The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play
Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
A career-defense and career-acceleration move for GTM professionals worried AI makes them obsolete. Instead of waiting for a team or agency, personally pick one acute problem, one leading vendor, and train an agent to production yourself. Doing so puts you in the ~20% who thrive and makes you highly hireable. Use it if your GTM role feels threatened by AI.
Origin
Lemkin says only ~20% of GTM people will make the jump, and offers the simple path to be in that group: nobody's doing it, so anyone who actually gets one agent live becomes 'the master of the universe.' He notes SaaStr itself became a de facto consulting shop because so few people have done it hands-on.
Core principles
- 01The scarce skill is having actually deployed an agent to production yourself — almost nobody has.
- 02Pick the most painful or acute single problem; don't try to solve everything.
- 03Do the training, ingestion, and orchestration yourself — don't delegate to an agency or wait for a team.
- 04The first agent is brutal; the second is easy, and then you're a veteran everyone wants to hire.
How to run it
- 1
Pick one acute problem
Choose a single painful problem — support, SDR outbound, inbound qualification. Just one, the most acute.
- 2
Pick one leading vendor that treats you well
Choose any leading vendor you like that will help you — Agentforce, Qualified, Artisan, whatever. Which one matters less than that they help.
Pro tip Apply the FDE test — pick one that will actually deploy with you.
- 3
Do it yourself, end to end
Personally train the agent, ingest the data, run the iterations, and understand how it actually works. Don't hand it to an agency or a 20-year-old SDR.
Pro tip Budget ~50-60 hours plus vendor qualification; expect the first one to be hard.
Watch out If you wait for your team or an agency to do it, Lemkin thinks you'll be out of a job.
- 4
Get it live into production
Push it past experiments into real production use. That crossing is what makes you hyper-employable — you can pitch yourself as a chief agentic GTM officer.
Pro tip Once the first is live, the second and third are far easier — become the internal veteran companies are desperate for.
In the wild
SaaStr ran a call with a public B2B company worth over $10B and 20 people on the line. Asked how much they'd done themselves, it was 'just crickets' — no one had touched it. They'd expected an untrained agent handed to junior SDRs to magically sell.
→ Demonstrates the scarcity of hands-on skill and the size of the opportunity for anyone who does it.
Lemkin argues the future SDR at a company like Vercel manages 10 agents, not 10 people, and is worth $250k instead of $80-90k.
→ The hands-on skill translates directly into higher pay and demand.
Common mistakes
Waiting for someone else to do it
Delegating to an agency or team means you never build the skill; agencies don't know how, and you become replaceable.
Panicking instead of building
Most people are panicked about AI and doing nothing. The move is available to almost anyone who's been in B2B — it just takes a month.
Is it for you?
Best for
SDRs, AEs, and GTM leaders worried about AI obsolescence who want to become the internal agent expert
Not ideal for
Junior reps with no budget access, since entry-level agents run ~$50k+ plus FDE fees
From the transcript
“Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems.”
“If you can go do this and get it live into production, you're hyper employable.”
“It'll be really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier.”
From the episode
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)