Ryan Vanshur is VP of GTM Intelligence and AI Solutions at Handle, a title that didn't exist until he built the job that needed it. He owns Handle's go-to-market tech stack and BDR team and has led an AI transformation reaching every department, including a custom go-to-market context graph and a role-based internal AI Academy. Before Handle he spent nearly a decade as a co-founder at CourseKey, the San Diego trade-school management platform, running sales, marketing, client success and eventually revenue operations through a full enterprise pivot and a private-equity exit. He holds an MIT advanced certificate in artificial intelligence, is completing a certificate at Harvard Business School, and writes the Vertical GTM Guild, where he publishes AI-native go-to-market frameworks and playbooks for vertical SaaS operators.
“The battle of models in frontier versus open, that's actually not the story. The story is what sort of context or ground truth is your model operating from.”
“Maybe it's not a one FTE hire, right, that's out there with a title that you're looking for. It might be a team, like a tiger team, of builders that live and breathe the problems every day.”
“It wasn't necessarily who has been using AI the longest or who has the most AI apps built, as much as who's always looking for ways to solve problems.”
“All of a sudden, six months later, I had a project that just slammed to a standstill because data has a shelf life.”
“I wouldn't trade that for faster emails, or quicker copy, or whatever most people are doing with AI right now.”
“The part a lot of people don't want to hear is there's no automated way to keep it 100% accurate.”
“It was like 75% of all the intelligence that I had was either outdated or no longer relevant.”
“Most people are used to 20 iterations of conversations. If you're getting to the point of frustration, I promise you, you have a context problem.”