Adam Liska spent years at DeepMind helping scale what eventually became Gemini, left in 2022, and built a company called Glyphic. You probably haven't heard of Glyphic. That's partly the point. Nobody could pronounce it, nobody could spell it, and the name said more about where the product started than where it was going.
So this year they rebranded to Airspeed, rebuilt the website with vibe coding, and moved on.
I sat down with Adam in London on the hottest day of the year, for The AI Revolution Show, and the conversation covered a lot of ground, but the thing that stayed with me was his framing of where AI and GTM actually are right now, and why the gap between knowing what to do and doing it is still wide open.
The core problem Airspeed is trying to solve is one most sales leaders recognise immediately.
A rep managing twenty-plus deals at the same time can only really focus on five or six. The rest stall.
The conversations went quiet not because the prospect lost interest in the problem, but because other priorities came up. That problem didn't go away. The rep just stopped being there for it. Airspeed works in the background on the stalled deals, figuring out what's changed, what's relevant to bring up, drafting the re-engagement, while the rep focuses on the deals that are actually moving.
Simple in concept. Harder to build than it sounds, which is Adam's broader point about the GTM space. People underestimate how difficult it is to apply AI here. Coding was a natural early win partly because the context is contained. One codebase, finite text, clear inputs and outputs. GTM organisations can have thousands of conversations a day across dozens of reps, different verticals, different stages, different objections. Making sense of that and turning it into action is a genuinely hard problem. The magic experiences people are expecting from AI in GTM are coming, but they're not here yet.
That tracks with what I heard at the Shift Collective retreat in Portugal recently. Thirty SaaS founders, and almost all of them were skeptical about AI GTM tools. Not because they don't believe AI is changing things, but because nobody in the room had a clear example of it working in practice. Adam's read on that is interesting. Part of it is the AI-replacing-salespeople narrative that founders are reacting against, which he thinks is largely nonsense for anything above simple transactional sales. Part of it is that the category genuinely hasn't caught up with where AI is in coding or operations. The tools are ahead of the proof points.
His view on where it goes is that the GTM stack doesn't collapse to one or two tools, but the experience of using it does. One interface that orchestrates everything, delegates to the tools underneath, and keeps the rep in a single place rather than switching between seven systems. That's what Airspeed is building towards.
On AI washing, which the GTM space has more of than most, his test is straightforward. Real AI nativeness means two things: building the system architecture so agents can actually do things inside it, not just humans clicking around, and having the AI make decisions at different steps rather than executing hard-coded sequences. The legacy tools adding AI features are doing neither, and buyers who've been around long enough can usually tell.
One thing he said towards the end that’s worth thinking about. He raised the Excel analogy, the one where people assumed that because spreadsheets could do in two hours what used to take a day, everyone would get the afternoon off. That didn't happen. There was just more to do, and it got done faster. His view is AI is the same. The four-hour workweek is not coming. You just play a faster game now, and you can't afford to be left behind in it.
The full conversation is on The AI Revolution Show. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, and:
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. Where is your company really on the AI shift? Every assumption about how software gets built, sold, and scaled is being disrupted. The AI platform shift is rewriting every rule, and navigating the platform shift means founders are rebuilding right now.
The Shift AI Transformation Index tells you exactly where your company stands, and what separates you from the founders who are moving fastest. The index highlights the gaps, and what you really need to focus on. Take the index here: https://www.shiftai.events/ai-transformation-survey
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shiftai.events
You're receiving this because you subscribed. Unsubscribe any time.