Sometimes, if you listen carefully, your audience whispers what you should publish next. Other times, it shouts. This is one of those other times.

As operating partners who advise founders, CROs, and CMOs, we’re frequently asked to suggest the latest tools that help companies market, sell, and support their customers more effectively. There was enough pattern in these questions that we decided to tackle the issue head-on by sharing our perspective on the modern go-to-market tech stack.

The plan started simply enough. That is, until it became clear that we’re in a transitional stage of architectural disruption. 

For literally a generation, the inbound model dominated business-to-business marketing. The playbook was based on the assumption that marketing (marketing automation) and sales (CRM) would each manage their own system of record. Newer, innovative tools would integrate into those central systems. Eventually those central systems would build or buy the most popular add-ons, which would help curb stack sprawl. 

The tech stack we published today is essentially an updated version of this classic model. Yet already, it’s under duress. Foundation models—recent Claude Code announcements in particular—are challenging third-party application architectures by arming GTM professionals with basic technical skills to build many of the capabilities we expect from packaged software.

So we decided to visualize two tech stacks. Think of today’s release as the transitional model. It consists of third-party applications—most AI-native, though some SaaS/AI hybrids—that perform functions relatively familiar to most sales and marketing teams. Where this architecture differs from the SaaS era is in the reduced centrality of those systems of record. A fast-growing infrastructure layer is facilitating matrixed data sharing across applications (reducing our reliance on a centralized database). A brand-new “workflows” category is diminishing our reliance on manual email, and visitor deanonymization has all but eliminated the need for forms. Meanwhile, in sales and post-sales, agents are performing many of the tasks that entry-level reps, support professionals, and customer-success managers once handled.

This would be considered seismic disruption, if not for the potential of foundation models to return us to first principles. That’s why our next release will examine how much of GTM could be absorbed by a foundation model and coding companions.

But first, there’s today’s AI-Forward GTM Tech Stack. We aimed to provide you with a useful resource. So rather than overwhelm you with every possible category or company, we limited the logos here to a handful of vendors we felt represented a range of approaches to fulfilling the promise of each category. For example, the Attribution/Measurement category includes everything from opinionated attribution tools to sweeping mixed-media modeling solutions to a relatively simple “AI business analyst.” There are a variety of ways to tackle attribution. Our graphic includes several options.

We also recognized the reality that companies seldom fit into a single, simple box. Many of the vendors depicted occupy more than one category. We’ve classified those vendors according to their primary use case, while also annotating their listings to indicate they span categories. Similarly, we’ve included a visual marker to identify companies that are part of the Battery investment portfolio. You’ll also see a smattering of SaaS-era incumbents among the AI-first logos because, in some cases, companies have successfully transitioned to AI prominence.

Lastly, you may be wondering how we selected the vendors that appear in this graphic. Within each category, we began with a comprehensive list of companies from a wide range of sources—some products used by our portfolio companies, others highlighted by our investment team, and still others recommended by trusted operators. A few we simply thought were really cool. Then we winnowed the list down to a manageable number of sample companies, again with a bias toward representing a range of solutions.

Please let us know what categories or companies we missed—and keep an eye out for the foundation model entrant in our GTM tech stack series.

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