CHAPTER 10A Chaotic Private Sector
HE NEEDED TO MEET the sales quota. A senior sales executive shared his story about selling AI. This story, he mentioned, was repeated at multiple positions he has held in various organizations. He had led sales in three top AI firms. “Selling ERP was easy. Selling Salesforce is easy. There is a clear business need-and-solution relationship. But when it comes to machine learning, what are you really selling?” He shared his battle story. “Day after day, we would walk into client boardrooms and tried explaining AI to them. We created true excitement. Everyone loved the glamorous part of it—the chatbots and all. They agreed that it is a large-scale disruptive technology. But when we asked them to apply it in a more strategic manner, they wouldn't go for it. With ERP, it was possible to make an enterprise sale, but not with AI. The alternative was to sell them baby steps, but that wasn't meaningful deal size for us or a big ROI for them. We were not able to sell large deals.”
The above situation is typical for many AI platform companies. What are you really selling? AI is being sold like a panacea for all ailments but without specifying how it cures any. With no corresponding enterprise transformation visions with AI, the only path left for these firms was to sell insignificant use cases.
The absence of any direction from the government created a vacuum in the private sector. The gap existed on both supply and demand sides.
In another story, when ...
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