquired by Zen Media in a $10M deal, and I’ve stepped into the role of CEO of Zen Media. We’re building the first AI-native, outcome-driven growth agency, uniting PR, performance marketing, SEO, and RevOps into one integrated platform. Clients no longer need to stitch together disconnected vendors. They get outcomes: fast, intelligent, measurable.We are redefining what growth looks like in the AI era. Excited for what’s ahead with Shama Hyder, Sarah Evans, Scott Thompson, and the entire Zen Media team. Stay tuned (or reach out to find out more): our new AI-powered visibility products are just the beginning.https://lnkd.in/eqU2svhv#AI #MergersAndAcquisitions #FutureOfMarketing #AIVisibility #GrowthEngine

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The race to agentic commerce is a relay.Partnerships across the entire customer journey are driving agentic commerce from pilots to scale. This is accelerating adoption and determining who sets the standards and owns customer relationships as the space matures. Four companies have emerged as the gravitational centers of AI commerce:OpenAI - The infrastructure leader with 16 partnerships since 2024, plus a $1.1B acquisition of Statsig to expand its commerce capabilities.Google - Scaling through major brand partnerships (Home Depot, Behr, Alaska Airlines) by embedding AI assistants directly into their platforms.Shopify - Strategically positioned to own the checkout layer by integrating Shop Pay with OpenAI and Perplexity.Perplexity - The emerging integrator, connecting the customer journey through AI-powered discovery and search.The fragmented nature of AI commerce tools makes partnerships essential. No single company is building everything needed for complete autonomous shopping. Success requires:-AI models for understanding and prediction-Data infrastructure for processing and insights-Selling platforms for transactions-Payment rails for secure, frictionless checkoutCompanies are discovering that strategic partnerships allow them to accelerate AI adoption without building everything in-house, while accessing specialized capabilities across the tech stack.While public launches remain limited, major payment networks are quietly laying groundwork for the future. Visa has partnered with AI firms including Anthropic and IBM to integrate AI capabilities into its Intelligent Commerce platform. Mastercard and PayPal are developing similar agentic payment systems.The complex requirements for autonomous payments – including authentication, fraud detection, and consumer trust – position incumbent networks as essential partners in the ecosystem.We are moving toward a world where AI agents can discover products, compare options, and complete purchases autonomously. These partnerships will determine who controls the customer relationship.

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New Rev-Up Sales Podcast Episode with Jeff Perry, CRO at Carta: We spoke about Capacity Alignment When Building Sales Orgs and touched on AI skepticism. Jeff, who is also on Grw AI's Advisory Board kindly joined me to unpack how capacity planning really changes as you scale!We dig into:💥 The story behind headcount, enablement, and quota as you grow💥 Aligning people, process, and tech💥 Why AI skepticism is at an all-time high (and how they think about evaluating AI tools)If you’re a CRO, RevOps, or sales leader wrestling with growth, you’ll want this in your ears.Listen now (link in comments) and let me know your biggest takeaway👇

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