LeanData, the backbone for AI-ready go-to-market infrastructure, today released findings from its AI GTM Customer Survey, spotlighting AI reckoning unfolding across go-to-market teams. The survey, first in ongoing series, found while 79% of revenue operations, marketing operations and sales professionals are already scaling or deploying AI agents, 70% say poor data quality is undermining results.
Problem: There's serious gap between widespread adoption of AI including AI agents and improvement in GTM results according to survey of 157 GTM practitioners.
The survey, conducted in May 2026 among GTM practitioners at companies of all sizes and across multiple industries, revealed widening gap between AI's promise and its production reality.
More than half of respondents, 55%, reported main things blocking AI transformation are bad data and not being ready for AI. When asked why AI initiatives stall or underperform, 45% pointed to inconsistent or incomplete CRM data, 37% blamed undocumented business processes and 32% mentioned siloed teams. These three root causes are infrastructure and coordination problems, not shortcomings in AI tools themselves.
GTM professionals surveyed made it clear they want more control, not more AI agents: 60% are afraid their AI agents will act on inaccurate data or wrong records, or that they would violate ownership rules. This fear signals concern about control and desire for complete audit trail rather than AI agent capability issue.
"An AI reckoning happens when you move fast without AI-ready execution infrastructure," said Katy Keim, CEO of LeanData. "Our customers are sharing pain of living through this."
"AI models are now both powerful and incredible. Yet, we all know they work only as well as infrastructure that lies beneath them," said Katy Keim, CEO of LeanData. "Executives told GTM teams to move fast on AI, and they did. Now same teams reporting data is not clean, business processes live in people's heads and everyone is thin-slicing different views of customer."
"You know you need to move fast with your AI GTM implementations, and operations leaders don't want to put brakes on ambition," Keim said. "But we're seeing when customers implement more thoughtful backbone for AI agents, they can run at full speed and also trust output."
Many of LeanData's customers will share stories at annual OpsStars gathering for B2B GTM and revenue operations leaders, to be held October 5 and 6 at Intercontinental in San Francisco. This year's theme, "Power Your AI GTM," recognizes AI has moved from experimentation to execution inside GTM revenue motions.
About LeanData
LeanData provides the backbone for AI-ready go-to-market infrastructure. More than 1,000 leading B2B companies and a community of 5,000-plus OpsStars rely on LeanData to fuel efficient growth by aligning marketing, sales and customer service execution with the entire AI-enabled customer journey. LeanData's Intelligent GTM Orchestration platform acts as the connective tissue across the revenue lifecycle, integrating and normalizing buyer data, automating signal-driven workflows and delivering AI-powered insights.
