Let me start with a confession that might sound familiar. I curse way too much. My kids, who are eight and ten, have heard more expletives from me than they probably hear at school.

But hey, it's part of their enablement growing up in New York, right?

I've spent most of my career actually doing sales rather than sales enablement. That gives me a different perspective on things.

I've worked at companies like Gartner and Yelp, then moved to OwnBackup, where I started as a team of one and grew the enablement function to a team of ten or eleven.

When the company got acquired by Salesforce for two billion dollars, I figured we'd done something right. Now I'm at Odeeva, OwnBackup's competitor, actually, trying to rinse and repeat that same playbook.

Currently, I'm the VP of Sales Excellence. Team of one again. But you've got to start somewhere.

The universal problem with AI that nobody wants to admit

Here's what I see happening everywhere, including at my own company. Everyone thinks they're already crushing it with AI. They believe they've implemented it, scaled it, and they're best in class. The reality? We don't have any idea what we're doing.

We don't even know what good looks like.

Most of us are still at the experimenting stage. That's why you see new vendors every other day trying to pitch their latest AI app. There are thousands of these companies now, and by the end of this year, there'll probably be tens of thousands.

The real kicker is that AI is complicated. Sure, we all know how to use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude by now. But when it comes to agentic AI? That's where things get complex. You need to connect it to an LLM, choose the right model, identify your users, and most importantly, give it the right content to set it up for success.

Here's what really scares me: revenue teams often aren't involved in AI implementations. Why are we letting IT teams or Salesforce admins take full ownership of building out these AI systems? From a backend IT perspective, absolutely, they should own that.

But when it comes to training the AI, are they really the best people for the job?

Why our roles need to evolve (and fast)

Don't wait for permission from leadership. Just go on LinkedIn and change your title today. I'm serious.

At Odeeva, I'm positioning myself differently now. My CRO originally hired me for sales enablement, but said:

"Tom, I want you to be excellent, not just enable. Make everyone be excellent."

So I became VP of Sales Excellence. But now, with the economy being what it is and everyone trying to do more with less, I'm evolving again.

Layoffs are happening left and right. You're probably being asked to cut expenses and tools. That tech wish list for 2025? Forget it. We have to do more with less, and AI can help us, but someone has to take ownership of making AI excellent, just as we make our reps excellent.

The old solution (and why it's broken)

When ChatGPT first arrived, I did what everyone else did. I gathered all my assets, white papers, case studies, infographics, and onboarding materials, and dumped them into the LLM. Then I started prompting.

But there are serious problems with this approach.

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