​How GTM Engineering Is Closing The AI Adoption Gap

Innovation​How GTM Engineering Is Closing The AI Adoption GapByVarun Milind Kulkarni,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 12, 2026, 10:00am EDTVarun is a Product and applied AI leader, shaping the future of forward-deployed customer experiences, agentic systems and GTM engineering. getty​AI adoption is not a buying problem anymore. It is a motion problem.The capability gap between AI products and the software that came before them has closed faster than most enterprises can adapt their procurement, onboarding and expansion playbooks. The shift is already in the data. According to recent McKinsey research, agentic AI will drive more than 60% of the additional value AI generates in marketing and sales. A recent Gartner forecast projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be intermediated by AI agents, pushing more than $15 trillion of B2B spend through AI agent exchanges. The capability is here but the motion to commercialize has not kept pace.A discipline has emerged across the AI-native landscape to close that gap. It applies builder thinking to the work of turning product usage into revenue. It is called GTM engineering and it is why the fastest scaling AI companies look nothing like the businesses that came before them.​How GTM Engineering Closes The GapGTM engineering is product thinking applied to revenue motion. In practice, it means building the systems that turn product signals into pipeline, customer behavior into outreach and usage data into expansion paths. Clay coined the term in 2023 and it has become a defining capability inside the fastest-scaling AI companies. The work runs without manual intervention and improves with every customer it touches.The closest adjacent functions are revenue operations and marketing operations. The differences are practical. Revenue operations runs systems that...