I’m excited to introduce you to Ava — the world’s first AI Sales Engineer, enabling sales, sales engineering, and customer success teams to operate with greater effectiveness and independence via on-demand technical expertise.

Right now, AI is on a collision course with Sales Engineering, and is on the verge of allowing everyone and every company out there to change the PreSales profession for good. This will change B2B selling for good.

The Collision of AI and Sales Engineering

You can see AI-driven transformation everywhere in how companies are building new capabilities, the amount of investment VCs are pouring into AI startups, the breadth of conversation around how AI will reshape our society, and even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stating the 25 yr. old SaaS behemoth needs to “hard pivot” for the future. 

AI is Reshaping B2B Selling Already

According to Gartner, 60% of B2B selling activities will be powered by GenAI in the next 4 years—and organizations who use GenAI will cut the amount of time they spend on selling activities in half. As everyone becomes accustomed to learning and using new, powerful tools, team roles and responsibilities will change. Team sizes will change. Who does what work – and why – will change. 

And back in August, we surveyed 524 Sales Engineering leaders for our State of PreSales Report, and learned that 45% of SEs are already using an AI tool every day, and 60% are actively integrating AI into their workflows.

Two Ways AI Affects Sales Engineering

This rapid arrival of AI is changing the very fabric of Sales Engineering in two big ways.

1. Making Greatness More Accessible

The first? AI is collapsing – and completely removing – the barrier to SE team greatness. Working with our customers at Vivun, we’ve witnessed that truly great sales engineering teams do far more than demo. They influence the product roadmap, share new, critical metrics with the C-suite and the board, keep the sales forecast on the rails, and redesign their Sales orgs and processes . 

The best SE leaders have always had the desire and courage to elevate the role, but creating and embracing new responsibilities always meant putting more work on their team’s plate. With uplift from AI, those new asks of the team which come with increased SE responsibility can be completely automated away. 

2. Solutioning, Like a Sales Engineer

The second major impact to Sales Engineering teams we see is that AI will be capable of doing the actual work of technical sellers.

In our August State of PreSales report, 85% of SE leaders surveyed were optimistic about AI’s potential — and over a third thought that AI would eventually replace the work they currently do. By using AI to do large swaths of work, these SE leaders see a future where their teams can change the work they do and more aggressively attack their own markets, creating brand new opportunities for growth at productivity levels never imagined before. 

The most important job of an SE, however,  is to create a compelling and differentiated solution for the customer. This is the intersection of your prospect’s or customer’s goals and challenges with your product’s capabilities, differentiators, and proof points—all in the service of delivering real business value. 

From our experience working with the world’s leading technology companies, aligning on the right solution and securing the technical win is also the longest part of the sales cycle — this is the work that matters the most for technical sales teams.

What if you had a way to give that expertise to everyone in your company, on-demand and always-on?

Meet the First AI Sales Engineer, Ava

That future isn’t five years away. It’s here right now with Ava. 

Working with Ava won’t feel like using a traditional SaaS product, or anything else you have today—the promise of AI lies in systems being able to do work as if they were an actual member of your team. Ava feels like you’re working with your best SE, which looks very different from how companies use software tools today. 

Ava combines the power of Generative AI with our decades of experience at Vivun leading technical sales teams, empowering Sales Engineers and the Chief Revenue Officers they support with a new set of incredible capabilities. 

What does an AI Sales Engineer do?

Ava can capably perform core sales engineering responsibilities, including:  

• Creating solutions that map customer pain points and goals to unique value propositions with customer proof points
• Guiding discovery and preparing for meetings by recommending questions to ask, highlighting key requirements mentioned on customer calls  
• Answering product questions and quickly surfacing relevant documentation 
• Building and delivering product demos to compel buyers with personalized experiences.

Vivun now gives sales and sales engineering teams two new superpowers. SE leaders can run a highly strategic organization and get the insights they need, all without asking their team members to lift a finger—and we’ve introduced Ava, the world’s first AI Sales Engineer, to help everyone in your revenue team operate with increased independence and effectiveness via always-on technical expertise. 

If you’re intrigued by the idea of an AI Sales Engineer, we want to hear from you—visit www.vivun.com/aise to let us know you’re interested, and we’ll be in touch.