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Revenue Brew

Sales Tech

Beck Salgado

revenuebrew.com

JP Poma was hired by Shopify in January with a mandate to inject its go-to-market teams with AI.

Seven months later, while the director of GTM initiatives’ team still resembles a traditional sales org—replete with SDRs, account executives, solutions engineers, and customer success managers—the 

 the team operates (how it uses insights and data, for example) is now more precise because of AI.

Poma and Shopify are pushing for tech to do everything from removing administrative tasks to synthesizing data for better decision-making. Shopify envisions a future where sales teams only have to do client-facing work—the rest will be handled by AI.

Poma is reinventing the GTM process to speed up how his teams are informed about clients.

To achieve this, Shopify created a “labs team” that uses AI to test hyperspecific solutions and discuss how, or if, to scale those solutions across teams. The team of three tests and builds solutions where “the impact radius is tiny” Poma said, meaning what might be right for, say, a GTM staffer might not be right for, say, an SDR.

“Now, if we have the right infrastructure in place, it’s almost like the exhaust of running the business because of what AI makes possible,” Poma said. “You take this work that used to be so high effort just to get to a reasonable baseline. Now you can exceed that baseline and have almost perfect information heading into every stage. It just helps us be even more merchant-centric.”

According to Ryan Longfield, head of global commercial operations, Shopify’s AI use has spiked inbound lead conversion rates by 83% and reduced spam rates in the same category by 54%.

Shopify was struggling to find AI tools that could export data, Longfield told us. So it did what any entrepreneurial company would do: build its own.

The company’s proprietary AI tool has an internal tech stack that revenue professionals can use to create enterprise-grade solutions. On top of its own AI tool, Shopify also integrates with Salesloft and Salesforce.

Outbound approaches are one aspect of the work that has been reshaped using AI.

“What we’ve always wanted to do was have the scale of a marketing engine, but the customization of an SDR,” Longfield said. “We’ve built a pretty cool agent that will grab internal and external data, depending upon if it’s a customer or prospect, and then it will have all of the structure of our most effective emails.”

Beyond outbound, Longfield said using AI minimizes meeting prep, enriches merchant data, creating more precise GTM decisions, and has increased accuracy of line-of-business classification by 25%. However, Longfield said using AI in this way is only possible because of employee buy-in, which he said has created a “source code” for finding efficiencies.

Longfield said the more foundational information that can be input into AI tools, in-house or external, like Cursor or Gumloop, the better they will become at finding efficiencies and solving complex, job-specific problems. In his view, it is essential to create AI tools that can communicate with each other and ensure that the data is being used across teams.

This comes as a result of leadership’s push into AI. In April, the company’s CEO, Tobias Lütke, posted a memo whose TL;DR was: AI or bust. Laying out a vision of the future where AI is baked into all aspects of the company, including revenue, 

: “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”

 reported in May that Shopify was using AI to reduce costs of running e-commerce businesses during times of economic uncertainty.

“We’re already in a post-AI version of Shopify,” Vanessa Lee, VP of product who oversees Shopifyʼs AI efforts, told Retail Brew. “AI should be infused in every part of the merchant journey not just at the beginning, and not just for people who are just getting started.”

Within the Shopify walls, executives bandy the phrase “vibe-coding,” which refers to the practice of using coding tools, like Cursor or Gumloop, to create AI models for hyperspecific job functions, as if their lives depended on it.

Bobby Morrison, Shopify’s chief revenue officer, said that ahead of the company’s quarterly “Hack Days,” a 48-hour window dedicated to coding, the company saw over 700 Cursor and over 500 Gumloop downloads. On Morrison’s revenue team, 2,000 of his 3,000 employees spent the window vibe-coding—or using AI to complete administrative tasks.

Morrison said this emphasis on technical capabilities could mean AI coding will be essential to any revenue organization.

“I’ve asked my team to be builders, meaning, if you have something in your role, that you believe AI could come along and help you automate, then I’m going to ask you to build your own personal [AI] exoskeleton,” Morrison said.

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Shopify's AI bet

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Delve, an AI-based platform that streamlines compliance, announced in July that it raised $32 million in its Series A funding led by global software investor Insight Partners. The funding comes after the company raised $3.3 million last year. According to 

, the Series A funding brings Delve to a $300 million valuation.

CEO Karun Kaushik and COO Selin Kocalar, two MIT AI researchers, started the San Francisco-based company in 2023. It now has a client list of over 500 companies, including AI startups like Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow.

Delve works to eliminate the manual work behind compliance by offering an AI agent that can handle myriad tasks to streamline the process.

“Compliance frameworks are standardized. Businesses aren’t,” Kaushik said in a statement. “That mismatch is why traditional software breaks down and teams fall back to duct-taped workflows across email, Slack, and shared drives.”

Delve plans to use the funding to further its AI capabilities, grow its team (currently it has 11–50 employees, according to Crunchbase), and introduce new support methods for more compliance frameworks.

“We’re not just streamlining compliance, we’re helping businesses grow faster,” Kocalar said in a press statement. “Getting compliant faster unblocks deals, and eliminating the busywork lets teams focus on what actually drives the business forward.”

As AI tools continue to innovate, platforms are able to take on more complex automation tasks, such as compliance.

“We’re positioning ourselves to improve as AI advances and labs roll out more sophisticated agentic technologies. But, what truly sets us apart is the deep, domain-specific knowledge we’re building into the platform,” Kocalar told TechCrunch. “Compliance is always shifting as new regulations emerge and existing ones evolve, with companies interpreting them in different ways. That’s where Delve stands out.”

Delve raises $32 million in Series A funding

The AI-based compliance platform is now valued at $300 million.

Scrunch AI, the two-year-old platform working to improve how companies appear in AI searches, raised $15 million in its Series A funding in July. The round was led by venture capital firm Decibel and included participation by strategic investors like Mayfield and Homebrew.

“Your website doesn’t need to go away, but 90% of its human traffic will,” Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Scrunch AI, said in a press statement. “AI agents are becoming the new front door to your brand, and we’re building the infrastructure that helps you show up, stand out, and stay ahead. The way people discover brands is changing fast, and marketers are scrambling to catch up.”

According to the company, Scrunch AI has grown its customer base 50% month over month and currently has over 500 clients. Scrunch AI said most clients have come from inbound demand, with customers reporting an average of 40% increase in referral traffic and up to four times improvement in visibility across AI platforms.

 in March, Andrew said: “I think people were like, ‘How do we use AI to make our website better?’ And my mindset was like, ‘Your website’s going to need to be for an agent or crawler in the future.’ That theory has kind of really played out with our customer base at the enterprise level saying our brand is no longer what we say it is. It’s what ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, Google AI Overviews say it is.”

 After decades of using Google for everything from searching for leads to directing prospects to their sites, revenue orgs now have to navigate the new world of AI search.

Founded in 2023, Scrunch AI analyzed “tens of millions of prompts and citations” to create a platform that understands how large language models operate to help its clients. It previously raised $19 million in funding from Decibel, Mayfield, Homebrew, and other investors.

Two business hands shaking with money in between falling out. (Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Adobe Stock)

Scrunch AI raises $15 million in Series A funding

The platform helps companies improve how they appear in AI searches. 

Since launching in 2018, Palo Alto-based training platform Zenarate has been providing sales and customer service professionals with field-specific AI simulations. It has taken its offerings up a notch with the release of its new AI tutor, which takes those training simulations and gives users real-time performance insights and feedback.

“It's basically your own little personal AI coach following you, listening, analyzing your calls, and it surfaces what we call an ‘automated development plan,’” Brian Tuite, chief executive officer and co-founder of Zenarate, said. “You come back from your sales call, and it’s in green on the left-hand side saying, ‘you did great with empathy, listening, acknowledging, and restating their problem,’ and all that. On the right-hand side, it says, ‘here’s some of your opportunities.’ The AI tutor will provide it where you can click and you can actually see the transcript, and it’ll show you what you said versus the best practice for that brand experience.”

The platform, which is currently offered in 79 languages, can be tailored to certain scenarios or industries. The AI tutor then grades users against best sales practices, including close rates, sales rates, and overcoming objections, and auto-assigns new simulations focused on areas in need of improvement. Capital One, Hyatt, BlueCross BlueShield, and Verizon are among companies already using the tool. There’s three steps to the process: guided role-play, which simulates a prospect call while guiding the user through best practices; coaching role-play, which offers real-time feedback; and dynamic role-play, which simulates a challenging prospect. Simulations vary from two to 30 minutes depending on the scenario.

Tuite follows a “practice makes perfect” principle. Instead of using internal training videos or info sessions, he believes Zenarate’s interactive software leads to quicker improvement among sales professionals.

According to its website, Zenarate boasts 50% less training time, 45% fewer errors, 25% lower attrition, and 10% higher year-over-year sales among its clients.

“We have seen amazing results since incorporating Zenarate into our new hire training,” Raul Peterson, senior technology training analyst at HealthPlanOne, said. “We have had some of our best-selling years in our Brokerage and other lines of business because our agents are practicing using Zenarate.”

In Q4, Zenarate is introducing an avatar sim in collaboration with 

. The avatar will mimic human speech patterns to give salespeople as close to an IRL customer interaction as possible. 

Update 6/20/2025: This story has been updated to reflect current direct clients.

Zenarate's AI platform is making sales training easier

The tool gives salespeople real-time data on their pain points and feedback on how to fix them.

Zenarate’s AI tutor is making sales training easier

Revenue teams across various industries have similar workflows: onboarding and training, forecasting and pipeline reviews and prospecting, etc. But now at the dawn of the AI era, there is the ever-present multibillion dollar question of how AI could help with those workflows—and much like the Gold Rush, there’s money to be made not just in digging for gold, but in selling pickaxes and shovels. 

Gong, an AI assistant designed specifically to help revenue professionals “improve productivity, increase predictability, and drive revenue growth by using data to drive insights into customers and business trends,” announced a partnership in early May with Microsoft; according to a news release, the partnership aims to integrate its “revenue AI platform with Microsoft’s…productivity applications and Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents ecosystem.”

Translation: While Microsoft is mining for digital gold with its AI platform Copilot, Gong is selling the tools to dig. Or at least positioning itself to answer: Can AI help you see what works and what doesn’t when you’re training? Can AI write your email when you’re prospecting? Can AI help you predict if the data says you’re going to close a deal when you’re forecasting? Gong, naturally, believes the answer to all the above is yes.

Founded in 2015, Gong is by no means a plucky underdog inking a deal with a tech giant. The company is used by more than 4,500 corporate customers and surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue as of FY 2025.It has been backed by major investors like Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Battery Ventures, 

, a company database, and now sits at a $7.25 billion valuation

In a conversation with Revenue Brew, Gong co-founder and Chief Product Officer Eilon Reshef said that, as it stands, AI isn’t replacing jobs, but rather replacing certain tasks, which can ultimately help revenue professionals work more efficiently.

“Go back 20 to 30 years ago, you used to have an executive assistant at the time, they would do the typing for you as an executive,” Reshef said. “They don’t do it anymore because no executive now needs typing, but the roles exist. But the mundane task of doing typing, photocopying, faxing, has gone away, and it’s just been morphed to other much more productive things.”

Reshef argues that instead of viewing AI as a means to reduce headcount, companies could leverage the tech to accomplish more with their existing teams.

, Gong will be housed in Microsoft’s Copilot environment and there, according to Reshef, it will be able to provide relevant data and dashboards.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

Gong will offer tools like “conversation summaries, action plans, risk alerts, customer objections, competitive concerns, and strategic recommendations,” all of which will be available “without switching applications,” according to the announcement.

, only 23% of a sales representative’s time is spent selling, while 27% is dedicated to non-selling activities, such as expense reporting and travel planning.

Reshef sees administrative tasks like these as “drudgery” and hopes the partnership with one of the largest companies in the world will serve as a springboard to reach more professionals—and help automate tasks that take time away from selling.

“There’s probably 20 million sales professionals… in the world. We obviously have access to, or we have sold to a small percentage of them,” Reshef said. “So our goal as a company is to continue growing and, at the same time obviously, adding value to customers.”

A Microsoft building peeking through trees.

Gong announce partnership with Microsoft

Gong, the makers of AI tool for revenue professionals, announces partnership with Microsoft to integrate into 365 Copilot ecosystem

The makers of AI tool for revenue professionals integrates with Microsoft

Sales teams from top to bottom are using a wide range of agentic tools to boost conversions, iron out leads, and even replace video communications.

Popping up across the corporate world faster than coffee shops in “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, AI agents are, 

 writes, “(more) autonomous systems [that] can 

” Oftentimes these tools will specialize in video recording, document automation, and data synthesization.

 and Vidyard, are already being used in conjunction with traditional CRMs and reshaping workflows.

“We spend so much less time in Salesforce and instead are using Gong as that single source of information because it can give us summaries of calls, and give a summary across calls, and give a summary across all customers. So that’s become really powerful for us,” Keith Rabkin, president of PandaDoc, an automated agreement management platforms, said.

Rabkin said his company initially used Gong as a training, enablement, and verification tool to help its revenue team be more efficient. However, as large language models like ChatGPT started to redefine what AI could accomplish, he explained that the use cases for these agentic tools started to multiply.

“It became this really interesting way that we could get insights into where we were winning deals, when we were losing deals, how much price pressure, which competitors were coming up,” Rabkin said.

As Gong analyzed customer call data across the company, it was able to produce effective leads, assess the health of ongoing deals, and identify friction points that could jeopardize a deal based on previous interactions. Giving sales employees more time to focus on work that directly generates revenue is a top priority for Rabkin, and one he said he is achieving with Gong. Rabkin isn’t alone in trying to find ways to beef up a sales team’s capacity.

Salesforce research found in 2022 that only 28% of a sales representative’s week is spent selling, and according to a recent Morning Brew Inc. survey of over 320 revenue professionals, “managing competing priorities and staying focused” was the biggest challenge for 41% of respondents. The conversation around sales tools was also front of mind with 23% of respondents identifying “equipping sales teams with effective tools” as a priority, while 21% identified “leveraging AI to boost performance and efficiency” as their top hurdle.

“Whether that’s filling out a contract or copying notes after a call, it’s time that’s going away from either talking to the customer and closing the deal or outbounding and prospecting new customers. And so what I want to do is give them all that time back to focus on revenue generation,” Rabkin said.

The speed and efficiency of agentic AI tools poses potential problems for CRM companies, as the results are showing revenue leaders like Rabkin how essential AI is becoming for sales teams.

“I would say it’s mission critical at this point. There’s very few tools I would keep over Gong,” said Rabkin. “I couldn’t say I would pick Gong over a CRM today, but in a year, it’s quite possible.”

Another tool disrupting the sales world is Vidyard AI, which uses generative AI to create“avatars” that record and distribute sales scripts. While AI usage is becoming common in workplaces (and in some cases mandatory), AI video generation is still relatively nascent in the corporate world.

Research conducted by Deloitte last year found that 61% of respondents were using generative AI at work; when used to produce images, audio, code, video, or 3D, however, only 17–26% used generative AI.

Peter Borkovich, Vidyard’s VP of revenue, said that the tool is already being used to do video outreach from a business development rep, guided walkthroughs from a salesperson, or “anywhere there’s an interaction between a person and somebody in the revenue life cycle.”

The company, which obviously has skin in the game, put together a survey of over 650 full-time senior sales and marketing professionals and found early usage of AI-generated video interaction replacements were yielding promising results. The survey also found that of go-to-market (GTM) leaders “who measure video-specific KPIs tied to revenue impact,” 79% responded that they were “more likely to achieve KPIs faster,” and 76% said they were “more likely to accelerate deal cycles.” As AI becomes, depending who you ask, either the asteroid we cannot avoid or the savior we need, the raft of AI video seemingly grows every day. To name just a few, Firework, Hippo Video, D-ID, and HeyGen all promise a brave new world where AI avatars will eagerly sell. And while AI won’t fully replace human sales reps, it will make sellers more efficient so they can handle a bigger pipeline—and support teams like RevOps and GTM that are already embracing the technology. (Vidyard’s survey also showed that 39% of GTM teams are already fully implementing AI-powered video tools into their workflows.)

“We’re seeing a lot of early interest in the market,” Borkovich said. “It’s right at the rate moving from early adopter to general acceptance on the maturity curve for us. So exciting times, but still, a lot of education in the marketing staff.”

Here's how AI agents are already redefining sales workflows

From data analytics to video generation, the growing role of AI in sales.

How many sales could a seller sell if a seller used AI?

Building out an efficient tech stack is key to any salesperson’s day-to-day operations. However, data shows that putting one together isn’t so easy.

While unique to each organization or individual salesperson, a tech stack is essentially a collection of various applications or software used for daily operations. Some notable companies one might find in a stack: Salesforce, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo. Each offers a different flavor of service to help revenue teams—from account management software to sales CMSes and from sales forecasting software to CRMs. But as more applications are added to the stack, the more cumbersome it becomes, causing challenges for sellers and leaders alike.

According to recent research conducted by Morning Brew Inc., 67% of salespeople are satisfied with their tech tools, while only 11% are truly enthusiastic about them. Among leadership, 52% agree the company’s tools slow them and their team down, causing issues and inefficiencies across the organization. This suggests that potential changes to the stack are mission-critical to revenue leaders trying to navigate the speed of change.

According to Salesforce data, sales reps spend 70% of their time on administrative tasks—emails, budgeting, etc. With AI added to sales tech stacks, the hope is that the technology can give sellers more time to sell and less time on the day-to-day operations.

“There’s a lot of interest in AI tooling and I think we're seeing that well beyond sales,” Brian Devaney, a partner at Underscore VC, a Boston-based venture capital firm backing B2B software entrepreneurs, told us. “Every function, every job is saying, ‘can I use this as a way to have superpowers, right?’ There’s a lot of interest on the sales front. We use [AI] to be more prepared. Can we use this to focus on the types of jobs that should take my time and attention? We’re kind of seeing this early proliferation of what could be every seller having a dedicated business analyst or a sort of chief of staff that’s helping them get prepared, do research, and show up 10 times better at every conversation they’re having.”

Salesforce noted that “among teams currently using AI, sales ops pros say the top tactic to prepare is to consolidate tools and tech stacks.”

While certain AI automation tools, such as Gong.io and Salesloft, can take on many of salespeoples’ basic tasks, like cold outreach and prospecting, it’s important, experts tell us, to keep the human element in play.

“Ultimately you need to have that human eye and you can’t just sit and leverage the AI piece to just do your entire job,” Sean Horton, vice president of growth at digital marketing firm Fusion Now, said. “That’s at least the focal point: How can I utilize the AI tools, if [companies] all have them, to expand upon why I’m a good salesperson in the first place?”

As tech tools pose a pain point for some sales leaders, B2B software vendors can look to these inefficiencies as an opportunity to offer best-in-class products that streamline salespeople’s processes.