Sales AI & KM Experience

Optimizing AI agents requires writing down the valuable institutional knowledge in your company. Big co’s will struggle with this: middle managers worry about becoming replaceable and leaders worry about leaks. If they don’t do it, they’ll be crushed by competitors who do.

— Harj Taggar (@harjtaggar) May 2, 2025

New tech, rinse, repeat. The cycle swirls around again. Fast-forward a quarter century.

At the turn of the millennium I embarked on my quest to put the know-how of the best salesperson for any particular facet right into the hands of any other that would benefit from it, just when they needed it.

Salesforce knowledge management was an utterly brand spanking new pitch then.

The weight of pushbackers I had was tortuously heavy.

What happens when someone leaves and takes it all on a plate with them?

It'll make our reps lazy.

It'll only work if they use it (!)

Yet so too were the number seeing the light also luminously bright.

At the time, there was a rush towards SFA. Sales Force Automation clamour meant sales leaders were racing to get some, any, kind of reporting system in that held all their salespeople's conversations and actions in a precious 'database'.

To think of what I'd created in any other way to that I happily managed to expose as lunacy.

And so we land at the current generational tech step.

Sales AI.

I can hear all those same old arguments echo twenty-five years on.

This time, with added flavours such as invasiveness, homogenised output ubiquity (sales slop?) and recording walls obscuring all the best intel.

Yet there's swelling tacit recognition around the distinction codifying your sales specialism can bring.

Weak links persist though.

Management 'training'. Promotion blindspots. Sales Ops crm obsession.

And the most brittle of all, a complete misunderstanding of 'process'.

For what it's worth, I spent a decade blazing the trail set out above.

The winners simply had a focus.

This month we gonna nail _____.

Our new product. Staying as incumbent. Displacing Competitor X. Upselling Product Y. Finding Problem Z. Meeting CEOs. Doing this thing...

Without such root your AI dreams shan't sprout any flower.