Inbound was the first GTM function ripe for AI. Now the question is – what’s next.
AI SDRs, conversational chat agents, 24/7 qualification, automated meeting booking…the top of the funnel is more automated than it has ever been. For most growth-stage B2B companies, these tools are no longer a competitive edge. They’re table stakes.
Blake Tiemeyer, Director of Growth Acceleration at General Atlantic, said it directly in our State of the Industry discussion on value creation: “Inbound I think is almost entirely automated at this point for a lot of our companies. AI SDRs, chat capability on your website, 24/7 coverage, able to book meetings, do your ICP scoring, prioritization — all within that platform.”
So if inbound is handled, where does the next wave of AI value in GTM actually come from?
Outbound Is Next
Outbound automation has followed a similar path. More volume, more sequences, more AI-written emails going out the door. The metrics look great until you look at the right metrics.
Amy Kramer, Operating Partner for Go-to-Market at Level Equity, shared a signal from their annual go-to-market benchmarking report that should get everyone’s attention. Meeting booking numbers are going up. Conversion rates are going down.
“It’s because all these different AI tools are enabling that much higher volume of outreach, but it’s kind of table stakes and it’s created a lot of noise in the market,” she said. “Your ability to convert any given prospect is actually that much harder.”
That’s the paradox of scaled outbound. The tool that was supposed to give you an edge is now being used by everyone, which means the edge is gone. If you’re not using AI-powered outbound, your performance is probably declining. If you are using it, you’re keeping pace, not pulling ahead.
CS & Post-Sales: Untapped AI Opportunities
While outbound is currently being worked on, Blake put it plainly: “post-sales is where the largest opportunity exists.”
Think about what that means in practice. Signal recognition to catch churn risk before it surfaces. Automated customer health scores that don’t require a CSM to manually update a spreadsheet. Upsell and cross-sell triggers fired off product usage data. QBR automation that actually prepares the account, not just the deck.
But as Blake noted, the full picture is not packaged cleanly yet. “A lot of our companies are starting to experiment with pieces of each of that process, but haven’t really come together in a full platform view yet.”
That gap is exactly where the opportunity is. The companies that get there first — with clean product usage data, automated expansion signals, and a real post-sales infrastructure — are going to look very different from their competitors in 18 months.
Why CS Has Been Left Behind
Here is the uncomfortable truth about customer success: it has the most low-hanging fruit and the weakest infrastructure.
Amy named it directly. “CS is such an interesting thing when you think about it through this lens, because there are so many opportunities. It’s actually the area we’ve tapped the least. And it’s because CS typically, at least for a lot of our companies, has the weakest infrastructure.”
The pattern makes sense when you trace how companies invest in resources. New logo growth gets the attention. Demand gen gets the ad dollars. The go-to-market stack gets the RevOps resources. Post-sales gets what’s left — which, for most growth-stage companies, is not much.
Retention forecasting is manual. Health scores are gut feel. Expansion plays are reactive. None of that is built for AI augmentation yet because the underlying processes were never built for scale in the first place.
That is the real blocker. Not the tools. The foundation the tools would need to run on.
The Future of the CSM Role
The role of customer success managers (CSMs) is where the conversation gets interesting.
Amy’s view: “The future is you shouldn’t need CSMs. A lot of this should be able to be built into the product and be so intuitive, and reporting should be self-served.”
The traditional CSM role, she argues, is functioning as a bandaid. A human layer compensating for a product that is not yet intuitive enough to deliver value on its own. “I don’t need a quarterly meeting with a CSM. I’m either getting value or I’m not.”
The shift she is pointing to is product-led engagement replacing the human touchpoint. In-app guidance, self-served reporting, automated signals that surface the right insight at the right time, without a scheduled call.
That does not mean the human relationship disappears. Blake made the point clearly: no commercial leader wants AI doing the high-EQ, high-relationship work. What they want is the administrative layer removed so their people can focus on what actually drives retention and expansion.
The CSM of the future is probably closer to an account executive. Someone driving expansion conversations, not onboarding checklists.
The Areas Nobody Is Talking About Yet
Beyond post-sales, there is a second tier of opportunity that is getting almost no attention right now.
Blake called it out: deal desk, RFPs, pricing, and proposals. “Deal desk is one of those areas that everyone kind of rolls their eyes about, just because it tends to be a bottleneck in some companies. There seems like low-hanging fruit there.”
RFP automation is already starting to mature. Tools that can pull from your knowledge base, match to requirements, and generate a first-pass response are real and getting better fast. The next version of pricing — dynamic, proposal-aware, approval-integrated — is not far behind.
Internal process optimization is the other one. Not headline-worthy. But if you run an honest audit of where your team’s time goes inside the revenue org, a significant portion of it is administrative work that has nothing to do with building pipeline or retaining customers.
These are not moonshots. They are process problems that AI is actually well-suited to solve right now. The reason they are underserved is the same reason post-sales is underserved: the development attention has been on top-of-funnel because it is the big, visible, revenue-generating motion.
Everything else has been waiting its turn.
What This Means for GTM Teams
Here is the pattern Amy and Blake keep coming back to: the teams that are going to win are the ones that stop chasing the next inbound tool and start asking where the real leverage is hiding in their existing funnel.
- Audit your post-sales infrastructure before buying anything new. If you do not have clean product usage data, reliable health scores, and a defined expansion motion, no platform is going to fix that.
- Look at your outbound conversion rates, not your outbound volume. More sequences is not the answer. Better signals and sharper targeting are.
- Build the CS foundation now. The companies investing in post-sales infrastructure today are going to be ready when the tooling catches up. The ones waiting are going to be scrambling.
- Take internal optimization seriously. Deal desk, RFPs, proposals — these are real productivity wins that most teams are ignoring because they are not on the revenue line.
- Shorten your vendor contracts. Blake’s tactical advice is worth repeating: negotiate shorter terms, build in trial periods, and protect your ability to move when better options emerge. Consolidation is coming.
The next three years of AI value creation are going to be won in the places that have been systematically underinvested – post-sales, internal operations, and the infrastructure that connects product usage to revenue outcomes.
At York IE, we help growth-stage companies build the go-to-market foundation and revenue operations infrastructure that makes all of this possible, so that when the post-sales platforms mature, you are positioned to actually use them.
Amy and Blake mapped out where the next wave is heading in detail. If you want to hear the full conversation, watch the webinar here.