Bruno Leardine runs go-to-market engineering at XBOW, the leading autonomous offensive security company.

He calls himself an "applied AI operator," and in under a year, he led the technical building of a GTM Engine that sustains a team juggling a “market that changes every week.”

Together with CRO Niroshan Rajadurai and Head of RevOps Justin Miller, Bruno cut the team's tool stack from twelve to five and built a single system that runs the entire funnel, from initial engagement through expansion readiness. His GTM Engine is setting the standard for how go-to-market teams will operate in the AI era.

At its core, the GTM Engine gives the go-to-market teams (sales, customer success, solutions engineering, product, marketing) and leadership one place to see the entire GTM motion. The team can:

• Ask anything in natural language: with a command line interface, the GTM team can use natural language to learn about accounts, pipeline, and the state of the business

• Generate assets on demand: team members can spin up reports, decks, or marketing content from live data

• Track proof-of-value trials: a shared board with timelines and status for every active POV

• Listen to the market: sellers and marketers can ****monitor what customers, competitors, and the wider community are saying

• Work from Slack: the whole thing is available as a web app and as a Slack bot named Bolt

All of it is wired into the product's code repositories, internal documentation, and customer conversations, so everything stays current and in one place.

Wrangling the Seller’s Attention

XBOW sells into a market that barely existed two years ago, when autonomous cybersecurity was still a research paper. The rapidly growing startup uses AI to simulate real attacks on applications, surfacing vulnerabilities so teams can find and fix the weaknesses in their own systems. The market changes every week, and the tools most revenue teams include in their tech stack weren't built for that pace.

"The seller's attention was everywhere and nowhere, because a very successful day for a seller is meeting after meeting, but then at the end of the day they have to go back and document everything, and in at least six different systems," he said.

Giving sellers more tools was doing more harm than help. Bruno realized, “When we offered them everything, we got almost zero results back because choice became a problem. People were just paralyzed with all the choices they had.”

While Bruno was running internal marketing tooling and co-building Project Sofia, an AI data-visualization tool, at Microsoft, he realized the problem with getting team members to use internal tools was “we were expecting too much from the end user," he said.

The prevailing fix at the time was to let team members use their own bots to read and update a static document designated as the source of truth, which required constant maintenance and could lead to discrepancies as different bots appended new information according to different prompts.

“That sounded like a nightmare to me, to be honest,” Bruno said. “At the speed in which we move, there's no way we can keep up with a Notion doc or any Google doc that will become our source of truth. Things change by the minute.” Asking bots to manage the upkeep wouldn’t work either. “Everybody creating their own bot sounded a little hectic because then you have one source of truth, but you have several ways of reporting back, so now we have slightly different versions of the same truth, which doesn't solve the problem.”

Centralizing the System

XBOW’s solution was to cut the stack from ten tools to five and build the GTM Engine around a live source of truth that plugged directly into the source data, so that "if something has changed, we get it."

Bruno, Justin, and Niroshan built the core themselves and then brought in design partners like Rox to solve the problems he didn’t want to spend the time focusing on. "Rox is solving prospecting for us in a way we could not solve ourselves," he said. “What [Rox is] doing, for example, is much better than what I can do in house. So there's no reason for me to go and reinvent the wheel.”

Bruno’s approach boiled down to:

1. Preserve focus: Consolidate the stack so sellers aren't splitting their attention across six different systems

2. “More CLI, less UI:” Let people state what they need in plain language and have an agent do it, instead of jumping from browser tab to browser tab

3. Plug into the source data: Build around a live source of truth wired into the data warehouse, not a static doc that someone, or a group of bots, has to maintain

4. Don't expect too much from the end user: Tools fail when they ask too much of the people using them. Build for adoption, not for the ideal user

5. Collaborate with key design partners: Design the full funnel in-house and bring in design partners for specialized problems like prospecting and outbound

6. Automate yourself out: Build infrastructure solid enough to run and be extended by others without you

The Perfect Partnership

When Bruno considers design partners, he is looking for teams that are building for the future and driving outcomes. For Rox, Bruno had the same people run Rox and a competing tool toward the same goal, and measured on meetings booked.

“We saw nothing in one tool in those two weeks, and then we saw, I believe, three or four meetings being booked [with Rox], and another three that were on the way,” Bruno said. “During those two weeks, it was clear to us; this is it. Let's just now bring in more people.”

Once the team had the tool, they started bending it to their own work. "Everybody was using their own way, being very creative," Bruno said. The strongest use cases got surfaced and amplified across internal channels, and that turned individual experiments into shared practice. "People started to understand how to templatize their own work, or learn from other users doing great work, a positive feedback loop, because now people see what's working, bring it back, and share with others."

Sellers started asking for new ways to use Rox. "I woke up Monday morning to a message. Somebody was thinking through it Sunday night," Bruno said. "It was a seller who sent me a request for GTME to integrate with Rox in XYZ ways, and that’s not me thinking about it. That’s not [Rox]. It's literally the seller who's using both tools and just asking: here's my day to day, can you do that?"

A partner like Rox also frees Bruno from having to track where a problem is heading.

"It was clear to me that [Rox was] thinking six to twelve months ahead, and that's a burden I don't need to have," Bruno said. "I don't need to be thinking about prospecting six to twelve months ahead, because I know [the Rox] team is on it. So I can come and learn and be advised on the topic, and then go figure out other parts of the business that I don't have a partner looking into."

Infrastructure that Elevates Everyone

Bruno’s approach to building is largely influenced by his upbringing. He grew up in Morungaba, a rural town in Brazil about 60 miles from São Paulo.

“Growing up there was great because we had to be very resourceful in things that we could play with as kids, because not a lot of things would get there,” Leardine said. “That creativity is definitely something that shaped me into what I do today.”

Bruno’s family was one of the few families who broke the poverty cycle in Morungaba. He was the first in his family to attend college where he studied economics and sociology as well as how South America dealt with poverty. In 2017, he published a book about social mobility in Brazil.

“My book [was] mostly trying to understand what happened to me, and how that could be applied to others, so that it's not the lucky ones that get out. It's actually an infrastructure that elevates the majority of the people,” he said.

That idea is mirrored by the system he built at XBOW. Rather than relying on a handful of star sellers to carry the team, Bruno designed a GTM Engine that brings lift everyone, and one that runs autonomously.

"What I'm proud of is I automated myself out of this job," he said.

That's what he built at XBOW: a system that lifts the whole team, solid enough to run and be extended without him, so he can go solve the next problem. "What I’m proud of is I automated myself out of this job," he said.