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Everything I measured in AI x GTM -- October report
TL;DR |
Build vs. buy, marketing agents are coming, the new inbound, and category lines blurring.
It blows my mind that most GTM tech vendors are still shipping new tabs, modules, dashboards, and SaaS features for humans to click around.
Agents are going to do more and more GTM work. As a buyer, you have two choices.
Buy agents. The vendor’s agent does the work and delivers the outcome.
Build agents. You build the system and buy the Legos (infra, tools, capabilities).
If we flip this to the vendor’s perspective, it highlights two paths to escape the SaaS 2.0 death zone.
The AI x GTM Tech Triangle is my framework for thinking about how GTM tech is moving from software humans use to agent-native GTM.
If I were a new CMO or CRO, I’d assess every vendor on this triangle. My CEO wants me to hit numbers AND deliver agent-native GTM. Any vendor that can’t show me an agent or give me the tools to build my own is getting put on churn notice.
I logged 129 GTM moves in October. Here are the key ones on each path.
This is the new build vs. buy for every GTM team. Which agents do you hire, and which do you build?
| I’ll be going deeper on this framework at Apify RUN on Tuesday in SF. I’m on at 2:30pm. I have 15 free passes: use code RUNADAMFREE. I’d love to see you there! |
And of course, there is no bigger player in the “build” conversation than Claude Code. The biggest story this month (above the GTM space) is Anthropic’s S-1 filing on Oct. 26. Its revenue grew 1,127% in a year, to $17.0B in the third quarter. Customers spending $100K+ went from about 950 to more than 11,900. This year, 79% of its revenue came from usage, not subscriptions. It’s the most remarkable growth story in history.
None of Anthropic’s seven vertical solutions are for sales or marketing.
But when I look at the conversations GTM leaders and creators are having about “agents,” Anthropic dominates. They don’t need to build for GTM to be disruptive in this space. In my panel, coding agents were mentioned in 8% of October’s GTM conversation. Sales agents at 1.4%, and marketing agents ~1%. So even within GTM conversations, there is more talk about how agents can help with coding work than actual GTM work.
This shows both Anthropic’s impact on all domains and how GTM is still lagging others (coding, support, legal, verticals). I’ve talked about this at length in the past.
So while CEOs have been riding their CROs and CMOs to “be AI-Native” for two years, it’s still the early days in our corner of the AI world.
Let’s get into this month’s readout…
Three themes that stood out.
1. Marketing agents are coming
If we look within GTM, I’d argue that marketing feels behind sales. But October was a big month for mar-tech. Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66B on Oct. 20. It’s one in a long line of marketing automation deals. 30 years in, the category keeps producing big outcomes. Only Intuit’s $12B for Mailchimp beat it.
I like the headless angle for Salesforce. But BrazeForce + Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget + Pardot) = CMO confusion. The PMM team will need to re-draw the marketecture yet again.
This is a dynamic space with many approaches. Databricks put CustomerLake’s campaign agents in beta. Klaviyo gave its Composer agent to every customer. Optimizely added two more Virtual Teammates. Attentive’s new CEO claims it’s becoming “the best marketing agent in the world.” Hightouch pitched a “marketing harness,” and two days after the Braze news said it can send messages now.
Startups are coming too. Tofu pivoted to Tofu Ads, a full-service paid media agent. Marketo co-founder Jon Miller launched Phave to rebuild marketing automation around AI. Inflection.io put their headless MAP in Claude’s connectors. Different raised a $48M seed for AI that runs demand gen for lean B2B teams. Primer launched a new version that researches your market, builds and checks ad audiences, and investigates campaigns from a chat. Cody Schneider’s marketing agent Graphed went from $98K to $1.3M ARR in six months.
I expect the battleground to move deeper into marketing execution. Everyone wants to own the agent that actually executes the campaign.
And builders are doing it themselves. Joe Reitz, who runs marketing ops at Vercel, automated email campaign ops end to end on Customer.io, with a human reviewer at the last step. His team shipped 40+ emails in October. “This is how you make a team of 4 feel like 100.”
2. The new inbound
Kieran Flanagan said it well: “Content marketing as we knew it is over.” He says HubSpot now drives more growth from creators than it did from blogs.
More and more buyers will send their agents to evaluate B2B products and services. Personal agents talk rose 57% in October and is up 10x since July. Menlo co-led Town’s $108M round at $1B, and Meta’s Muse hit 10 million U.S. downloads in 40 days.
Inbound is still the #1 GTM motion according to Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje’s 2026 State of B2B GTM Report. But it’s not the same inbound. OG inbound was gated eBooks, landing pages, MQLs, blogs, SEO and heavy email “nurture.” That playbook got very tired. New inbound is creator programs, exec social, apps instead of form pages, agents that answer in seconds, real tools instead of eBooks, zero-click content and AEO.
The conversation is moving the same way. Since April, new inbound talk grew 12%, and OG inbound talk fell by a fifth. New inbound now draws 2.1x the conversation OG inbound does.
Creator programs were a hot topic in my index last month.
Hector Serrano’s creators → UGC → paid playbook at Wispr Flow: 500 to 700 creator ads a month from 50 creators was the big story. In B2B, I’d try it this way: measure ICP engagements, treat creators like a sales team, pay a retainer plus incentives tied to ICP engagements, and run one new angle per ICP per day.
Creator programs are showing up in the jobs tracker too. In October, 15 of the 355 companies that posted new roles in my Jobs tracker put up one that runs a creator or influencer program. Eleven of the 15 sell to businesses or developers, not consumers. Nine posted a title built just to run one, like Granola’s Affiliate and Influencer Marketer. Supabase is hiring to bring its creator program in-house.
I think creator programs are huge, and probably still underrated in B2B. I’m seeing it from both sides now.
3. Everyone competes with everyone
The lines between categories are breaking down quickly. Unify launched a dialer, which puts it up against Nooks and Orum. Granola launched free voice typing in any app, Wispr Flow’s core product, after Wispr added its own meeting notetaker. Hightouch now sends the messages. Gamma said “Today, we’re starting over.”
Then there’s Anthropic. It’s the wrecking ball everyone else wants to avoid. Anthropic sells the tools, and it competes for the work. Claude Platform is infra for the agents you build. Claude Code, Cowork and its vertical solutions are agents you use. Over half of its $100K+ customers now use both, up from about 30% at the end of 2025. In October alone it launched Claude Duet, a personal agent across your email, Slack, calendar and files, and put Claude Dashboards and Motion in beta.
In my index, Claude Code is the most-talked-about brand in GTM, ahead of Salesforce, Clay and HubSpot.
The S-1 says so itself. Anthropic competes “with some of our own customers,” a risk that’s “particularly acute with software-as-a-service and other software companies.” And its go-to-market makes it hard to see coming: “By the time our direct teams engage a customer, Claude is often already in use.”
GTM still doesn’t have its breakout agent. Will it come from an existing GTM company, an AI lab, or a new agent-native startup?
The full Live Market Tracker is free to explore: every topic, brand, and move.
Note on numbers: my AI x GTM Panel reviewed 35K+ posts, articles and episodes in October. “October change” compares calendar October with September on the same topic registry; the live Index shows rolling 30 days, so its numbers differ a little. Topics overlap, so shares don’t add to 100%. Don’t compare these with percentages in earlier issues; the topic system keeps expanding.
GTM Market Tracker: October Numbers
Top topics
The Topics index measures 132 topics grouped into 25 curated clusters, plus 68 brand topics. Clusters and topics are overlapping views of the market, not separate buckets.
Topic | SOV · Change | Context |
|---|---|---|
1.) Building GTM Agents (cluster) | 17.1% · -14.7% | Coding, MCP, skills, context and runtimes |
2.) AEO/GEO (cluster) | 10.3% · +21.4% | Visibility, citations and recommendations in AI answers |
3.) Zero-Click Marketing Strategies (cluster) | 7.4% · +18.7% | Value in the feed instead of a click or a form |
4.) GTM Engineering (cluster) | 7.0% · +1.5% | Builders, orchestrators and developer tools |
5.) Headless & Agent Interfaces (cluster) | 6.0% · -21.7% | APIs, CLIs, protocols and agent interfaces |
6.) Signal-Based Sales & ABM (cluster) | 5.0% · +11.0% | Buyer signals that decide who to target, and when |
7.) Foundation Models (topic) | 4.6% · -51.7% | Frontier model launches, labs and model lines |
8.) Open vs. Closed Models (cluster) | 4.1% · -19.5% | Open models or closed APIs: cost, control, quality and lock-in |
9.) Proving AI ROI (cluster) | 3.8% · -23.4% | How companies prove AI delivers enough value to move beyond a pilot |
10.) Enterprise AI Adoption (cluster) | 3.7% · -19.9% | How large companies move AI from pilots into production work |
Fastest-moving topics
The demand topics led the gains. Personal agents kept climbing.
Topic | SOV · Change | What changed |
|---|---|---|
1.1% · +73% | Kieran Flanagan: HubSpot drives more growth from creators than it did from blogs. | |
Personal Agents (cluster) | 1.6% · +57% | Meta and Sierra’s Personal Agent Protocol; Zendesk and Link built support and payment rails. I narrowed this trend in November, so September restates to 1.0%. |
Forward Deployed Engineering (topic) | 0.8% · +55% | FDE became a hiring plan; Cargo added forward-deployed GTM engineers. |
Lead Scoring (topic) | 1.0% · +50% | Practitioner playbooks for scoring visitors and accounts. Back near its Q3 pace. |
Machine-Readable Sites & Docs (topic) | 0.6% · +47% | SEO voices moved to pages agents can read. |
Paid Media (topic) | 3.4% · +44% | A broad rise with no single driver. Back at its January level. |
Agentic GTM (topic) | 0.8% · +44% | Agentic marketing playbooks and Hightouch’s move into messaging. |
AI-Driven Advertising (topic) | 0.6% · +43% | ChatGPT Ads reached 89 countries; Lovable started running users’ ads. |
Attribution (topic) | 2.0% · +35% | Shopify data says AI-referred sessions convert about 50% higher. |
GTM Tech brands leading in each race
I track six market contests. Grouping is my framework; measurement is brand SOV. Here is who led each as of Nov. 1.
Market | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Traditional SaaS Going Headless | Salesforce, 94 | HubSpot, 90 | Instantly, 65 | Gong, 64 | HeyReach, 54 |
AI-Native GTM Challengers | Granola, 53 | Attio, 51 | Nooks, 48 | Gamma, 45 | Fin, 43 |
Coding Agents & Harnesses for GTM | Claude Code, 99 | Codex, 84 | Cursor, 77 | Grok Bot, 75 | Lovable, 61 |
Orchestrators & Agentic Workflow | Clay, 93 | n8n, 59 | Zapier, 54 | Airtable, 47 | Make, 37 |
GTM Developer Tools | Vercel, 61 | ElevenLabs, 56 | Prospeo, 54 | Apify, 52 | OpenRouter, 52 |
AEO-First Marketing Tech | Profound, 53 | Ahrefs, 50 | Semrush, 47 | AirOps, 41 | Peec AI, 29 |
For this table, each brand belongs to one market. The live Index allows overlapping membership.
Granola passed Attio for the AI-native lead. Grok Bot closed to within two points of Cursor. Clay gained 5.
The leaders at each stage
Stage | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Scaled | Claude Code, 99 | Salesforce, 94 | Clay, 93 | HubSpot, 90 | Codex, 84 |
Growth | DeepSeek, 65 | HeyReach, 54 | Apify, 52 | beehiiv, 51 | Attio, 51 |
Startup | Prospeo, 54 | AI Ark, 48 | RB2B, 48 | FullEnrich, 44 | Findymail, 44 |
Scaled means public, 250+ employees, or $150M+ raised. Growth means 50–249 employees or $25M+ raised. Startup means under both Growth thresholds. Products inherit their parent’s stage. Umbrella labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta) are held out.
CEOs and founders moving the conversation
Founders announcing their own launches and rounds drew the biggest spikes.
Founder or executive | Top October post | Engagements | Engagement vs baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
Andrew Yan, co-founder at AthenaHQ | 2,982 | 96.2× | |
Yahia Bakour, CEO at Context.dev | 1,448 | 26.6× | |
Grant Lee, CEO at Gamma | 2,638 | 21.1× | |
Paul Copplestone, CEO at Supabase | 2,166 | 17.5× | |
Alex Mashrabov, CEO at Higgsfield | 7,099 | 15.8× | |
Bill Magnuson, CEO at Braze | 3,076 | 15.5× | |
Austin Hughes, CEO at Unify | 897 | 12.1× | |
Anton Osika, CEO at Lovable | 9,168 | 12.0× | |
Arnaud Weiss, co-founder at Sillage | 759 | 11.7× | |
Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO at Exa | 2,818 | 8.2× |
Ten of the founder and executive posts on my October moves with the biggest spikes, LinkedIn or X. Engagement is likes, comments, and reposts. Response multiples compare each post with the author’s median response over the prior 90 days (Braze’s CEO against his full history).
Acquisitions and mergers
Two kinds of buyers showed up in October. Salesforce bought into customer engagement and analytics. The tools layer bought what agents need.
Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66B. Bill Magnuson stays on as Braze CEO. Salesforce also signed for Loops, AI analytics for Tableau, on Oct. 12. Neither deal has closed.
→ Read More: Bill Magnuson, 3,076 engagements and a 15.5× spike | Braze announcement | Salesforce on Loops
Hightouch bought Strata. Strata builds no-code integrations so Hightouch’s agents can reach more marketing tools. Its CEO, Kelsey Mullaney, joins to lead revenue programs.
→ Read More: Hightouch, 180 engagements and a 3.9× spike | Company announcement
Supabase bought Turso the day it raised $150M. Turso builds small SQLite databases for agents that spin up many at once. Glauber Costa joins as Head of Agentic Services.
→ Read More: Turso | Supabase blog
Replit agreed to buy Chroma, the vector database. Chroma says the two share a focus on a context layer for autonomous companies.
→ Read More: Chroma blog | Chroma on X, 559 engagements and a 14.2× spike
And more deals. Zeta agreed to buy Senso, the technology behind its GEO offering. Deepgram is buying Daily, the maker of the open-source Pipecat voice framework. Meta bought Sundial, the data startup Julie Zhuo co-founded.
→ Read More: Zeta announcement | Daily blog | Julie Zhuo | Chandra Narayanan
Funding deals
The biggest October checks went to the Legos: models, data, and the tools agents run on. Agent-side GTM apps raised smaller rounds; the biggest I found was Different’s $48M seed.
TypeSafe raised $870M at a $7.5B valuation, 24 days after a $40M seed. Andreessen Horowitz led, with Sequoia and DCVC, and Martin Casado joins the board. TypeSafe makes Jev, the decision model I wrote about last month.
→ Read More: TypeSafe blog | a16z announcement
Modal raised $750M at a $15.75B valuation. Accel led the Series D. Modal says it crossed a $1B annualized run rate and usage tripled in five months.
→ Read More: Erik Bernhardsson, 1,002 engagements | Modal blog
Otter.ai took $320M in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Otter says it has 40M+ users. A week later it launched Work Mode, which preps you before meetings and coaches you during calls.
→ Read More: Sam Liang | Otter.ai, 145 engagements and a 5.8× spike
Supabase raised $150M, led by GIC. Supabase says it adds about 5M databases a month, around 70% of them created by agents.
→ Read More: Paul Copplestone, 2,166 engagements and a 17.5× spike
Nous Research raised a $90M Series B at a $1.5B valuation for Hermes Agent. Robot Ventures led.
→ Read More: Nous Research, 927 engagements | TechCrunch
Daytona raised a $60M Series B at $1B to build the agent cloud. FirstMark led.
→ Read More: Daytona, 849 engagements and a 49.9× spike | Daytona blog
Context.dev raised a $9M seed for a web data API for agents. General Catalyst led. Four days later it launched a People Search API over 1 billion people.
→ Read More: Yahia Bakour, 1,448 engagements and a 26.6× spike
Othello raised an $8M seed for live sales coaching during calls. It says 50+ companies use it.
→ Read More: Othello announcement | Jared Zelman interview
Higgsfield and Cohere raised undisclosed amounts. Higgsfield extended its Series B with NVIDIA and TCV and says it’s at $1B in annualized revenue. Cohere announced a first close of its Series E at a CAD $35.7B valuation.
→ Read More: Alex Mashrabov, 7,099 engagements and a 15.8× spike | Cohere, 3,727 engagements and an 18.3× spike
Launches and strategy moves
Anthropic launched Claude Duet, and Stripe gave it a wallet. Duet is a proactive agent across email, Slack, calendar and files. At launch, Duet users could buy with Stripe’s Link agent wallet.
→ Read More: Claude on X, 59,780 engagements and a 6.7× spike | Anthropic announcement | Maia Josebachvili, 1,780 engagements and a 9.3× spike
Personal agents got a protocol. Meta and Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol on Oct. 6, with Walmart, Shopify and Stripe as founding partners. Sierra published the draft three days later with 35 new design partners, and Zapier signed on as a launch partner. Decagon open-sourced PACT, a consent protocol built with Instinct. Zendesk launched an Open Service Directory so assistants can find a brand’s verified support.
→ Read More: Bret Taylor | Wade Foster | Tom Eggemeier, 338 engagements | Decagon
GTM context moved toward the warehouse. ZoomInfo launched a GTM Context Graph, added unstructured context from Workbounce, and brought its MCP and API into Snowflake. Snowflake expanded Horizon Context with connectors for 18 sources. Neo4j launched a Context Engine, Zoom a Unified Context Layer, and Qontext a shared context platform for agents.
→ Read More: Henry Schuck, 712 engagements and a 3.1× spike | Emil Eifrem, 656 engagements | Lorenz Hieber, 928 engagements | ZoomInfo in Snowflake
The marketing platforms answered with agents. Databricks moved CustomerLake into beta with campaign agents. Klaviyo shipped its Composer agent to every customer. Braze shipped Decisioning Studio Go, where agents run the 1:1 campaign tests. Optimizely added two Virtual Teammates. Webflow launched Campaigns. Attentive named Eric Miao CEO and recast itself as a marketing agent.
→ Read More: Eric Miao, 1,007 engagements | Chano Fernández | Bill Magnuson | Linda Tong, 367 engagements | Databricks
Hightouch went from data to delivery. It launched a “marketing harness” on Oct. 8, then message delivery across email, SMS, push, in-app and WhatsApp on Oct. 22.
→ Read More: Tejas Manohar, 846 engagements and a 5.2× spike | Marketing harness
App builders and creative AI went after the ad budget. Lovable launched Growth Tools, which run Google and Meta campaigns from the app builder. Higgsfield’s ChatGPT plugin now launches ad campaigns, and Higgsfield launched prompt-to-playable ads.
→ Read More: Anton Osika, 9,168 engagements and a 12× spike | Higgsfield plugin
Five companies moved toward inbound. Clay previewed an inbound SDR agent at Sculpt. 11x launched a unified revenue platform with inbound agents. monday.com launched Harmony, voice AI that qualifies leads. Invoca launched messaging agents for Google Ads. Chili Piper launched an agentic marketing platform.
→ Read More: Prabhav Jain, 529 engagements and an 8.1× spike | Vitali Margolin, 696 engagements | Alina Vandenberghe | Clay’s Sculpt recap
The creator stack moved toward agents. Limelight’s founder is rebuilding around AI agents for B2B marketing. Trybe shipped an MCP so brands can ask about creator ads from their AI tools. Passionfroot opened a Partner API. CreatorIQ launched Applied Creator Intelligence.
→ Read More: David Walsh | Dylan Harari | Passionfroot
Everybody moved into someone else’s lane. Unify launched a dialer, and so did TitanX. Granola launched free voice typing in any app, and its post drew 198× its usual response, the biggest spike of any October launch in my ledger. Gamma shipped Gamma 5 and partnered with Clay on decks built from Clay data. Airtable launched Canvas and Runway launched App Studio, two new app builders.
→ Read More: Austin Hughes, 897 engagements and a 12.1× spike | Granola on X, 7,028 engagements | Grant Lee, 2,638 engagements and a 21.1× spike | Gamma x Clay
Decision models multiplied. Cloudflare launched Clef. Perplexity open-sourced a decider model, then cut prices with a 4B Flash model. Microsoft shipped Decision-1. Baseten released three open-source decision models. Parallel launched a web-grounded Decisions API. Tealium paired Jev with its Functions for next best action.
→ Read More: Satya Nadella, 13,192 engagements | Aravind Srinivas, 1,178 engagements | Cloudflare blog | Tuhin Srivastava | Baseten, 409 engagements and a 6.6× spike
The labs kept shipping. Google launched Gemini 4 Argon and Carbon. OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra with computer use. Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5, shipped Claude Motion and Dashboards in beta, and donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation. Mistral launched Large 4, and Moonshot launched Kimi K3.1 Pro.
→ Read More: Sundar Pichai, 46,475 engagements | OpenAI, 5,394 engagements | Claude Motion | Agent Skills | Mistral, 21,752 engagements and an 8.4× spike
Strategic moves. Clay partnered with SpaceX Super Intelligence to bring Grok Bot into Clay.
→ Read More: Clay, 712 engagements and a 5× spike
The rest of October’s 92 launches are on the Moves tab.
Milestones
Anthropic filed its S-1 to list on Nasdaq as ANT. Its Nov. 2 amendment reports $33.2B in revenue for 2026’s first nine months and 11,900+ customers spending $100K+.
→ Read More: Anthropic | Anthropic on X, 22,008 engagements and a 4.1× spike | Anthropic newsroom
OpenAI said its run rate is about $50B, up 77% in three months. B2B run-rate revenue grew 107% in the same three months.
→ Read More: Sarah Friar, 1,130 engagements
Exa passed $100M in annualized revenue. It handles 2B requests a month for 200K+ teams.
→ Read More: Will Bryk, 2,818 engagements and an 8.2× spike
Sierra crossed $400M ARR, five months after $200M. It added more than $150M in ARR in the third quarter.
→ Read More: Bret Taylor on X, 893 engagements and a 7.3× spike | Sierra blog
And more milestones. Modal crossed $1B in ARR. Zapmail reached $50M ARR, bootstrapped. Trybe passed $25M paid out to creators, eight weeks after $10M.
→ Read More: Alan D’Souza, 1,235 engagements | Trybe
Where my head is at
I’m watching four things in November.
Do more GTM startups pick a lane, or keep bundling SaaS 2.0 features like it’s 2019?
Does marketing get its first breakout agent?
How do B2B sellers respond to personal agents?
Does Claude become the marketer’s video editor? Since Opus 5.5 launched on Sept. 22, the share of my panel’s Claude conversation about editing and producing video went from 0.6% to 2.6%. Still small. But it’s all over X, and the loudest posts came in the first days of November.
My Jobs tab tracks new GTM roles at 600+ high-growth companies. Tell me who I’m missing.
Every October move
I logged 129 moves in October, each with its source and, where there is one, the measured market response. The complete ledger is live in the Moves tab.
Which agents do you hire, and which do you build? I read all replies.
