The clearest signal in Zeki’s latest research is not about engineering. It is about commercial hiring. Go-to-Market (GTM) hiring is now outpacing technical hiring in seven of eight scale-up verticals. Zeki’s analysis also finds that GTM experts are becoming disproportionately valuable because the skill is changing and standard sales roles no longer fit in the same way. That is the place to start. The commercial job has changed. Many hiring briefs have not.
That mismatch matters because the role is no longer defined mainly by coverage, activity or title seniority. Zeki’s work on hiring and role definition makes the underlying problem quite plain: the most important roles are often the hardest to define, the hardest to fill, and the most expensive to get wrong.
In deep-tech and AI, job descriptions lag reality, salary benchmarks age quickly, and the strongest people are rarely active in the market. The difficulty begins before the search begins. It starts with the brief itself.
The role is moving closer to the product
One shift stands out above all others: the rising importance of technical, outward-facing commercial roles.
Zeki’s research highlights the growing priority of hiring solutions engineers and similar profiles in enterprise sales built around AI models. It describes customer engagement in these businesses as more consultative and iterative, with teams shaping a solution around a specific customer context rather than simply onboarding them into a largely fixed product. It also finds that people moving into these roles often come not only from sales engineering, but from data engineering, data science and systems engineering as well.
That is not just a rebranding exercise. It suggests the commercial burden is shifting upstream, towards technical interpretation, implementation confidence and customer-specific design. Selling has not disappeared. But in this part of the market, it is increasingly tied to helping a customer understand how a complex product will work in practice. Zeki’s research says directly that GTM approaches built for SaaS do not always carry over to enterprise sales of AI-driven products.
The strongest commercial profiles are narrower—and less conventional
The talent patterns around these roles are just as revealing. Zeki finds that former founders now make up just over 9% of scale-up workforces, nearly double the proportion in the Magnificent Seven. It also finds that, among fast-growing companies, the proportion of GTM talent with both a STEM background and founder experience rises from four per cent in slower-growing firms to 18 per cent in the fastest-growing ones. The conclusion is measured but clear: this is one of the signs that the GTM ecosystem is changing.
The useful point here is not that every company should hire former founders into commercial roles.
It is that the market is rewarding a more particular kind of operator: someone technically literate, comfortable with ambiguity, and capable of operating without a finished system around them. Zeki reinforces that point with another finding that cuts against a common hiring instinct. Years of experience at hire are flat across growth cohorts. The fastest-growing companies are not solving the problem by simply hiring older people. They are hiring differently.
The title is a weak signal
This is where many founders still go wrong. They search by title and infer by pedigree. Zeki’s research suggests both are less reliable in GTM than in technical hiring. It finds that the search for GTM talent is more diffuse than the search for technical talent, and that elite GTM talent is less likely to come from a leading technology employer than elite technical talent is. It also finds that sales-representative experience at a Big Tech company does not translate as directly to the scale-up world as Big Tech technical expertise does.
That does not make background irrelevant. It makes it less legible. The same research shows the label “GTM” rising sharply in hiring rankings alongside solutions-oriented titles, but it also makes a useful distinction: the rise of “GTM” is more a rebranding than the arrival of a wholly new skill set. The market is not converging on one perfect title. It is circling a changing capability. That is why title-led hiring in this area so often produces a plausible shortlist and the wrong fit.
What follows from this
If the role has changed, the brief has to change with it. Zeki’s hiring insights keep returning to the same discipline: move beyond job titles towards capability and trajectory; define what “exceptional” means precisely; ground hiring in reality, not job specs; and favour precision over volume. It also makes the broader point that the right companies for this sort of hiring are willing to be challenged on role definition. That applies here too.
The practical implication is not that every deep-tech company now needs the same sort of commercial hire. It is that the old shortcuts are becoming more expensive. A familiar title, a well-known previous employer, a polished CV: none of those tells you enough on its own. Where commercial depth has to match technical depth, hiring has to start with the real capability gap, not the nearest available label.
Deep-tech has not simply made commercial hiring more important. It has made it easier to mis-specify. And once the role is mis-specified, the rest of the process becomes very efficient at producing the wrong answer.