The 20 AI Sales, Marketing & GTM CEOs You Need to Know in 2026
Every enterprise revenue team, from a scrappy startup running cold outbound to a Fortune 500 deploying agentic AI across its entire GTM motion, depends on software. The CEOs building that software are, in many ways, defining how companies find customers, close deals, and grow revenue in the AI era. From CRM platforms and sales intelligence to conversational marketing and AI SDR agents, these leaders are rewriting the playbook for how organizations generate and convert pipeline.
Companies are listed in alphabetical order. This list is non-exhaustive.
1. 6sense: Chris Ball, CEO Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: $500M+ | Valuation: ~$5.2B
Chris Ball became CEO of 6sense in September 2025, stepping into a company that his predecessor Jason Zintak had built from $5M in annual revenue to over $250M ARR and one of the highest valuations in the sales intelligence category. Ball arrives as 6sense enters what may be its most consequential chapter: the transition from a market-defining ABM and intent data platform into what the company calls an agent-powered Revenue Intelligence system — one that doesn’t just surface buyer signals but acts on them autonomously.
Ball brings more than two decades of enterprise software leadership to the role. Most recently he served as President and COO of Instructure, where he expanded its global SaaS footprint and delivered the consistent performance that led to a $4.8B acquisition by KKR. Before that, he held senior roles at Adobe scaling the Digital Experience business, and at SAP leading global go-to-market transformation across enterprise segments — a background that maps directly onto what 6sense needs next: converting category leadership and open-source adoption momentum into durable enterprise revenue at scale. Zintak, who built the company’s foundational playbook and remains as Chairman, described the handoff as the right moment for new leadership to guide 6sense into its next stage — and Ball’s operational record suggests he was chosen precisely to execute what Zintak designed.
2. Apollo.io: Matt Curl, CEO Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$251M | Valuation: $1.6B
The Apollo.io origin story belongs to Tim Zheng — who co-founded the company in 2015, nearly ran it into the ground by 2020, and then executed one of the most celebrated GTM pivots in SaaS history, switching to a freemium, product-led growth model that took Apollo from the brink of collapse to $100M ARR in under two years. That foundation is what Matt Curl inherited when Zheng promoted him to CEO in February 2026, and it’s a foundation Curl had already been quietly reinforcing for over a year as COO.
Curl is the operator Zheng chose specifically for Apollo’s next phase. He joined in mid-2024 with a background built on scaling GTM infrastructure at Checkr and Fivestars — companies where he built the systems, RevOps rigor, and execution culture that let organizations grow without losing discipline. At Apollo, he delivered the company’s best month, best Q4, and best fiscal year on record before the title change ever happened. Under his leadership Apollo has grown to nearly $200M ARR with close to 100,000 paying customers, launched an AI Assistant that helps users book 2.3x more meetings per account, acquired revenue intelligence platform Pocus, and built native connectors into Claude and ChatGPT — a signal that Curl is positioning Apollo as the execution backbone for an AI-first GTM world, not just another sales data provider. Zheng remains as Board Chair; the mission of democratizing world-class go-to-market for everyone is unchanged, and now it has an operator purpose-built to scale it.
3. Clay: Kareem Amin, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: New York, NY | Total Funding: ~$210M | Valuation: $5B (January 2026 tender)
Kareem Amin co-founded Clay in 2017 with a vision to give non-engineers the power of programmable workflows — and spent five years in search of the right wedge before landing on go-to-market. The result is now the defining platform of a new profession: GTM Engineering. Clay’s programmable workflow layer connects 50+ data sources, applies AI enrichment, and automates personalized outbound at scale — a capability that has made it the tool of choice for growth teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, and Intercom.
Clay hit $100M ARR in December 2025, raised a $100M Series C led by CapitalG at a $3.1B valuation in August 2025, and conducted a second employee tender offer at a $5B valuation in January 2026 — tripling in value within a single year. Amin has also pioneered the GTM Engineering career category itself, with over 280 open GTM Engineer roles at companies like Cursor, Webflow, and Notion. His bet that the “how” of go-to-market will be as valuable as the “what” is paying off at a remarkable pace.
4. Clari + Salesloft: Steve Cox, CEO
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA & Atlanta, GA | Combined Funding: $900M+
Steve Cox was appointed CEO of the combined Clari + Salesloft entity when the two companies merged in December 2025, a category-defining consolidation that brought together the leading revenue forecasting platform (Clari) and the leading sales engagement platform (Salesloft) under a single AI-powered roof. Cox, a seasoned SaaS executive with over 25 years of experience including CEO roles at Employ and Community Brands, is now building what the company calls the world’s first Predictive Revenue System.
The combined platform connects pipeline creation to close — shared data, unified AI, and one system of action — and already serves thousands of enterprise customers including Adobe, IBM, 3M, and Zoom. In March 2026, the company announced a strategic partnership with 1mind and the sunset of its legacy Drift conversational marketing product, signaling a clear pivot toward agentic revenue intelligence. Cox was recognized in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration in April 2026, validating the combined company’s market position.
5. Demandbase: Gabe Rogol, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$320M
Gabe Rogol has led Demandbase as CEO for several years, having spent over a decade at the company building what is now the definitive pipeline AI platform for B2B enterprises. Demandbase’s platform unifies account intelligence, intent data, advertising, and sales orchestration into a single system — giving GTM teams the ability to identify, target, and engage the accounts most likely to convert, without the fragmented stack of point solutions that plagues most enterprise revenue operations.
In April 2026, Rogol unveiled Demandbase AI at the company’s GO London conference — a total transformation of the platform built around a conversational interface and proprietary Context Intelligence layer that translates account signals into pipeline actions. Demandbase was the only vendor named a Leader in both The Forrester Wave for Marketing and Sales Data Providers and The Forrester Wave for Revenue Marketing Platforms in Q1 2026 — its fifth consecutive year in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABM Platforms. Rogol’s consistent message — “AI without context creates noise” — reflects a deliberate product philosophy that has kept Demandbase at the top of the ABM and pipeline AI category against a growing field of challengers.
6. Gong: Amit Bendov, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$584M | Valuation: $7.25B (last primary round)
Amit Bendov co-founded Gong in 2015 with the conviction that AI could fundamentally change how sales teams understand and win customer conversations — a bet he described as the most significant innovation in sales since the invention of the CRM. A decade later, that prediction has been validated: Gong reached a $500M ARR run rate in May 2026, with over 55% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter, and Bendov reports signing million-dollar-plus enterprise contracts at a pace not seen before.
Gong’s Revenue AI Operating System captures and analyzes interactions across calls, emails, and meetings, turning them into the actionable pipeline intelligence that drives the Revenue Graph. Named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list in the Applied AI category in March 2026, Gong is preparing toward an IPO while remaining nearly profitable from its 2021 Series E capital. Bendov’s thesis — that AI only creates value when it drives action, not just insight — has become a mantra for how enterprise AI sales tools are evaluated.
7. HubSpot: Yamini Rangan, CEO
Headquarters: Cambridge, MA | NASDAQ: HUBS | Revenue: $3.1B (FY2025)
Yamini Rangan has led HubSpot since 2021 and has accelerated the company’s transformation from a beloved SMB marketing tool into a comprehensive AI-native front-office platform for sales, marketing, and customer service. Under her leadership, HubSpot delivered $3.1B in revenue for FY2025 at 18.2% constant currency growth, with FY2026 guidance of $3.69–$3.70B — ahead of Wall Street expectations.
What defined 2025 for HubSpot under Rangan was AI momentum: Breeze AI agents embedded across the platform, with the Customer Agent activated by over 8,000 customers at a mid-60% resolution rate, and the Prospecting Agent activated by over 10,000 customers. Rangan’s strategy — embedding AI across an integrated platform rather than bolting it on — has positioned HubSpot as the customer platform of choice for AI-native companies like Lovable, Browserbase, and Squint.ai, and for traditional enterprises rethinking their front-office stack.
8. Jasper: Timothy Young, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, TX | Total Funding: ~$131M | Valuation: ~$1.5B
Timothy Young leads Jasper as CEO, having been appointed by founder Dave Rogenmoser to scale the company’s enterprise ambitions. Young, formerly President of Dropbox, arrived as Jasper pivoted from a broad AI writing assistant into a focused AI copilot for enterprise marketing teams — a narrower but more defensible positioning in a market rapidly crowded with AI content tools.
Jasper has built its enterprise identity around brand voice consistency, on-brand content generation at scale, and integrations into the workflows that marketing teams already use. With $88M in ARR and 100,000+ customers, the company’s differentiation is the depth of brand intelligence it can encode — ensuring that AI-generated content sounds like the company, not like a generic language model. Young’s enterprise distribution experience is the strategic bet Jasper is placing as the content AI market consolidates around platforms that can operate at Fortune 500 scale.
9. Mutiny: Jaleh Rezaei, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$72M
Jaleh Rezaei co-founded Mutiny to solve a problem she experienced firsthand as Head of Marketing at Gusto: B2B websites are built for the average visitor, not for the high-value account that’s actually worth converting. Mutiny’s AI-powered personalization platform lets enterprise marketing teams deliver tailored website experiences to target accounts at scale — the kind of 1:1, high-touch buying experience that was previously only achievable by hand for the very largest deals.
Rezaei, a mechanical engineer by training who pivoted through Stanford’s Management Science program, has built Mutiny with Sequoia and Insight Partners backing into the reference platform for account-based website personalization. After a major product pivot completed in 2025 — bringing agentic pipeline generation to the forefront — she gathered 50 marketing leaders from top enterprises for a product soft-launch at which, by all accounts, the reaction to the new capability was immediate and visceral. Rezaei is one of the most intellectually rigorous founders in the GTM AI space.
10. Qualified (acquired by Salesforce): Kraig Swensrud, Co-Founder & former CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$163M | Acquired by Salesforce, April 2026
Kraig Swensrud co-founded Qualified with fellow Salesforce alumni Sean Whiteley to solve the one problem that every B2B marketing team ignores: the website visitor who doesn’t fill out a form. Qualified’s flagship product, Piper the AI SDR Agent, runs as an always-on presence on enterprise websites — engaging inbound visitors, qualifying intent, and booking meetings without human intervention — and drove nearly 100% year-over-year growth for the company.
Salesforce announced its acquisition of Qualified in December 2025 and closed in April 2026, with Swensrud and his co-founders rejoining their former employer to bring agentic marketing into the Agentforce ecosystem. The acquisition validated a thesis Swensrud had been pushing for years: that the website is the highest-intent channel in B2B GTM, and that AI agents could do the work of entire SDR teams at a fraction of the cost. With 600+ enterprise customers and the #1 rating for AI SDR agents on G2, Piper is now the agentic marketing front door for Salesforce’s enormous installed base.
11. Salesforce: Marc Benioff, Chair & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | NYSE: CRM | FY2026 Revenue: $41.5B
Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999 and has spent 25 years building the world’s largest CRM platform. In 2026, he is executing the most significant product reinvention of his career: Agentforce, the autonomous AI agent platform for sales, marketing, and service workflows, which the company calls the defining product moment of its history. Salesforce delivered FY2026 revenue of $41.5B — up 10% year-over-year — with Benioff reporting that six of Salesforce’s top ten deals in recent quarters were driven by enterprises specifically seeking to transform with Agentforce.
Benioff’s acquisitions of Informatica (for $8B, the data layer) and Qualified (the agentic marketing front door) in 2025–2026 sketch a Salesforce betting on owning both the data and the engagement layers of the agentic enterprise. With nearly 10,000 paid Agentforce deals already signed since its September 2024 launch and a $72B remaining performance obligation, Benioff is arguably presiding over the most consequential shift in enterprise software since the original SaaS transition — and he’s the one who started that transition, too.
12. Seismic: Doug Winter, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Diego, CA | Total Funding: ~$450M | Valuation: $3B+
Doug Winter co-founded Seismic to solve the problem of sales enablement at enterprise scale — making sure every seller has the right content, at the right time, for the right buyer interaction. The Seismic platform has evolved into a comprehensive AI-powered enablement intelligence system, helping revenue teams across training, coaching, and content management at organizations like IBM, American Express, and T. Rowe Price.
In an AI era where the volume of customer-facing content has exploded, Seismic’s role as the intelligence layer that helps reps use content effectively — and helps organizations understand what content actually drives deals — has become more valuable, not less. Winter has built Seismic into one of the most enterprise-entrenched platforms in the GTM stack, with deep integrations into Salesforce, Microsoft, and the major CRM environments that enterprise sales teams live inside.
13. Together AI → Writer: May Habib, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$369M | Valuation: ~$1.9B
May Habib co-founded Writer in 2020 — originally as Qordoba, a content localization platform — and has built it into the leading full-stack enterprise AI platform for agentic work. Where most AI writing tools target individual productivity, Writer’s platform is built for the enterprise use case: deploying AI agents that execute complex, mission-critical workflows across teams and systems, powered by Palmyra, Writer’s family of proprietary enterprise-grade LLMs that Habib developed in-house rather than relying on third-party models.
Writer raised a $200M Series C at a $1.9B valuation in November 2024, with investors including Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, IBM Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth — a list that signals how serious the enterprise AI infrastructure community is about Writer’s positioning. Customers including Uber, Intuit, Accenture, and Vanguard are using Writer for mission-critical operations. Named to Inc.’s Female Founders list and the Forbes AI 50, Habib is one of the most quietly influential builders in enterprise AI, and one of the few building foundation models specifically for enterprise use cases.
14. ZoomInfo: Henry Schuck, Founder & CEO
Headquarters: Vancouver, WA | NASDAQ: GTM | Revenue: $1.25B (FY2025)
Henry Schuck founded ZoomInfo in 2007 and has scaled it into the leading go-to-market intelligence platform for enterprise sales and marketing teams — and famously changed the company’s stock ticker from ZI to GTM in a signal about where the category is headed. ZoomInfo delivered $1.25B in FY2025 revenue, exceeding the top end of its own guidance, and Schuck’s flagship AI product, ZoomInfo Copilot, generated $250M in ACV just 18 months after launch — faster monetization than most SaaS companies see across their entire lifecycle.
Schuck has built Copilot on a data flywheel that ZoomInfo has been constructing for nearly two decades: a foundation of proprietary firmographic, technographic, and intent data that gives its AI a signal advantage over competitors building on top of third-party sources. His GTM formula — dogfood hard, sell before GA to test willingness to pay, launch narrow with a clear ICP — is now referenced across the SaaS industry as the playbook for monetizing AI responsibly. Schuck recently joined the board of YipitData, extending his influence into the alternative data intelligence space.
15. Artisan: Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$25M+
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack co-founded Artisan to build AI-powered business process workers — what the company calls “Artisans” — that automate entire job functions end-to-end, starting with Ava, the AI BDR. Rather than building AI tools that sit alongside human SDRs, Artisan is betting that AI can replace the entire SDR function: autonomous prospecting, research, personalized outreach, and follow-up across email and LinkedIn, without a human in the loop.
Carmichael-Jack, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and founded the company while still in his early twenties, has positioned Artisan at the sharp edge of the AI-versus-human debate in sales. The company’s “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign became a lightning rod for that debate in 2024. In a market where AI SDR adoption accelerated dramatically through 2025, Artisan is one of the most aggressive voices for the agentic, fully autonomous future of sales development.
16. 11x: Hasan Sukkar, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: London, UK | Total Funding: ~$50M+
Hasan Sukkar co-founded 11x with a clean thesis: that AI digital workers — not AI-augmented human workers — represent the future of sales. 11x’s platform deploys AI agents including Alice (the AI SDR) and Jordan (the AI phone agent) that autonomously handle prospecting, outreach, lead qualification, and analytics — tasks that previously occupied multiple full-time roles per account executive. The platform is built for the enterprise sales team that wants to scale output without proportionally scaling headcount.
11x has attracted backing from notable investors and become one of the most referenced AI SDR platforms in the rapidly growing agentic sales category. Sukkar is building at a moment when enterprise buyers are moving from curiosity about AI SDRs to production deployment, and 11x is positioned alongside Artisan and Ava as one of the first movers in the category. His London headquarters makes 11x one of the most prominent European players in the AI-native sales stack.
17. Read AI: David Shim, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$50M+
David Shim co-founded Read AI to bring AI intelligence to the meeting layer of enterprise GTM — the calls, demos, and customer conversations where deals are actually won and lost. Read AI’s platform provides meeting summaries, sentiment analysis, engagement scoring, and CRM-ready insights from video calls and async communications, turning the unstructured data of human conversation into structured revenue intelligence that flows directly into CRM systems.
Shim has built Read AI into a platform used by GTM teams across the enterprise spectrum, with a thesis that resonates in the agentic era: as AI agents increasingly take action on behalf of go-to-market teams, the data from human-to-human interactions becomes more valuable, not less. His observation that “GTM’s version of ‘vibe coding’ is ‘vibe selling’” captures a real tension — AI can scale outreach, but understanding the texture of a live customer conversation is still where deals are made or lost, and Read AI is the intelligence layer for that moment.
18. AirOps: Alex Halliday, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$15M+
Alex Halliday co-founded AirOps to help marketing and content teams build AI-powered workflows that optimize for a fundamentally new distribution reality: in a world where AI agents are increasingly acting as research intermediaries, content doesn’t just need to rank on Google — it needs to be cited by AI. AirOps helps teams like Webflow and Descript structure content for higher visibility in AI overviews, ChatGPT citations, and agent-driven discovery, a category Halliday has helped define as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
The shift from SEO to GEO is one of the most consequential changes in B2B marketing in a decade, and Halliday is one of the clearest voices articulating its implications: marketing teams that don’t adapt their content architecture for machine consumption risk invisibility in an AI-mediated discovery environment. AirOps’ platform sits at the intersection of AI workflow automation and content strategy, making Halliday one of the most forward-looking CEOs in the marketing technology space.
19. Fathom: Richard White, Founder & CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Total Funding: ~$20M+
Richard White founded Fathom as a Series A company with a deceptively simple thesis: the AI meeting assistant should be the best product in the HubSpot App Marketplace, not an afterthought. Fathom has become the #1 ranked AI notetaker and meeting assistant in that ecosystem, serving tens of thousands of HubSpot customers and millions of teams worldwide — all with a team of fewer than 150 employees, an extraordinary output-to-headcount ratio that makes it one of the most capital-efficient AI GTM companies in the market.
White’s philosophy on AI tools cuts against the prevailing hype: he argues that evaluating vendors based on “can it do a thing?” is insufficient — teams need to develop entirely new acumen for judging whether AI output is actually high quality. That kind of first-principles thinking, applied to a product category that seems simple on the surface, is why Fathom has won in a market crowded with meeting intelligence competitors.
20. Highspot: Robert Wahbe, Co-Founder & CEO
Headquarters: Seattle, WA | Total Funding: ~$654M | Merging with Seismic, 2026
Robert Wahbe co-founded Highspot in 2012 after 15 years as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, bringing a depth of enterprise platform experience that has defined Highspot’s methodical, product-led growth trajectory. The platform has become the highest-rated revenue enablement solution in its category — serving 20 million users and helping go-to-market teams connect content, guidance, training, coaching, and engagement analytics in a single system — the connective layer between a company’s strategy and its sellers’ day-to-day execution.
Named a Leader in the inaugural 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Enablement Platforms with the highest score for Ability to Execute, Highspot launched its GTM Agent at its Spring 2026 conference — an agentic AI that connects signals across live deals and turns them into clear next-best actions for sellers. In February 2026, Seismic and Highspot announced a merger that would combine the two dominant forces in sales enablement into a single platform — a consolidation that signals how the category is converging around AI-native revenue execution. Wahbe will join the Seismic board as the combined company takes shape, bringing to a close one of the most competitive rivalries in enterprise GTM software.
A Note on the Field
The AI sales, marketing, and GTM category raised $3.7B in the first months of 2026 alone, with investor conviction concentrating on companies using autonomous AI agents to carry out marketing and customer service workflows — a shift from the rules-based automation of the prior decade. The boundary between “AI tool” and “AI agent” is where every company on this list is competing. What separates the leaders is a combination of proprietary data (ZoomInfo, 6sense), depth of workflow integration (Clay, Gong), and the conviction to build toward outcomes rather than features.
Who Did We Miss? The AI GTM landscape is evolving faster than perhaps any other category in enterprise technology. If there’s a CEO or company you think belongs on this list, drop your nominations below or reach out to our editorial team and we will get you on the next one.
