Leading Through Uncertainty: How AI is Redefining the Operating Model for Growth

Markets are volatile, tariffs unpredictable, and boardrooms louder than ever about one thing: proof of productivity. 

For CEOs and CMOs, the mandate is clear. You are not being asked to understand change; you are being asked to master it. 

In my recent conversation with Dom Colasante, CEO of 2X and former CMO, one theme kept surfacing. Uncertainty has become the default operating condition. 
Every decision now sits in a tension between caution and courage. Wait too long and competitors move faster. Move too soon and the market shifts out from under you. 

Dom’s advice to leaders is simple: do not freeze. Growth is the only real hedge against volatility. While others pause, the best leaders double down on clarity, execution, and intelligent use of artificial intelligence (AI) to move first. 

Because in today’s environment, strategy alone does not separate winners. 
Speed to insight does. 

The New Growth Challenge: When Uncertainty Becomes Default 

In every CEO conversation I have, one question keeps coming up: act or wait. Markets feel unpredictable. Global conditions shift overnight. And the wrong move, at the wrong time, can feel impossible to recover from.

This hesitation is the new enemy of growth.

Many boards are setting bold productivity targets, often tied to AI adoption. Some expect double-digit efficiency gains or even headcount reductions in the name of automation. Yet, most CEOs quietly admit they are still figuring out what “AI-enabled growth” really looks like inside their own business. 

That tension is redefining leadership. 

As Dom put it, uncertainty breeds hesitation, but the cure is still growth. More revenue creates optionality, cushions against volatility, and gives organizations the confidence to move forward when others retreat. 

For today’s leaders, the challenge is not just surviving uncertainty. It is building a system that turns uncertainty into advantage. 

The most effective executives are not waiting for clarity. They are creating it. 

Why Traditional GTM Playbooks Are Breaking 

The go-to-market (GTM) model that once worked no longer fits how buyers actually buy. What used to be a predictable, linear journey has become fragmented, invisible, and increasingly AI-influenced. 

Buyers no longer follow forms and funnels. They search, compare, and validate long before vendors ever appear on their radar. The discovery phase now happens in private digital spaces including community forums, Reddit threads, and AI search engines that summarize options before a single sales conversation begins. 

For marketing leaders, this has changed everything. Visibility comes later. Trust takes longer. And metrics that once defined success, like MQLs or attribution scores, now tell only half the story. 

Many organizations appear healthy on paper. Scorecards are green, dashboards are full, yet growth remains flat. That disconnect has eroded CEO confidence in the predictability of marketing-led growth and accelerated CMO turnover across industries. 

The truth is simple: the funnel has not disappeared, it has gone dark. 

To win, leaders must stop optimizing for visibility and start optimizing for preference which is the unseen decision that happens before engagement ever begins. 

What High-Performing Leaders Are Doing Differently 

From my discussion with 2X CEO Dom Colasante, three behaviors surfaced that consistently set high-performing executives apart.

• They solve, not sell 
  Every piece of content, every interaction, is designed to help the buyer solve a problem, not push a product. The most credible brands leave prospects better informed even if those prospects never buy. This approach builds trust that compounds into preference.
• They amplify originality with AI, not replace it 
  AI has made it easy to create, but even easier to blend in. The leaders who stand out use AI to sharpen clarity, accelerate research, and scale their point of view. They still rely on human experience to define what is worth saying.
• They operate at two altitudes 
  Winning teams play both wide and narrow. At the broad level, they use AI search and digital ecosystems to answer natural-language questions and gain mass visibility. At the focused level, they rely on predictive intent data to identify buying signals and engage with precision. They avoid the middle—the most crowded and least effective zone of the funnel. 

The Operating Model Shift  

Growth leadership is evolving from strategy to system design. The next generation of CEOs, CROs, and CMOs are architecting the operating models that make execution predictable. 

Dom describes it this way: modern commercial teams should think like professional services firms. They manage capacity, inputs, outputs, and productivity with the same rigor an operations leader brings to a factory floor. The variable is not machinery; it is talent, workflow, and data. 

The leaders who embrace this mindset use unit cost economics to measure the true efficiency of knowledge work. They view AI as a workflow-level accelerant that improves utilization and precision across marketing, sales, and customer success. Random alignment across GTM functions creates one-in-eighteen-million odds of success. Without system-level design, even great talent and ideas get lost in execution. 

The shift is already underway. Growth organizations are moving from strategy as PowerPoint to strategy as process that is measured, repeatable, and fueled by data and machine insight. 

The leaders who scale growth now are not just thinkers. They are system builders. 

Human + AI Collaboration: Smart vs. Wise 

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations think, plan, and act. But it is not replacing human judgment. 

In our own experience at SBI, the use of AI began with a simple goal: make growth decisions faster and more accurate. By training models on thousands of successful go-to-market programs, we built systems that can now forecast outcomes in minutes rather than weeks. What once required a fifty-person RevOps team can now be analyzed by AI in under ten minutes.

The result is not automation for its own sake. It is speed to accuracy. This is a new standard for how quickly leaders can move from data to decision. 

Still, the most effective organizations remember one truth. AI is smart, but not wise. 
It identifies patterns; humans interpret meaning. It reveals signals; leaders decide what matters. 

Machines can process complexity, but only people can turn insight into action. 

The advantage is not in having smarter tools. It is in how wisely those tools are used. 

What to Think About, Consider, and Do 

AI has changed how leaders see, measure, and move but growth is still a human act. 
The best executives are pairing machine precision with human judgment to create speed without losing clarity. 

As you evaluate your own operating model, ask yourself: 

What to Think About

• Am I measuring the right signals or just the visible ones?
• Is my team designed for adaptability or just activity?

What to Consider

• Where can AI accelerate understanding, not just output?
• Which decisions still require human interpretation before action?

What to Do

• Treat your growth strategy like an operating system—measured, testable, and continuously optimized.
• Invest in the mix that matters: data that speeds insight, and people who can turn that insight into impact.

Growth in this era is not about being faster for its own sake. It is about being faster to understand.

And that is what separates operators from outcomes.