Some revolutions arrive with noise. Others slip quietly into our daily workflow until one day you realize you can’t imagine working without them.

Artificial Intelligence entered the business world in both ways: loud in public debate, silent in the way it quietly rewires how decisions are made.

But in Israel, where startups sprint faster than their funding cycles and execution often matters more than perfection, something strange happens. We adopt AI tools enthusiastically, yet most Go-to-Market (GTM) operations still run on human intuition, departmental silos, and “I think this segment might convert better…”

We’ve put rockets on a horse carriage. And then we wonder why the wheels come flying off.

The High Cost of Guessing

If you’re familiar with Israeli tech culture, you know that speed is our religion. We build fast, pivot fast, sell fast. But beneath the bravado lies a truth: a shocking amount of GTM strategy is still guesswork.

Sales forecasts built on gut feeling. Marketing budgets spread like hummus: wide, flat, hopeful. Customer retention managed by “we’ll deal with it when it happens.”

GTM was never designed to be a predictive discipline. It was designed to be persuasive. AI changes that — but only if you let it.

The numbers tell the real story of how that’s going. Recent MIT research found that only about 5% of enterprise generative AI pilots deliver measurable financial impact. The other 95% stall. Gartner forecasts that 40% of Agentic AI projects will be scrapped by 2027 due to escalating costs and unclear business value.

Translation: most companies aren’t failing at AI because the technology doesn’t work. They’re failing because they jumped to automation before they........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)