Ross Rich, CEO and Co-Founder of Accord, recently sat down with Cristina Cordova, COO at Linear, to discuss where AI is creating value and what happens when teams rely on it too much.
Is AI making GTM worse or better?
Ross Rich, CEO and Co-Founder of Accord, recently sat down with Cristina Cordova, COO at Linear, to discuss where AI is creating value and what happens when teams rely on it too much.
Here are her three hot takes.
“We have a really fantastic PLG business, with people signing up for the product, using it, and playing around with it a lot,” says Cristina. “To me, a lot of that is product data I want to use for GTM purposes.”
How someone interacts with your product can tell you a lot. They might already be using it. They might have used it at another company. Or they might simply be really excited about what you're doing. All of those interactions are signals.
This is one of the areas Cristina sees AI adding real value. “We’re using AI to help us understand those signals a lot more [and figure out when to act on them],” she says.
GTM teams have more AI tools than ever to help them identify the right people to reach out to, but leads are still falling through the cracks.
“I don’t know for sure that we have reached out to every lead we should have reached out to,” says Cristina.
Her ah-ha moment came when someone from a 1,000-person company posted something nice about Linear on LinkedIn and tagged her. Except, the company didn't use Linear.
Curious, her team did some digging and found out the person was part of a company that had been acquired by the larger organization a few years earlier. That team was still using Linear internally. So, there was a huge expansion opportunity sitting right in front of them. They just didn't know about it.
And for a company like Linear, those opportunities matter. A customer might start with one team or a smaller plan and expand from there, with sales stepping in along the way. “In some months, our net revenue retention for a 12-month cohort is over 200%,” says Cristina. “To me, a lot of that is driven by something that was originally PLG, that eventually you layer in sales. One feeds the other.”
Are people getting carried away with how much they’re using and relying on AI?
According to Cristina, the answer is a blaring yes.
“People have AI psychosis,” she says. “Which is a real problem. People are using AI too much and not watching out for quality.”
And people have developed a pretty good sixth sense for AI-generated content.They don’t like it. Something feels off. “Once I have some kind of tell that it wasn’t written by a human, I’m immediately deleting it. And it might be a great sales email, but I want to feel like there’s a real human behind it,” she stresses. “I buy from humans. I don’t want to talk to agents.”
And she’s not alone. Recent reports indicate that 60% of consumers are “turned off” by brands that use AI-generated messaging.
But is the answer to disregard AI altogether and go back to human-only interactions? Probably not.
Instead, Cristina recommends companies become more strategic about how they use it. “Come up with a writing style guide that sounds how your brand wants to sound,” she says. “Use these tools, but use them appropriately. They are not saviors for all of your problems.”
