For mature companies struggling with AI inference costs, the solution isn't feature parity. They must develop an AI agent so valuable—one that replaces multiple employees and shows ROI in weeks—that customers will pay a significant premium, thereby financing the high operational costs of AI.

AI's most successful enterprise use cases, customer service and coding, target opposite ends of the labor cost spectrum. It either replaces easily quantifiable, lower-cost roles or provides significant leverage to the most expensive employees like software engineers.

Focusing on AI for cost savings yields incremental gains. The transformative value comes from rethinking entire workflows to drive top-line growth. This is achieved by either delivering a service much faster or by expanding a high-touch service to a vastly larger audience ("do more").

The primary ROI of sales AI isn't just saved time, but the reallocation of that time. Evaluate and justify AI tools based on their ability to maximize Customer Facing Time (CFT), as this directly increases both the quantity and quality of customer interactions, leading to better performance.

Beyond individual productivity gains, AI's strategic enterprise value is its ability to re-engineer core operations. This automation creates significant efficiency savings, unlocking capital that can be reinvested into strategic technology spending without negatively impacting financial returns.

Most view AI for efficiency, but its true power lies in handling routine tasks to free up human talent. This unlocks capacity for strategic, creative, and relationship-driven work that fuels innovation and growth, shifting the question from cost savings to new capabilities.

The most significant value from AI is not in automating existing tasks, but in performing work that was previously too costly or complex for an organization to attempt. This creates entirely new capabilities, like analyzing every single purchase order for hidden patterns, thereby unlocking new enterprise value.

For 20 years, sales reps have spent only ~25% of their time with customers. AI is the first technology that can fundamentally shift this ratio by automating low-value prep work, rewriting the nature of go-to-market jobs.

While AI provides operational efficiency, its most profound value lies in enabling tasks that were previously impossible due to scale, like instantly rewriting 10 million pages of web content after a terminology change. This capability transcends traditional ROI calculations.