The Biggest AI Mistake in BD: Taking the Human Out of the Loop

What we talked about.

Shubh Sidhu joins his old engineering school friend Sunny Ray to talk about Aware GTM, the go to market consulting and execution studio he co-founded with Shai Ranama after years together at Canadian fintech Zayzoon. Shubh explains why he treats revenue as a systems problem rather than separate sales, marketing, and success functions, and why partnerships proved to be an underrated growth channel. The conversation centers on AI in business development, where Shubh argues the biggest mistake companies make is stripping human judgment and taste out of outreach once automation arrives. He describes Aware's approach of pulling context from internal tools and customer conversations, then pushing it back through a human review layer before messages go out. They discuss why Aware targets two to one hundred million dollar revenue companies, how the firm landed its first clients through network relationships, and Shubh's belief that founders remain the best salespeople for their own business. Shubh also plugs his own podcast, Your Business Is On The Line, co-hosted with Philip Burns in Calgary.

Aware GTM co-founder Shubh Sidhu explains why AI outreach fails without human taste, context, and judgment in the loop.

The questions, and the answers.

What is Aware GTM and why should people care about it?

My business partner Shai and I spent years together at a fintech and two years ago saw early adopters using AI in go to market and realized we needed to learn it fast. We combine personal go to market experience with the new tools to help post traction B2B companies fix positioning, targeting, and messaging, then actually execute the plan instead of just consulting on it.

You were founding head of growth at a Canadian fintech. What did building that function from zero teach you?

It taught me there is more than one way to get to market. Early on every company just poured money into SDRs and ads, but partnerships became one of my favorite growth levers. At our fintech we partnered with mid-market HR and payroll companies, and that taught me partnerships can be a genuinely viable path to scale, not just a lifestyle business tactic.

What was the moment you decided go to market was a systems problem rather than a headcount problem?

I went through project management into product and eventually revenue, touching every part of the company, so I never bought into sales, marketing, and success being separate owned pillars. I always saw it as one connected system. Working with technical partners who could connect tools like Segment reinforced that revenue is really a mathematics and systems problem.

Your principle is context before AI. What goes wrong concretely when a company gets that order backwards?

Even with context, if you do not apply taste it still feels forced, like an email referencing something random you posted. Context also gets scattered across everyone's individual AI tools instead of being shared. You have to pull context out of the team and the customer, then push it back in so the whole system stays aligned, not just one person.

Where does human judgment still beat the model?

Not every human beats the model, but a founder can still talk about their business better than anything AI produces. It is a taste question, does this actually feel right. You do not need to review every message, but for higher ticket, lower volume sales especially, having a human pass over what the context produced each morning matters a lot.

What does the call recording intelligence side of your stack surface, and what do teams consistently miss?

We are trying to find the moment someone actually clicks, on a call, in an email, wherever we touch them, and make sure the whole team is aware of that moment. A huge miss is sales pitching one thing while customer success delivers value on something else entirely, and that loop between what was promised and what actually resonates never gets closed.

Why did you pick the two to one hundred million dollar revenue band specifically?

Honestly we did not overthink ICP selection on day zero. We are operators, not consultants, so we do not want a hundred clients. In the Canadian market especially, founder-led sales often stalls at one or two million in revenue, and that is our niche, helping companies scale past the founder rather than working with very early startups or enterprise.

How did Aware's first ten clients actually find you guys?

Almost entirely through our existing networks and whatever credibility we earned from past companies. That is how it goes for most startups, the first clients come from people you already know. We are being selective, choosing to work with people we like and products we believe are growable, and only now starting to use our own tools for outbound.