The third in a series of three articles to help you plan for SKO by NVSI Founder and CEO, Walter Santiago
I’ll be honest about something: I think most sellers have hit a strange kind of AI fatigue, and it happened faster than I expected.
Everyone has Copilot now. It’s baked into email, into meeting notes, into the deck template. And because everyone has it, it’s stopped being anything close to a differentiator. If your whole AI strategy as a seller is “I have Copilot,” you’re not ahead of anyone. You’re just caught up to where the market already is.
The Practical Piece
So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about two things: how buyers are showing up to conversations more informed than ever, and how that changes what a seller’s actual job is. It’s less about supplying information and more about judgment and interpretation. This piece is the practical one. If that’s the “why,” here’s some of the “what.”
The first category I’d point sellers toward is research and account intelligence tools that go beyond generic chat. The difference that actually matters is grounding. These are the tools that pull from your own account history, call intelligence, and deal patterns instead of just the public internet. That’s the difference between an AI that sounds like it knows your customer and one that actually does.
The second is presentation and content creation. I’ve watched this space move fast. There are tools now that can take a rough outline and turn it into a genuinely polished, on-brand deck in a fraction of the time it used to take to dig up the right template. If your team is still building decks from scratch every time, that’s hours a week you’re not getting back.
Third, and most undervalued in my view, teams often fail to pool their knowledge. The best talk track on most sales teams I’ve worked with lives in one rep’s head: the one who’s been there longest, who always seems to have the right case study ready. The tools worth looking at now surface that material automatically, for everyone, before a newer rep even has to ask.
The AI Toolkit
Here’s the part I want to be straight with you about, though. None of these tools touch qualification. They don’t navigate a skeptical stakeholder for you. None of them build a deal strategy. Every vendor demo will imply otherwise. I don’t think that’s honest. Nor do I think it’s useful for your team to believe it going into next year.
That’s really the whole point of the series I’ve laid out here: tools can close a lot of gaps. They can’t close all of them. If your 2027 kickoff needs to cover both—where AI actually helps and where your team still has to show up—I’d genuinely love to talk about what that could look like for your organization.
