When Generative AI broke onto the scene and ChatGPT went viral, a lot of the world was awestruck by its power. For me, it landed differently because I’ve spent years launching RegTech products where the day-to-day reality was far less magical. We were often reading through huge volumes of unstructured legal and regulatory text just to extract the specific obligations a client actually needed to follow. We used methods like RPA for text scraping and extraction and machine learning for enrichment, and while it worked, it was exhaustive and resource intensive. Not just for the system, but for the humans operating it too. In fact, we even implemented Lean Six Sigma quality processes to protect customer quality and reduce error rates. The irony is that we got really good at scaling the busy work. We amplified activity, checks, and workflows, but left very little room for attention on the highest priority decisions that actually moved outcomes.
That shift really took off when the paper “Attention Is All You Need” was published by Google Research. I recommend reading it, even if you have no interest in deep AI theory. There are also plenty of videos online that break it down in plain English.
Read the paper: Attention is All You Need
So how does this relate to GTM?
In this research paper, the breakthrough in GenAI was achieved through something called an attention function that sits between the model’s encoder and decoder. The simplest way I can describe it is this: it eliminates the need to read and process a blob of text from start to finish. Instead, it learns what to focus on, what to ignore, and what matters right now. It highlighted something simple but profound for me: if you want better outcomes, you do not just add more intelligence. You build a system that protects attention.
A simple analogy is how you scan a room when you walk in. You do not treat every object as equally important. Your brain picks up the most relevant signals almost instantly. People, movement, emotion, urgency, opportunity. You connect patterns fast without reading the entire room line by line. Sales professionals are experts at this. Another analogy is an ER team. They do not treat patients in the order they arrived. They triage based on signals. Who needs attention first, who can wait, who is stable. That prioritization is the whole game.
Now imagine this when you have 40 deals and renewals in motion. A prospect thread pops in asking a compliance question about new FDA guidelines on AI usage related to diagnostics. Without triage, you pass this to legal. But what if this simple ask came from a prospect accelerating a buyer decision who needs assurance that your product can address this compliance requirement, and your competitor addresses this concern first and ends up winning the deal?
This happened all the time in the compliance world. A client would submit what looked like a routine policy interpretation request, and buried in the third paragraph was new and urgent guidance that invalidated their entire compliance framework. When you triage for regulatory velocity or business impact, you become indispensable. ER teams save lives by reading vital signals, not just forms. GTM teams close deals when they read deal signals, not just logs.
That is what attention really means. Not more information. Just better filtering.
Now bring that back to GTM. It has everything to do with attention, and the lack of it impacts GTM more than we realize.
This was basically my day yesterday. I started the day with a clear, time-boxed to-do list, and then I got an email about a contract change that needed review. A prospect followed up asking for a pricing exception and a “quick call today.” A customer thread popped up with a compliance question that could derail a deal if we handled it wrong. Before you know it, the day is gone, and none of it was truly planned. The scary part is none of these things are bad in isolation. They are all legitimate. But they hijack attention away from the biggest needle movers of the day.
So I stopped the busy work and came back to my top three. I asked myself, what are the most important GTM signals today? Which deals are most likely to close this month and what is blocking them? Which accounts are quietly drifting and showing churn signals? What is the one move we can make this week that improves pipeline quality, not just activity? The problem is only compounded when your GTM teams scale and there is not enough time to identify, much less act on, high impact activities and blind spots that can derail your quarter.
This happens all the time. In GTM, most activities are designed to scream for attention. Slack, email, CRM alerts, “quick asks,” internal pings, external pings, competitive noise, customer noise. Everything looks urgent, because everything is loud and fuels our FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
That is why I keep coming back to the core idea. Attention routing beats information overload.
Most GTM leaders think their problem is solely sales execution and how hard the sales teams are working. It is also whether your systems are designed to protect their focus or destroy it. You cannot always scale a human’s capacity to filter noise, but you can build systems that do it for them. That is the breakthrough in my view. Not more visibility into everything. Just relentless prioritization of the signals that move deals forward, and the discipline to ignore everything else.
This is also why I am building FlowState. It is a mission coming from my own deep personal experiences. I want to give GTM teams the right signals at the right time to act on what truly matters. Not more dashboards. Not more random alerts. Not more noise. Just better attention. Because in GTM, the winners are not the teams with the most information. They are the teams that can consistently focus on the few things that actually move revenue.