How the CRO job is changing in the agentic AI era

Around a year and a half ago, Jeff Santelices, chief revenue officer at response management platform Responsive, didn’t think much of AI’s potential in sales.

Sure, it could whip up some automated outreach emails, but “sales is sales, and it’s all about engaging with people,” he said. That view changed as he started to see agents take on prep tasks like tiering and prioritizing accounts, researching org charts, and spitting out sales hypotheses.

“My sellers can produce their entire territory account plans really effectively in a matter of days,” Santelices said.

Santelices thinks agentic tools like these will ultimately free sales leaders from a strictly quarter-by-quarter mindset to think more about long-term strategies.

It’s one of many ways sales leaders tell us their jobs are changing in the agentic era. With AI automating more of the sales pipeline, it’s not just entry-level workers whose roles are in flux. We talked to five CROs and sales heads about how they use agents and how AI has shifted how they operate.

Becoming builders

“The old-school executive is just like, ‘I’m going to run the motion,’ and right now, in the field, it’s like redesigning the motion from the ground up,” Navid Zolfaghari, chief sales officer at workflow automation platform Zapier, told us.

One such process that he’s redesigned at Zapier is meeting prep. Before sales staff have a meeting, they get a Slack notification delivering a PDF of information about a given company, pulled from the CRM platform as well as internal strategy docs and even public earnings reports.

The company has also begun to discourage DMs within Slack, asking employees and execs alike to instead interact in shared channels so that the AI platform, Glean, can incorporate the contents of messages into an internal AI database, according to Zolfaghari. Zapier executives use a “war council” of fake AI personas—“ruthless CFO,” “contrarian board member”—to deliberate on decisions, and Zolfaghari has added to the mix a “digital twin” of CEO Wade Foster based on Foster’s real-life postings online (“It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close,” Zolfaghari said of AI-Foster’s accuracy.)

“What I think is changing the most is that CROs need to be builders today,” Zolfaghari said.

That said, having all employees create too many different local AI agents or tools can create quality and consistency issues, according to Resolve AI CRO Jason Forget. An increasingly important job of the CRO is also to make sure that sellers have the best possible tools and platforms in place to do their jobs, he said.

Forget is building an agentic system called Deal Pulse that helps sales managers see how far along deals are and help guide sales teams on how to close them. Rather than having sales managers spend time auditing or inspecting deal status, they can instead focus on what needs to be done to close, Forget said.

“You could say, ‘Hey, this deal is in stage five. You think it’s going to close, but I can see that based on your data, you’re nowhere near where it should be,’” Forget said. “However, we can infer across your Gong, across your Slack—whatever the tools that you use—we can infer maybe that you have this information, but maybe you should go qualify it…That moves to a much higher value ROI in sales leadership time.”

Many small tasks

Sales pipelines are particularly prone to automation because they involve many discrete tasks that can be broken down into agents, according to Christopher Shutts, group VP at cloud-based enterprise platform ServiceNow.

“Selling is really a bunch of small activities, like send a prospect a case study that’s relevant to their business, for example; move an opportunity up a stage, reprice an opportunity, send out an ROI analysis,” Shutts said. “Those are things that are really well-suited for agents because there are lots of bursts of relatively simple activities that are easy to automate with AI.”

Many CROs say they’ve been stymied by obstacles like integrating different tools, data infrastructure challenges, and a lack of a clear playbook, according to a recent survey of 100 CROs from executive search firm Spencer Stuart. More than a third (37) said they had below-average capabilities.

Integration challenges

Matt Overman, CRO at domain management startup Identity Digital, said his revenue org is targeting the first quarter of next year for a “future state” in which all of its AI tools are fully integrated with full context into deal flow and data from various platforms. With data security a chief concern, Overman said the company is being especially cautious about what it shares with AI platforms.

“Right now, we’re using all of that, but the connectors…there’s some parts that still leave a little to be desired, where we don’t have the perfect connectors—Slack into Google Enterprise, for example,” Overman said. “So we’re working on some of that, but I think we’ve taken an approach to doing it responsibly and step by step, as opposed to getting ourselves in trouble by giving full access.”

At Responsive, Santelices said he’s worked with his rev ops team to vet more than 50 tools, including making sure they mesh well into the existing workflows. The company also uses a handful of firms to “stitch and glue” the various AI platforms together.

“I really lean very heavily on my rev ops leader to kind of suss these things out and to give me a sense of, will this work within the context of the flows that we’ve already created?” he said.

Like Santelices, Overman said his job has also shifted to more long-term business strategy as he has helped to guide the company’s AI transformation, and he expects the CRO role will continue to move in that direction.

“I spend more time on strategy than I ever have,” Overman said. “A lot more of the busywork is getting automated, and I think this is only going to shift even further.”