Aaron Biggs, VP of Revenue at Summit, is a tenured technology leader with expertise in growth, go-to-market strategy and customer success.
If you’re a sales or marketing leader right now, there’s a good chance you’re feeling the squeeze: Every budget conversation includes some variant of “Why haven’t we automated this yet?” or “Can’t we just add an AI tool instead of hiring?”
It’s a fair question. AI has been positioned as the great equalizer, offering scale, speed and analytics that no human could match. But when it comes to your go-to-market (GTM) motion, the right answer isn’t binary. It’s not a matter of AI or people. It’s about deploying the right blend of automation and human engagement to differentiate in an increasingly impersonal landscape.
The AI Temptation (And The Risk)
AI is a powerful accelerant. Sales enablement, lead scoring, content generation, personalization at scale—these are all fertile ground for AI-driven efficiencies. But here’s the rub: Automation alone can only get you to parity with competitors also wielding AI.
Where AI starts to struggle is where the complexity of human decision making and the nuances of buyer behavior live. AI can help you predict when to reach out, but it can’t (yet) sit across from a client, read the room and navigate the layered politics within an account. As of now, there’s no GPT model that can decode why a champion suddenly went cold because of an internal reorg.
At Summit, we often see clients eager to deploy AI tools for their infrastructure, sales or customer support, hoping for an overnight transformation. Yet the most successful outcomes come when those tools are implemented alongside strategies that amplify human expertise, not bypass it.
Over-indexing on AI tooling risks creating a sterile buyer journey, efficient but undifferentiated. And in a market where experience is the differentiator, that’s a strategic misstep.
Human-Driven, AI-Augmented GTM
What high-performing organizations are discovering is that AI is best used to augment the human component of sales and marketing, not replace it.
• Insight Generation: AI can synthesize vast data sets, surfacing insights that enable sales teams to be more strategic in account planning.
• Administrative Automation: Free your best sellers from data entry and research tasks, empowering them to do what they do best: Build relationships and navigate complex deals.
• Content And Messaging Support: AI can help draft messaging frameworks, but humans still need to tailor the message to the specific business context, industry trends and stakeholder personas.
When you approach AI as a co-pilot rather than an autopilot, you empower your teams to deliver a buyer experience that feels both personalized and thoughtful with the added speed and intelligence that AI brings.
At Summit, we embrace this philosophy ourselves. Whether we’re designing cloud infrastructure solutions, managed services or data protection strategies, we integrate automation and AI insights where they add value, but we always keep a seasoned expert in the loop to guide the client through complex decisions. It’s how we ensure every engagement feels custom-fit, not cookie-cutter.
The Buyer Experience Is Your Differentiator
Buyers today are sophisticated. They know when they’re talking to a bot, and they’re increasingly resistant to cookie-cutter outreach. The buyer experience itself has become a competitive advantage, especially in complex B2B deals where relationships and trust still matter.
Human sellers backed by AI insights can better read the subtle signals of buying intent, customize their engagement strategy and build the credibility that moves deals forward. This is especially critical in late-stage sales conversations and renewals—areas where trust and authenticity outweigh automation.
At Summit, we see this play out in the infrastructure space all the time. Customers evaluating cloud hosting, colocation or disaster recovery solutions aren’t just buying capacity, they’re buying confidence. They want a partner who understands their business, anticipates risks and tailors solutions to their unique needs. AI helps us identify patterns and flag potential issues early, but it’s our people who bring the consultative insight that wins trust.
How To Invest Smartly
When debating whether to invest in more AI tools or expand your GTM team, ask yourself:
1. Where are our current bottlenecks? If reps are buried in admin work, automation can free them up. If you lack deep account penetration, consider expanding human resources.
2. Where is the buyer journey breaking down? AI can improve early-stage lead gen and qualification, but mid-to-late funnel stages often benefit more from experienced human engagement.
3. What is our differentiation strategy? If experience, service and expertise are how you win, human investment should be prioritized and AI should act as a support layer.
4. How will we continuously optimize? The best AI tools improve with data and feedback, but your people are the ones providing that feedback loop. Summit routinely reviews the performance of our AI-driven insights with our client-facing teams to ensure we’re tuning our approach, not just scaling it.
A Practical Example From The Field
In our own GTM efforts at Summit, we’ve invested in AI to streamline prospect research, competitive analysis and even content recommendations tailored for vertical markets like financial services or SaaS providers. But we also bolstered our sales engineering team to ensure that when a prospect raises a technical question, there’s a real expert who can engage in depth.
That combination of AI-enhanced targeting paired with human expertise has helped us build credibility faster and progress conversations more effectively than if we had leaned exclusively on automation or hiring alone.
Final Thought
AI isn’t here to replace your people; it’s here to make them more effective. But leaders need to resist the allure of full automation at the cost of buyer experience. The organizations that win in this new era will be those who get the blend right, pairing human authenticity with AI-powered intelligence to meet buyers where they are, with what they truly need.
Summit’s own journey has taught us that the future isn’t AI versus humans. It’s AI with humans. And when you strike that balance? You won’t just keep up. You’ll lead.
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