The Boldest AI Moves Are Coming From the Smallest Budgets

Hello go-to-market leaders, strategists, and innovators! 👋 Thank you for dropping by to learn practical AI applications and gain strategic insights to help you grow your business and elevate your team's strategic value.

Quick Take

When resources are tight, leaders stop asking "How can AI help us work faster?" and start asking "What could we become?"

That shift changes everything.

This happens whether you're a startup with one marketer or an enterprise team navigating approval processes and budget cycles.

Frank Nardi leads Cloud Coach with a highly efficient team, focused on maximizing resources as they scale. Rather than getting stuck on constraints, Frank leveraged AI to turn static buyer personas into dynamic, evolving systems. Now, messaging is tested before launch, campaigns align with real buyer needs, enabling his GTM team to compete effectively with companies 10x their size.

Megan Ratcliff and the Dice team faced the challenge of a new product that broke all the traditional go-to-market rules at the company. Instead of months of alignment meetings, she created a GTM strategist that coordinates across departments.

Companies with the fewest resources are building some of the most advanced uses of AI today because they have no choice but to reimagine everything. Whether you're constrained by budget, approvals, or old systems, those limitations push you toward the breakthroughs that actually matter.

Your biggest constraint might be your secret weapon.

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When Constraints Force Breakthrough Thinking

In my previous newsletter "AI is Breaking Department Silos: Moving from Org Charts to Work Charts," I explored how AI enables teams to organize around workflows instead of departments. Today's examples show this transformation in action.

The leaders making the biggest leaps share something unexpected. They started with significant constraints.

Limited resources force better questions:

• What if we can't hire more people?
• What if we must achieve bigger goals with less?
• What if we can't get approval for new platforms?
• What if we're stuck with legacy systems?

These questions lead to breakthrough thinking.

These constraints exist everywhere, from startups to Fortune 500s.

Frank Nardi: CEO as AI Strategy Partner

Frank Nardi leads Cloud Coach , a project management/PSA platform for professional services teams. As CEO and former CRO with deep go-to-market experience, he faces a classic startup reality: scaling smart with a lean, focused team, finite budgets, and ambitious goals.

Rather than letting those limits define the approach, Frank reimagined how work gets done.

The Challenge - Frank and team needed to quickly and efficiently target ideal buyers and stay aligned with a moving market. Traditional personas were static, slow to produce, and often outdated by launch time. This led to misaligned messaging, poor targeting, and inefficient ad spend. For a fast-growing company, wasted spend adds up fast.

AI as a Teammate - Frank built adaptive buyer personas using four AI tools, but this approach works with any combination—some teams get 80% of the benefit using just ChatGPT and one other AI. The key is matching AI capabilities to your biggest business needs rather than making one AI do everything. Frank chose his tools strategically:

• ChatGPT - Foundational strategic messaging and persona development
• Claude - Ad strategies and campaigns
• NotebookLM - Sales knowledge base (plus Frank likes the AI podcast feature for sales)
• Jasper - Brand voice consistency

Using CRM data, call transcripts, customer insights, market research and psychological drivers as inputs, Frank created adaptive personas that evolve continuously. Every message, ad, and email gets pressure-tested against these personas before hitting the market, providing instant feedback on relevance and helping the team move faster with better precision.

But even the best AI outputs can miss the mark. That’s why every message is still pressure-tested by humans. Responsible AI means pairing fast automation with real-world judgment.

The Bigger Transformation - Frank is designing an AI-enabled workplace where every team member has personalized tools that eliminates busywork and boosts performance allowing them to focus on high-impact, strategic work.

Frank's next step is to automate this into live agents connected to real-time prospect data, latest emails, transcripts, and win/loss signals to keep the feedback loop fast and actionable.

Frank shared his vision:

"At Cloud Coach, we’re designing an AI strategy that empowers every team member by automating repetitive tasks so they can focus on high-impact work. The goal is to accelerate execution, continuously adapt to customer needs, and create a seamless flow of knowledge that breaks down silos and enables smarter, faster decisions."

The Early Results - Personas are now fully embedded in workflows, guiding messaging decisions early and often instead of sitting idle in decks. Teams now make more informed decisions, run focused campaigns, and validate messaging before going to market. Creative aligns with what buyers actually care about.

Frank's Pro Tip - "Treat personas and targeting as living systems that evolve alongside your customers."

Frank represents an early look at Stage 4 of the AI Work Chart Maturity Model with work organized by what needs to be done, not departmental silos. Smaller companies can compete with enterprise resources by reimagining how work flows.

The data backs this up from the 2025 Microsoft Work Trend Index report. Companies making this transformation see workers who are:

• More optimistic about future work opportunities (93% vs 77% globally)
• Less worried about AI taking their jobs (21% vs 38% globally)
• Better able to take on meaningful work (90% vs 73% globally)
• More capable of handling additional responsibilities (55% vs 20% globally)

These aren't just productivity gains. They're fundamental shifts in how people experience work.

Megan Ratcliff: Cross-Functional AI Orchestrator

Megan Ratcliff at Dice , the career marketplace that connects tech professionals with opportunities, is part of a team that grew from a small marketing group to a 45-member powerhouse with 25 humans and 20 AI teammates in just 6 months. Now, they have 63 AI teammates and expect having more than 100 this summer.

She and her team faced a unique challenge: launching a new product that didn't fit inside their traditional GTM box. Everything was different - the audience, sales process, invoicing, and messaging.

The challenge required cross-functional collaboration, but no one person could own such a complex shift across departments.

The Challenge - Standard GTM approaches failed because this product required different invoicing, sales motions, and messaging. The kind of cross-functional coordination that usually takes months through endless alignment meetings.

AI as a Teammate - So Megan built a GTM strategist (a custom GPT) to serve as their "connective tissue and voice of reason." This AI teammate helps define the ideal customer profile, determines next steps, and guides each department on their specific contributions.

For example, when they needed to define the ICP for this relatively new product that had some data but required additional research, the GTM strategist helped determine how to source that additional information. Then it told the team what the next task was and which department should handle it.

The Transformation - Megan's role is changing. She's now working across the entire GTM motion and becoming a much more valuable coworker in the process. AI gave her the tools to answer questions and guide action at a strategic level.

As Megan puts it:

"AI has unleashed my superpowers. I've always been a strategic thinker, but having tools to answer questions and guide action has been transformational. I'm working across the entire GTM motion now."

The Results - The GTM strategist is getting them started and organizing the work, speeding up time to action. Megan envisions they'll iterate on it over time and eventually allow it to work on their behalf, but for now it's getting them started on a major business transformation. Instead of departmental silos, there's unified movement toward shared goals.

Megan's Pro Tip - "The first few things you make will probably be mediocre. That’s okay. Keep going because you’ll get better and better."

The Pattern: Three Critical Questions

Both Frank and Megan answered three questions that separate AI optimizers from AI transformers:

1. What do you finally have time to focus on?

• Frank - Strategic thinking across the business instead of tactical execution
• Megan - Cross-functional orchestration instead of departmental tasks

2. What parts of your role become more strategic, creative, or cross-functional?

• Frank - Building adaptive systems instead of static processes
• Megan - Breaking down silos instead of working within them

3. What does your job become when AI becomes a teammate, not just a tool?

• Frank - CEO as AI strategy architect designing human-AI workflows
• Megan - Marketing professional as cross-functional orchestrator

A Simple Framework to Begin

Here's a simple framework to get started:

Understanding AI isn’t something you can delegate. It’s not a report you can read or a task you can hand off.

Unlike past innovations, AI changes how work happens. That means everyone, from individual contributors to CEOs, needs to put hands on keyboard.

Try tools. Break things. See what AI can and can’t do. Only by doing will you start to see where the real opportunities lie.

Exploration isn’t optional. It’s the first step in reimagining your role, your team, and your business.

Your Next Steps

The leaders getting ahead aren't waiting for perfect conditions or unlimited resources. They start with what they have and build AI teammates that transform how work happens.

Here's how to begin:

1. Identify your biggest constraint
2. Map what you'd do despite the constraint
3. Design one AI teammate to bridge the gap
4. Test for 30 days and measure results
5. Share learnings and expand what works

Small steps lead to significant gains in productivity, innovation, and competitive positioning. While these examples focus on go-to-market, these principles apply across all functions.

Your scarcity might be your secret weapon. The question is: Will you keep treating AI as a tool or turn it into your strategic advantage?

The Practical AI in Go-to-Market newsletter is designed to share practical learnings and insights in using AI responsibly. Subscribe today and let's learn together on this AI journey!

For those who prefer more interactive learning, explore our applied AI workshops, designed to inspire teams with real-life use cases tailored to specific go-to-market functions.

Also check out this team transformation case study and step-by playbook of how we helped transform a lean GTM team into a human-AI powerhouse with human and AI teammates.

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