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Revenue Brew

Sales Tech

Beck Salgado

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 roiled AI-forward businesses after it found that 95% of companies are seeing no return on their AI investments. It was a sucker punch for business leaders trying to wrap their heads, and budgets, around an increasingly essential part of the corporate tool kit. If your boss forwarded you an email entitled “SOS: the 411 on AI ROI,” it might have come from an AI bot trying to save itself.

These AI platform providers and users told Revenue Brew they haven’t been discouraged by early results and gave us insight into what could be coming down the pike.

 is by no means the new kid on the block when it comes to sales enterprise AI. It’s confident in the path it’s on and working with customers to become more effective. 

According to Gong’s co-founder and CPO Eilon Reshef, this means going beyond being an agent and tapping into its software roots to find the best solutions for specific sales tasks.

“The real value actually hasn’t changed in the last decade, which is you need good enterprise software infused with AI and that is aligned with your business processes, which is where Gong is heading…because that’s what we think the industry is heading,” Reshef said.

Gong has already identified time-sucking tasks as a major pain point. This was the basis for its new product Orchestrate, designed to centralize information and quickly provide next steps for tasks like follow-ups and customer handoffs.

“This is an automation script, like an agent that does things for them, collects all of the historical information and makes it a no-brainer,” Reshef told Revenue Brew. “So it’s both automation and a reminder system.”

Because AI is a “moving target,” according to Reshef, results will come at different paces.

Sales intelligence and prospecting platform Apollo.io measures AI success in two ways: increase in customer revenue and time savings. For Radu Vaduva, Apollo’s lead solutions consultant, this means creating effective products and infrastructure for humans using those products.

“The hardest part about it is not the tech, it’s the people. Because people typically worry about losing control or needing to add, let’s say, a data scientist to use the AI in the right way, what we try to build at Apollo is we try to fit the Apollo tool specifically the AI workflows into their daily motion as opposed to replacing it,” Vaduva said.

Earlier this month, Apollo.io launched a new agentic end-to-end GTM platform that includes functions such as agentic data enrichment and agentic outbound. It allows customers access to all GTM data, workflows, and execution recommendations in one platform.

“It preserves the context… and it makes all of your data richer and that turns into better insights and better ROI,” Vaduva said.

Bob Pritchard, CRO at digital automation platform Vasion, is always looking to add new components to his tech stack. He finds the biggest inefficiencies come at the integration stage as a side effect of an industry still organizing itself.

“As I look at tools, they’ve got to be able to integrate with Salesloft and Salesforce, and so that seems to be the biggest challenge as we look at different tools in the market,” he said.

Pritchard seems convinced, however, that the potential mastery of AI is worth his current investment.

“[For some] it’s gone from hype to complete lack of trust and faith. We’re on board with the commitment to it because we see the potential,” Pritchard said. “It’s just harder than anyone expected to make it work, and we want to do it right. ”

How enterprise AI companies are addressing ROI questions

Gong and Apollo.io on AI deployment. 

Here’s how enterprise AI companies are responding to ROI concerns 

OpenAI has landed another attention-grabbing partnership—this time with retail heavyweight Walmart.

Walmart customers and Sam’s Club members will be able to make purchases through ChatGPT using OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature (announced at the end of September). The possibly biggest AI-retail tie-up to date could redefine how shoppers buy groceries and household essentials online. In September, OpenAI partnered with online marketplace Etsy to enable AI-powered shopping.

Walmart and OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal or when shoppers can begin purchasing Walmart items on the platform.

“For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change,” said Walmart CEO Doug McMillon in a press release.

For Walmart, the move is another AI-focused investment after announcing the release of GenAI assistant Sparky in June. The agent offers customers bespoke recommendations and synthesizes product reviews.

For OpenAI, this is just the latest tie-up as it looks for ways to scale. Hot on the heels of newly minted partnerships with AMD and Nvidia, the AI research company announced on October 13 that it will tap semiconductor giant Broadcom to build custom AI accelerators.

“We’re excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler,” OpenAI CEO and cofounder Sam Altman said in the release.

Some of the nation’s biggest retailers are jumping on the AI bandwagon. 

 on a push into the space through its new AI agent Mylow Companion.

Walmart to partner with OpenAI

The tie-up will see Walmart purchases available in ChatGPT. 

Walmart announces partnership with OpenAI

Layla Ilchi

Agentic AI is the latest iteration of artificial intelligence entering the sales domain. Many of the world’s most influential tech platforms have adopted some type of AI-powered SDR to automate research and outreach tasks typically done by a human being. While this has, in some cases, 

, experts say companies need to proceed with caution.

“The real story is not ‘human versus AI.’ It’s ‘human plus AI’ versus ‘human alone,’” said Er Jia Jiang, cofounder and VP of growth operations at agentic AI company Redcar. “AI skills the activity, but humans still bring that ultimate trust, creativity, and guidance. This combination is what wins for companies.”

One of the most lively debates in the sales ecosystem is whether AI is snatching jobs from flesh-and-blood humans (

). For many companies AI is a cheap and relatively safe bet in automating some of an SDR’s tasks. However experts stress that a human element is crucial for personalization and nuance—still an important part of the seller’s toolkit.

“Founders and sales leaders are falling for the illusion that these AI companies are offering a silver bullet,” said Leslie Venetz, founder of the Sales-Led GTM Agency. “Instead of taking the time to build a sustainable strategy…to build repeatable processes that actually serve our buyers…they are using AI to just do what already didn’t work at scale.”

Venetz is touching on a core push-pull for salespeople: personalization versus scale. Both are important, but there are pitfalls when trying to achieve both at once. The strategy can manifest in a spray-and-pray tactic with questionable success rates.

“If you have to send out 30,000 emails to set 30 meetings, that’s not working,” Venetz said.

Agentic AI clearly has a role to play in a sector where the sequencing of outreach and urgency of follow-up is often just as important as first contact. The risk for companies is more of the dreaded “

,” where AI-generated content masquerades as thoughtful work.

“Just because something gets initial results, if we aren’t looking at the long-term impact of completely eroding trust, eroding our brand reputation, burning through our entire territory to get those few initial meetings, it’s just a very short-term focus,” Venetz said.

Overreliance on AI across the sales journey appears to be a big risk, especially when the technology is acting as a Band-Aid for actual improvement.

“If you sell like a robot, you’re more likely to be replaced by a robot,” said C. Lee Smith, founder and CEO of sales research firm SalesFuel. “What we see is the lower performing SDRs are more reliant on AI to do tasks that really they should be giving personal attention to.”

Personalization in sales outreach can take many forms: curated email subject lines, compelling copy, or a reference to specific company events. This tactic has been compromised thanks to the growth of “personalization at scale,” or mass emails that seem personal but are sent to broad distribution lists. AI can factor into all of this, and meeting somewhere in the middle seems most optimal at this stage.

“Those personalized takes are really where advancement in pipeline is coming from,” said Marshal Sawyer, an account executive working in security, AI, and strategic partnerships. “One of the simple things they can do well today is research. That’s something that I see as a quick way to win with AI or agentic AI as an SDR.”

The growth of AI will inevitably threaten some sales roles, but experts stress that entry-level SDR positions (human ones) are needed for sales professionals to develop skills.

C. Lee Smith says he’s seen some hiring managers prefer utilizing agentic AI over hiring entry-level employees.

"That’s going to impact development of your talent pool and going to make you more reliant on having to go out and hire experienced people and poach them from competitors,” Smith said.

Others see the role of the SDR evolving into other positions, with more opportunities on the horizon.

“The number of SDR titles may shrink, but the number of opportunities for people grows,” Jiang said. “People get upgraded, skills get upgraded, roles evolve, and sales professionals can move into more strategic and rewarding positions. Whether or not those roles are still called ‘SDR’ is a different conversation.”

An office full of silhouettes of workers filled with The Matrix-style cascading computer code

 How SDRs are being impacted by agentic AI

While SDR roles might be shrinking, experts stress a human component is still necessary for success. 

How the role of the SDR is being impacted by agentic AI

A big partnership has emerged in the artificial intelligence space and for once it doesn’t involve OpenAI.

Software heavyweight IBM and up-and-coming AI research startup Anthropic have announced they’re teaming up. 

The partnership will see Anthropic’s Claude AI large language model inserted into select IBM software products. First up will be IBM’s integrated development environment (IDE), a package of developer tools that can enhance productivity. 

The deal is an opportunity to expand Anthropic’s push into enterprise, as it seeks to take advantage of IBM’s corporate infrastructure. Financial terms for the deal weren’t disclosed.

“This partnership enhances our software portfolio with advanced AI capabilities while maintaining the governance, security, and reliability that our clients have come to expect,” said Dinesh Nirmal, IBM’s SVP of software, in a press release. 

Anthropic is on something of a roll: On October 6, it announced an expanded alliance with Deloitte to make Claude available to 470,000 people across the firm’s network.

“Claude has become the go-to AI for developers at the world’s largest companies because of our focus on safety and reliability,” said Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer.

Tech companies have been spending money hand over fist to scale their AI offerings, but the efficacy of the investments is yet to be seen.

An August report from MIT found that 95% of companies are 

 on AI investments. A recent report by Benchmarkit and Mavvrik found that 80% of companies 

The Anthropic-IBM partnership could be a big step toward taking enterprise from AI experimentation to full deployment.

IBM and Anthropic partner on enterprise AI

The two want to master enterprise AI.

IBM and Anthropic partner on enterprise ambitions

Sales prospecting isn’t for the faint of heart. Shopping for a SaaS solution these days feels less like popping into your local bodega and a little more like gearing up for a trip to Jungle Jim’s International Market. You need the right tool for the job, and identifying that is half the battle. Are you leveraging your social media contacts? Do you need a giant contact database? Are you looking for richer insights? Is seamless CRM integration your main goal?

It’s a maze out there, and your shopping list needs to be on point. Here are three companies that could put a pep in your prospecting step.

Lusha CEO and co-founder Yoni Tserruya feels his company provides the most value through its data-driven recommendations, or as previously referred to, “prospecting on autoplay.” Think of it as AI-powered sales leads in the form of a playlist or Spotify for sellers. Tserruya says having to manually search for data poses a major barrier for sales teams. He uses the analogy of the music industry, where you once had to download individual songs to build a playlist.

“Today you have Spotify, and it knows you, and it knows your taste,” he said.

As AI takes over administrative duties, Tserruya thinks manual prospecting will soon become extinct. That’s where he sees Lusha stepping in.“What makes us unique is the fact we are investing the most in data, and in learning you as a user…we are investing less in features that might be disrupted next year,” said Tserruya.

Tserruya said Lusha’s edge comes down to the best mix of data aggregation that can provide value for Lusha’s users.

“We have unique technology that allows us to identify trends and identify similarities and those two together, which are not easy to build.”

Max Angell is head of sales at Apollo.io, which is helping sales teams evolve their outreach and get hyperspecific with AI by marrying a vast B2B dataset with powerful AI workflows.

“AI workflows are really only as powerful as the data that’s supporting them, and in turn, data is really stagnant without any sort of powerful workflow,” he said. The result is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Angell gave an example of an Apollo customer in the security space, which sells a product that when paired with System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 compliance creates value for customers.

“Using the Apollo dataset, we can layer in AI and we can ask Apollo to take that account list and then go and scour all of the websites of all of the accounts and identify where SOC 2 exists,” he said. Angell says the quality of the datasets is paramount, and after that it comes down to the specificity of the “unique differentiators on the workflows themselves.”

As for the industries Angell thinks Apollo is best integrated with and used for? “Tech is definitely our sweet spot,” he said.

RocketReach CEO Scott Kim says the platform is the “simplest and most intuitive AI-powered” GTM tool. He joins the chorus of business leaders focusing on the importance of quality data but adds that ease of onboarding, and general use, is key for his platform. Kim says the sheer volume of platform usage allows the team to incrementally hone the product.

“We get to take a more science-oriented approach in usability,” he said. “Not all 300 [to] 500,000 people watch a webinar or a video, so we pride ourselves on the ability for our customers to figure it out.”

Integration is also a huge plus for Kim, and the ability to integrate across a host of platforms is critical to RocketReach’s value proposition.

“We have to be able to fit our puzzle piece into that larger workflow in an easy and seamless way,” Kim said. “We actually integrate where you want us to integrate into your workflow.”

Zooming out to the bigger picture, he suggests staying in your lane, doing what you do best, and letting “other companies do the thing they do really well.” The priority: making sure “our thing integrates with their thing,” he said.

Three outreach companies, three ways to do outbound

There is no one solution.

How three outreach companies approach outbound

-like universe where the machines are a little bit less T-1000 and a touch more like the one that tries to help John Connor. One company is leaning into that narrative: humans and machines working together to solve problems.

Workforce solutions company Asymbl built an AI SDR, gave it a job description and even a name.

“We gave him a name specifically to help the rest of our team think of him as an employee and not just a bot,” Asymbl CEO and founder Brandon Metcalf said. “We call him Theodore when he’s being naughty, and he’s Teddy’s when he’s doing a good job.”

Theodore wasn’t an accident but rather was part of a deliberate drive to increase digital deployment in the organization. “We went through a program with Salesforce, of trying, iterating, adapting, coaching, all of that,” he said.

Theodore might just be stage one. Asymbl recently hired a chief digital labor officer with a modest task: find out how to make the company’s entire labor force a mix of human and digital workers, with the goal of having 40% of its labor come from digital employees by next year.

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to eliminate our current team. It means we’re going to give them more horsepower,” Metcalf said.

Theodore’s job is to sift through all of the company’s prospects, identify the value of a potential customer, and when there is an ideal profile match, convince the prospect to talk to a human sales rep.

“Instead of having to hire more [humans], I can 5x Theodore’s capacity. I’m going to pay more for his usage, but I’m saving a tremendous amount of money because to manage [humans] requires supervisors, HR, systems access, time off, and all this other stuff that us humans need,” Metcalf said.

He made it clear that it’s not all on AI SDRs like Theodore, but that it is a part of a process that will “hopefully do 10, 20, 100 times more than we’re doing right now with the same human team that we have.” Metcalf says it’s a mix of different pieces, including generative and predictive AI.

Despite all the hype around the technology, the human aspect of AI’s success is impossible to dismiss. Enter Mitch Canaday, business development representative at Asymbl, the man behind the machine.

Canaday said he understood the concept presented to him, that digital labor was going to take the form of a digital employee. “I was still going to have to meet with [Theodore] once a week and collaborate…just like I would any other coworker,” he said.

Following Theodore’s “hiring,” the two met in scheduled meetings and collaborated to win new business. Once he learned how to best leverage Theodore’s strength, Canaday said he felt more productive.

“The benefit is that I’m able to do my own outreach and be really specific and take the human approach and figure out what are good prospects,” Canaday said. “Then I can just meet with [Theodore], feed all that information to him, and continually update messaging that he’s sending out.”Canaday says he’s comfortable with the relationship because “it’s never going to be effective unless there’s a human being on the other side.” He recommends those who are nervous about the threat to sales jobs should instead lean into and have confidence in AI. He says his AI experience is essential knowledge that will propel his career forward.

“It’s like AI 101. I get the opportunity to have hands-on experience with this, and experience being able to create it, build it, feed it information, just have a really strong foundational understanding of how it works,” he said.

Robert Wahbe, CEO of sales enablement company Highspot, believes AI can revolutionize entry-level workforces. This viewpoint conflicts with discourse suggesting AI will steal jobs from college graduates.

“People coming out of college can now operate as if they’re much more senior because they have AI, and yet they’re still very new and inexpensive,” Wahbe said.

Wahbe’s optimistic tone tracks with Canaday’s testimony, especially the idea that AI can be beneficial to the workforce if deployed in a measured way.

The flip side means risk. Highspot recently 

 on AI implementation in GTM teams, which identified “AI leapers” as a category of companies embracing the technology without first building the right infrastructure. Wahbe emphasized that AI should be implemented within a strategic framework, like Asymbl’s two-year plan for digital labor.

“It’s the right time for every department. If you’re not doing it, you’re going to fall behind because this is a transformational time,” Wahbe said. “Like all transformational technologies, it’s overhyped in the short term and it’s underhyped in the long term.”

Robotic hand shifting a mouse around the canvas in a circular motion

Should you hire or build your next SDR? 

 It’s part of the company’s digital workforce plan.

Why Asymbl built an SDR named Theodore

Put away your Gregorian calendar. The age of AI means 2025 is a leap year for all of us. But a report from sales enablement platform Highspot confirms your go-to-market team’s worst fear: AI deployment, while accelerating, might be missing the mark.

Of the 463 senior go-to-market leaders surveyed for “

, 98% said though their strategy has been rolled out, just 10% saw it driving results. Worse still, the report showed only 6% are keeping abreast of GTM performance signals, suggesting a major breakdown in deployment assessment. The big picture around so-called “AI Leapers”—companies taking the plunge, despite not acting with precision—is stark: Despite 77% of companies investing in an AI-driven future, only 28% reported performance improvements.

Some key trends emerged from teams experiencing success:

Alignment trumps ambition; it’s no good jumping in if everyone isn’t on the same page.

Choosing the right AI for your org is pivotal.

Using your go-to-market strategy as a performance system is key; it helps you analyze what’s working, and what isn’t.

The report also signals a disturbing side effect of misalignment, with 80% of GTM leaders reporting signs of burnout and stress among their teams due to twisted priorities or inefficient workflows. It seems a key catalyst for the breakdown of execution is sales and marketing content not being used effectively. What’s more, GTM leaders can’t agree on the best way to improve consistency: Roughly a quarter (26%) said AI recommendations were the key, while 22% suggested better tool and workflow integration.

“Don’t scale chaos,” warns the report, suggesting that you don’t need to overhaul your GTM structure overnight. The big takeaway: The GTM performance gap indicates a hefty, but not insurmountable, gulf between strategy and execution.

There are some silver linings out there. Data from Highspot’s 2025 “State of Sales Enablement” report revealed that AI-guided coaching improves win rates by 36%, and companies with unified enablement tech stacks were 42% more likely to improve sales productivity. Looking at that data in this new context will provide food for thought.