Sales teams are getting to know their colleagues in IT—and it’s not because they forgot their password.

Marketing and sales orgs are claiming, more than other business teams, that AI is leading to revenue increases, according to a recent global online survey from McKinsey. Of those rev org groups, 67% reported benefitting from the automation tech. But a sales team can’t build the potentially revenue-revving tools without some assistance from their technically minded colleagues.

AI-powered sales assistants are automating previously manual processes for sellers, like scoping and client research. This kind of deal-accelerating assistance requires a conversation between IT and sales. IT must understand sales team challenges (like how to find a good lead), and sales teams can learn how to support IT on their own priorities, like protecting and refining data.

We spoke with business pros who shared how IT and sales are bringing forth communication bridges, sales assistance tools, revenue intelligence platforms, and data protections. This trend is also creating indispensable employees who understand how to solve both business and technical problems.

AI as a bridge. Edward Gorbis, a sales lead at Amazon Web Services and writer of the Morning Sales B2B newsletter, said he is seeing the heightened role of IT in the revenue organization firsthand, and it starts with increased communication.

“What we’ve seen is these types of coding tools enable a much shorter bridge between technical folks and business folks within a business,” Gorbis said.

For example, he explained, there have been past situations where team members didn’t fully understand the language of business and sales teams. Today, by contrast, it’s more commonplace for salespeople to vibe code, use tools to translate their goals into technical terms, and even generate specs for the IT team to build software.

Keep reading for more on building a solid data foundation for AI.—BS, BH

If you’re having trouble keeping up with the myriad of consumer LLMs on the market (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Grok are just the tip of the iceberg), you aren’t alone. AI search engine You.com reacted to signs of attrition in the consumer market and in 2022 pivoted to AI search for enterprise (or anyone dealing with specialized workflows). The company now provides AI search infrastructure, accessible via various APIs—designated as search, content, or research APIs (the latter is for multistep agentic reasoning)—that communicate with LLMs to give real-time answers, insights, or summaries to complex questions.

In an era of AI hallucinations, the search for accuracy is an important one. You.com’s ability to deliver citations, nuanced responses, and customization (through integrated AI agents) makes it a kind of AI-powered Swiss Army knife. For the layperson, You.com functions as a sort of Google Search and ChatGPT hybrid, merging search engine capabilities with the generative functionality of LLMs (the platform is LLM-agnostic, and quickly integrates new models).

Timing is everything

You.com only had experience employing product-led growth motions when its leadership made the decision to pivot to enterprise. It needed someone with experience, and that’s where CRO Peter Grant came in.

Grant was recommended for the job by Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff (also an investor in the company) and immediately targeted an ideal customer profile with a view to crafting an enterprise motion. Grant soon decided that traditional SaaS motions were too slow for the AI space.

“If you look at the sales process in generative AI, and especially around the APIs as well, it is condensed…There’s no education of the end user, so it’s all about qualification,” Grant said. “The average SaaS enterprise revenue used to be $50k and [took] about nine months. Some of our deals we’re doing over $300,000 in six weeks.”

Read on for expert insight on tech pivots.—BS

Footwear tends to have its “in” moment: Remember the green Adidas Sambas everyone was wearing a couple years ago? What about Converse’s seemingly ubiquitous Chuck Taylor All Star?

Sustainable footwear brand Allbirds falls into that group, but the once high-flying company is changing hands amid plummeting sales and a pressured consumer. Its assets and intellectual property are being acquired for $39 million by American Exchange Group, owner of brands like Ed Hardy, Aerosoles, and Jones New York. That figure represents a drop in the bucket compared to the $4 billion valuation Allbirds commanded after its 2021 IPO (raising $348 million), but is actually a premium to its current market value of around $22 million.

Expansion team: The pressure to scale is an inevitable chapter for many successful businesses (especially after multiple funding rounds, including one for $100 million during the pandemic). Following its public listing, Allbirds expanded its brick-and-mortar presence and moved into apparel, a strategy that largely backfired. It then attempted an eleventh-hour U-turn back to e-commerce as losses piled up. In February, it announced the closure of all its full-price US retail locations.

In a Fortune interview last year, co-founder and former co-CEO Tim Brown said of the quick acceleration: “The time we had to evolve and grow that story was compressed in such an intense way. With the rapid success that came our way, we lost some of our DNA.”

Brown stepped down from his co-CEO role in May 2023, followed by co-CEO Joey Zwillinger in 2024.

Keep reading for the next steps of Allbirds’s sale.—LI

How Meta is thinking about physical stores (Retail Brew)

It’s still early days for tech giant Meta’s push into physical retail, but a top executive from the company recently said it thinks of stores as a candid way to get quick feedback from people.

Scale AI leader on why clinical AI needs a ‘trust layer’ (Healthcare Brew)

For this week’s Making Rounds, we talked with MaryAnne Rizk, general manager of healthcare and life sciences at Scale AI.

The software company focuses on providing data and other tools to help develop and oversee AI systems. Since its 2016 founding, it has worked with big names including Cisco, Mayo Clinic, the US federal government, and even the government of Qatar.

CEOs say CFOs are the greatest threat to their jobs (CFO Brew)

If you’ve noticed your CEO looking over their shoulder lately, you might be the reason why.

CEOs view CFOs as the biggest threat to their jobs, a new survey by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found.