AI Fluency is a Real Hiring Requirement in GTM

Everyone says they use AI now.

But there is a big difference between using AI and actually knowing how to apply it to your job.

For go-to-market hiring, simply having ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool in your workflow tells an employer little. The more useful question is what you are actually doing with it.

That is what we are hearing from companies hiring across Sales and Customer Success.

We recently talked about how employers are starting to screen more directly for AI fluency.

Not: “Do you use AI?”

But: “How do you use it?” or “What process did it improve?” or “What did you build?” or “What can you do now that you could not do as efficiently before?”

Those questions are becoming much more important.

AI Fluency Is About the Workflow

For Sales candidates, we are seeing AI show up in areas like:

• Account research
• Prospect prioritization
• Messaging
• Outreach cadences
• Personalization

For Customer Success teams, the use cases can look different:

• Creating more customer touchpoints
• Monitoring account health
• Summarizing customer activity
• Identifying risk
• Surfacing expansion opportunities

There is no single “correct” AI workflow.

Different roles have different problems to solve. Employers care less about whether someone knows a particular tool and more about whether they can apply technology to the work.

Last week, we talked about this in our broader look at GTM hiring trends in 2026.

The larger shift happening across GTM teams is not just about adding AI to existing jobs. Companies are reconsidering the work itself.

What can be automated?

Where are people wasting time?

What still requires human involvement?

And where can one person create more leverage by building a better process?

AI fluency sits right in the middle of those questions.

“I Use ChatGPT” Is Not Much of an Answer Anymore

I recently screened a candidate who spent five or ten minutes walking through an AI SDR sequence he had built.

He could explain the different steps, how the workflow operated, and how it made his day-to-day work easier.

That level of specificity matters.

Compare that with someone saying:

“I use ChatGPT.”

Okay. For what?

That is increasingly where candidates separate themselves.

Knowing the name of the tool is easy. Understanding where it fits into a process is harder.

Strong candidates should be able to explain:

1. What the workflow looked like before.
2. What problem they were trying to solve.
3. Where AI was introduced.
4. What still required human involvement.
5. What improved after the change.

That tells a hiring manager far more than simply knowing which platforms someone has used.

Companies Are Looking for Practical AI Experience

The tools themselves are going to change. The AI platform everyone is excited about today may not be the one teams rely on a year from now. That is why hiring around a specific platform only gets you so far.

What matters more is whether someone understands their job well enough to recognize where AI can make them more effective.

A good Sales candidate should understand how they build pipeline, prioritize accounts, and communicate with buyers.

A strong Customer Success candidate should understand customer health, retention, risk, and expansion.

AI can make those processes faster or better. But the person still needs to understand the process in the first place.

That is the distinction employers are starting to look for.

AI Is Also Raising the Bar for Candidates

There is another side to this. As AI becomes easier to access, simply using it becomes less of a differentiator. Most candidates can use a tool to draft an email.

Most can summarize an account.

Most can generate a first pass at messaging.

What stands out is being able to explain how you have worked AI into your day-to-day and what changed because of it.

Did it save time?

Did it help you prioritize better?

Did it improve your outreach?

Did it allow you to spend more time on work that actually required you?

Those examples give employers something tangible to evaluate.

And they say a lot more than “proficient with ChatGPT” ever will.

What Hiring Managers Should Ask

If AI fluency matters for a role, companies should stop asking broad questions about it.

Instead of:

“Are you comfortable using AI?”

Try:

“Walk me through one workflow you improved using AI.”

Or:

“What part of your current job have you automated, and what still requires your involvement?”

Or:

“Show me how you use AI when researching a new account.”

The point is to get beyond whether someone has used the technology and understand how they think about using it.

That is what we are seeing from clients now.

AI tools will keep changing. The specific use cases probably will too.

But candidates who can look at their work, find a better way to do it, and clearly explain the impact are going to stand out.

For GTM hiring in 2026, that is becoming a much more meaningful definition of AI fluency.

You can watch more here on what I’m seeing with AI fluency in GTM hiring.