Frankenstein AI and the collapse of the GTM playbook

The first half of 2025 has made one thing unmistakably clear: B2B go-to-market teams are overwhelmed by tools, but starved for strategy. AI is everywhere. Revenue leaders are running endless pilots. Marketing teams are stitching together point solutions in hopes of unlocking scale. Yet pipeline growth is stalling. Credibility is eroding. And the playbooks that once promised repeatability now feel entirely out of touch.

Nick Zeckets has seen the dysfunction up close. A longtime revenue leader and martech operator, Zeckets has spent the past two decades at the intersection of product, marketing and sales. He founded Smoke Signals, a consultancy that designs and operates signal-based GTM systems for high-ticket B2B companies.

“We’re living in an age where almost anything is possible with AI,” Zeckets said. “But instead of clarity, we’ve created confusion. Most GTM teams are stuck in Frankenstein mode; bolting tools together without a strategy, hoping it all magically works.”

Tools ≠ strategy

Zeckets uses the term Frankenstein AI to describe what he sees daily: sales and marketing teams chaining together platforms like Clay, Perplexity, Trigify, HubSpot and PhantomBuster into fragile, break-prone workflows. These stacks promise automation, personalization and real-time activation, but without an orchestrator, they collapse under their complexity.

“You see these beautiful Notion dashboards, but behind them is duct tape and a Zapier key,” Zeckets said. “The team doesn’t realize the limitations until LinkedIn bans their account or their enrichment pipeline floods the CRM with junk.”

He’s not against tooling. His entire practice is built on stitching together modern platforms in elegant, strategic ways. But he draws a line between intelligent orchestration and indiscriminate automation. One drives pipeline, and the other drives marketers insane.

The signal blind spot

What’s missing isn’t automation. It’s awareness. GTM teams today lack clarity on what constitutes a signal. Many confuse generic intent data or job postings — reflecting a changing of the guard — for meaningful buying behavior. Others over-index on engagement metrics that don’t correlate with sales readiness.

Zeckets gives a concrete example: his team designed a trigger for one QA automation client that scans public GitHub repositories for tests that run longer than expected. 

That signal, while narrow, identifies a high-value problem his client could uniquely solve. “We only need to see it four times a month to open four six-figure opportunities,” he said.

These kinds of signals aren’t for sale in a vendor dashboard. They require critical thinking, context and custom logic — the exact capabilities most GTM teams don’t have time to develop.

Playbooks are dead (and agencies are lost)

For years, companies turned to agencies to fill the expertise gap. But Zeckets finds many agencies aren’t ready to support the next phase of AI-led growth. 

“A lot of HubSpot agencies don’t have an ‘orchestration’ mindset and they’re too mired in CRM admin tasks to see where new tools can fill critical gaps. And most playbooks are just lists of tactics, not strategy,” he said.

He argues that the agency model often prioritizes billing hours over delivering outcomes. Junior staff with limited business acumen are tasked with complex systems design, and clients are left with workflows that look efficient but never move the needle.

Zeckets isn’t anti-agency. He believes great ones exist but are usually small, selective and expensive. “The big ones scale by standardizing mediocrity. The small ones burn out trying to be everything to everyone,” he said.

That creates a void for marketing leaders who need orchestration, not just execution. “They don’t need more slide decks. They need systems that connect signal creation, capture and activation … and they need someone who’s built those loops before.”

Dig deeper: Why marketing must reclaim GTM design in the age of AI

GTM engineers aren’t solving the right problem

Some companies have tried to address this gap by hiring GTM Engineers, a hybrid role between RevOps and sales automation. But Zeckets believes this trend has failed.

“Calling it GTM is misleading,” he said. “Most GTM Engineers are glorified sales ops. They don’t touch awareness, they don’t shape narratives, and they definitely don’t think about expansion. It’s still just pipeline math.”

In his view, a real go-to-market strategy must span from content and context all the way to sales and client success. It must align teams on what a qualified signal is, how it’s created, enriched and activated with relevance. 

“If your so-called GTM motion doesn’t start at signal creation, it’s not a motion. It’s just noise,” he said.

AI alone won’t save you

There’s no doubt AI has transformed what’s possible. Teams can now enrich contacts, summarize research, generate content and trigger workflows at speeds that seemed impossible just a year ago. But Zeckets warns against letting AI run the show.

“There is no standalone AI tool that consistently drives pipeline in high-ticket B2B,” he said. “Every AI vendor promises magic. But unless you know what comes before it and after it in the stack, it’s just another button.”

He sees companies waste thousands of dollars and months on AI experiments that never scale. “You don’t need five more tools. You need one clear view of how your GTM system is supposed to work.”

Dig deeper: The hard truth about what AI will do to GTM

The role of the marketing leader has never been more complex or more important

Zeckets believes the marketing leader today must serve as a GTM designer, not just a content strategist or campaign planner. They must speak the language of revenue, understand data hygiene and advocate for long-term brand relevance in a world addicted to short-term capture.

That’s easier said than done, especially in investor-backed companies still chasing MQLs and outdated attribution models.

“Marketing’s seat at the table has always been shaky,” Zeckets said. “Now AI is pulling even more budget into sales-led tools that claim to do marketing’s job better. It’s not true. But it’s happening.”

He argues that marketing leaders need a return to strategic ownership. That starts with reshaping how GTM is defined — not as a siloed function but as a collaborative revenue motion across product, marketing, sales and client success.

It also means being honest about what internal teams can and can’t do. Most marketers can evaluate a great GTM system when they see it, but few have the bandwidth or technical depth to build it from scratch. “That’s not failure,” Zeckets said. “That’s reality. But it means you need the right partners, not just more platforms.”

The future: Fewer pilots, better systems

The heaviest tech stack or the flashiest demo won’t win the future of B2B growth. The winners will be teams that can align signal, narrative and outreach into a cohesive, repeatable system. These systems won’t resemble Frankenstein AI; bloated and brittle. They will be human-led, tech-enabled and deeply contextual, built around real buyer context.

“Marketing creates the signal. Sales activates it. But right now, everyone’s just increasing the noise,” Zeckets said. “What teams need isn’t more tools, it’s a system that actually knows what to do when someone raises their hand. And, equally important, what a hand raise really looks like.”

In a market where attention is scarce, trust is fragile and buyers are self-educating long before sales ever gets involved, the winners will be the ones who stop chasing automation for its own sake and start building signal-first, strategy-backed engines that scale trust, not just output.

Dig deeper: How AI flipped the funnel and made GTM tactics obsolete