2025 was the year of the Great AI Delusion. We saw CEOs lighting piles of cash on fire to buy “AI magic wands” while their core revenue systems were leaking like a 19th-century steamship.

Here is the cold, hard truth that most consultants are too afraid to tell you:

AI doesn’t create performance. It only amplifies the system it’s plugged into.

If your Go-To-Market strategy is a “fuzzy” mess of misaligned goals and generic segments, AI won’t save you. It will just make you fail faster—at scale, and with a higher invoice.

The Paradox of Misaligned Growth

Last year, I sat in boardrooms with CEOs, CROs, CMOs, and founders across SaaS and enterprise tech. They all had the same “AI Paradox”: record spending on LLMs and “copilots,” but zero movement in closing rates or pipeline velocity.

Why? Because Sales, Marketing, and Product were still speaking three different languages. They used AI to automate the status quo rather than fixing the underlying rot.

Speed vs. Truth

If your revenue pipeline is full of holes, increasing the pressure won’t help. You’ll just lose water faster. AI is a high-pressure pump. If you plug it into a broken GTM, you don’t get growth—you get a flood of ‘Faster Confusion’.

Most firms are using AI as a glorified typewriter for marketing fluff. But real revenue—the kind that survives a market correction—comes from a Growth Operating System. This isn’t about “doing more.” it’s about finding the Customer Truth.

The 3 Questions Your Team is Avoiding

In 2026, the winners won’t be the ones with the best prompts. They will be the ones who can answer these three Socratic questions with absolute clarity:

  1. What business are we really in? (Hint: It’s never the product).
  2. Which customers really matter? (If you say “everyone,” you’ve already lost).
  3. How do we make decisions faster? (Without losing the truth).

The 2026 Mandate

2025 was the year of proof—the year we realized that “content creation” is the lowest-value use of AI. 2026 is the year of Scale.

If you aren’t embedding AI into your core sales and management workflows to drive decision-making, you aren’t leading; you’re just watching the movie.

Stop the hype. Fix the system.

(Watch the full 2025 Retrospective video below for the breakdown of the Growth Operating System.)

Are you ready to stop the ‘AI Theater’ and build a Growth Operating System? 👉 Book your 30-minute AI+IMPACT assessment here

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Published by Emmanuel Obadia

With over 30 years of experience in software, I’ve had the opportunity to work as an entrepreneur and international executive for some of the biggest names in tech, including Lotus, IBM, Peoplesoft, Sun Microsystems, Sage, Salesforce, and Oracle. As a former EMEA Vice President of Marketing and Global Chief Product Officer, I gained invaluable insights into the rapidly changing tech industry. Today, I’m an Optimist Sr. Advisor, Executive Coach & Mentor, and public speaker. I’m thrilled to help teams of any size thrive in complexity, speed, and change, and to inspire transformation and innovation for impact. I’m passionate about empowering individuals and organizations to make a lasting mark on the world. If you want to learn more about my journey, please check out my bio and About for additional details My motto: “Authentic leadership: unlocking the potential to achieve the impossible.”

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