I feel like I write some version of this every year. I keep hoping I won’t need to, but the pressure keeps increasing. Targets don’t go down. Teams keep getting flatter. AI keeps speeding everything up. And somehow we’re still expected to stay aligned across sales, marketing, product, and customer success without friction showing up for buyers.

We should be used to this tension by now. It’s baked into how most of us operate in the wonderful world of GTM. 

What’s different heading into 2026 is that the margin for error is gone. The buffers that once absorbed misalignment are disappearing.

That shift changes what matters. It changes how teams organize, how leaders make decisions, and how creativity survives inside a go-to-market engine crafted over a decade of revenue-first mentality.

Here are five changes that follow from that reality:

This isn’t the year of a new channel or a new playbook. It’s the year when AI and efficiency pressure-strip away the insulation that once protected broken GTM systems. Targets stay high. Teams flatten. Speed increases. And suddenly misalignment shows up where it always mattered most: in the buyer experience.

AI doesn’t create new problems. It removes the delay. What’s left is alignment, accountability, and whether your company actually feels coherent to someone trying to buy from you. Weak systems don’t fail quietly anymore. They fail in real time.

Owning the narrative stops being enough.

In 2026, product marketing either moves closer to revenue or gets flattened into support. This isn’t about carrying a quota. It’s about owning the inputs that change buyer behavior inside active deals.

Conversion at key stages. Deal velocity. Objections that stall pipeline dollars. Competitive framing. These aren’t brand exercises. They’re revenue levers.

AI removes the data bottleneck. The strongest PMM teams spend less time launching new things and more time fixing what’s already breaking in the funnel.

Vagueness loses its immunity.

Awareness doesn’t disappear in 2026; it just stops being a safe place to hide. Boards and CFOs aren’t interested in whether the market knows your name. They care whether the right accounts understand why you matter when a buying decision is being made.

As GTM systems become more accountable, metrics that can’t be tied to buyer behavior start to feel fragile.

This isn’t anti-creativity. It’s anti-vagueness. Creativity works best when it has a real audience and a real problem to solve. Precision doesn’t limit creative space. It sharpens it.

And GTM pays the price.

Creativity won’t die in 2026 because of AI. It will die because of premature ROI. When the first question about an idea is how it will be measured, the work immediately becomes boring. Safe ideas survive. Interesting ones disappear.

And I like the interesting ideas.

This process is only getting faster because of AI, which is making average work fast and cheap. The downstream impact shows up everywhere. Sales conversations blur together. Demos sound identical. Pricing pressure increases because nothing feels meaningfully different.

The strongest teams separate exploration from evaluation. They allow ideas to be wrong before asking them to be efficient. Measurement still matters, but it happens where buyers make decisions, not where ideas are formed.

Decision-making becomes the constraint.

Flattening in 2026 isn’t primarily about cost reduction. It’s about learning speed. Every handoff between GTM functions is a place where insight slows down or dies.

Marketing learns something that sales never hears. Sales hears objections that the product team never sees. Customer success uncovers expansion signals that never make it back upstream. Fragmentation becomes expensive.

The teams that adapt will organize around ownership of segments, motions, and outcomes. They will get smaller, flatter, and more senior because execution is abundant and judgment is scarce. Creativity doesn’t disappear in flatter orgs. It loses places to hide.

The coming year won’t expose weak marketers or underperforming sellers. It will expose our broken systems. Systems we knew were broken but were okay with the duct tape. 

The companies that win won’t have the better duct tape. They’ll have a shared language, clear ownership, and faster feedback loops. 

So here’s to 2026, where creativity will never disappear but broken systems will.

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