SPOTLIGHT: The AI category GTM teams are about to converge on | Adam Liska, CEO & Co-Founder @ airspeed
About this episode
Adam Liska discusses the challenges of sales forecasting and the concept of 'revenue execution' in the context of AI and business strategy.
A rep says "follow up on that" on a call, then buries it under five more calls and a late-night inbox. Three days later the deal's gone cold, but the CRM still says it's live. The manager forecasts off that. The CRO forecasts off the manager. The board asks the CEO if anyone actually has a grip on the number. The whole thing was built on a promise nobody kept. Adam Liska worked on the early Gemini models at Google DeepMind before leaving to close that gap. His company, airspeed, just raised a $20M Series A on a bet that "revenue execution" is the next real category, not another tool that logs calls and calls it intelligence. Sam Jacobs traces the full arc with him: DeepMind to founder-led sales to the unglamorous work of turning a founder's instincts into a system a team can actually run. What we get into: Why "follow up on that" breaks the forecast chain from rep to CRO to board What "revenue execution" means, and why it isn't revenue intelligence with a new label Whether you own the interface or hand it to a chat model and live as middleware The Nashville lunch that became airspeed's first six-figure deal The real sequence from founder-led to scalable: capture the data first…
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