Enablement
Shift ‘25 Day 1: Supercharge your Future
By Tony Smith — On September 10, 2025
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Enablement
By Tony Smith — On September 10, 2025
Seismic CEO and Co-Founder Doug Winter opened the event with reflections on how far the company and the enablement industry have come since founding Seismic in 2010. He reminded us that the very first Shift, held more than a decade ago, welcomed just 22 customers in a hotel basement. Today, the crowd of 1,200+ is proof of how far the community has grown.
Doug spoke about the evolution of enablement from sales-led and siloed to a company-wide, strategic driver of transformation. He underscored how modern enablement is no longer about one-size-fits-all training or static content libraries. Instead, it's about delivering personalized, proactive, in-the-moment guidance to every customer-facing role.
The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ has grown alongside this transformation, from its earliest days of helping customers consolidate content chaos into one system, to today's global-scale platform powered by AI and embedded into the daily workflows of sellers, marketers, and customer service teams. Doug emphasized that enablement is no longer a tactical support function — it's a strategic capability that drives business outcomes and change at scale.
"The real advantage isn't in the technology itself, but in how we use it to change behaviors and outcomes."
Doug Winter
Co-founder and CEO, Seismic
Doug welcomed Mark Dodds, Chief Revenue Officer of Elastic, for a candid conversation about a surprising finding: despite decades of major technology shifts — CRM adoption, the rise of the internet, and now AI — B2B sales efficiency has actually declined.
Doug shared research showing that when measuring sales efficiency (revenue growth per dollar spent on sales and marketing), gains never materialized. Even during the rollout of CRM and other transformative tech, sales efficiency worsened.
Mark offered a compelling explanation: because every company implements the same technology at roughly the same time, the playing field simply resets. Competitive advantage is fleeting. As he put it, CRM didn't necessarily make reps more productive — it mostly made leaders more informed. Sellers still succeed because of skills like trust-building, discovery, and navigating complex deals.
"Enablement is a strategic weapon to help transform the sales organization for a competitive advantage"
Mark Dodds
Chief Revenue Officer, Elastic
The takeaway? Technology is essential, but it doesn't replace the fundamentals of great selling. It raises the stakes. For enablement leaders, that means doubling down on coaching, skills, and change management, while leveraging AI as an amplifier rather than a silver bullet.
After Doug's vision-setting keynote, Chief Product Officer Krish Mantripragada took the stage to show how Seismic is bringing that vision to life with AI. His product keynote focused on agentic AI — a new class of AI that doesn't just provide answers, but autonomously executes tasks to help teams work faster, smarter, and with greater impact.
Krish laid out a roadmap for how AI will continue transforming the Seismic Enablement Cloud™. He emphasized that Aura is now omnipresent across Seismic — embedded in Pages, DSRs, and Meetings — and extending beyond the platform into the tools users already rely on every day, like Outlook, Teams, Slack, and PowerPoint.
He emphasized that agents cannot live in isolation. They must be grounded in trusted data, connected to enterprise systems, and interoperable with orchestration platforms like Salesforce's Agentforce, IBM's watsonx Orchestrate, and Microsoft Copilot. That vision is already becoming reality through Seismic for Agentforce, which brings Aura AI directly into Salesforce so sellers can access insights and recommended content in their flow of work.
Finally, Krish spotlighted Seismic's leadership in responsible AI governance, announcing that Seismic is officially ISO 42001-certified, the global standard for trustworthy AI development and deployment.
These innovations reinforce Seismic's commitment to freeing enablers from tactical busywork, empowering sellers to deliver more value in every customer interaction, and giving leaders the data-driven insights they need to answer two critical questions: "How's it going?" and "Are we ready?"
Learn more about Seismic's vision for a trusted, interoperable and purpose-built enablement platform in our Newsroom by clicking here.
No Shift would be complete without celebrating the customers pushing the boundaries of enablement. This year's award winners showcased innovation, transformation, and measurable business impact across industries:
The day closed with a thought-provoking keynote from Cassie Kozyrkov, global AI leader and founder of the field of decision intelligence. She reminded the audience that the AI revolution is really an interface revolution, powered by simplicity that makes technology accessible to everyone.
Cassie challenged leaders to move beyond surface-level adoption. "AI adoption without enablement is just theater," she said, stressing that transformation requires culture, context, and judgment.
Her framework positioned AI as a new form of advice — cheap, abundant, and instantly available. But she cautioned that the real differentiator in this new era is human judgment:
"Yesterday advice was costly. Today advice is abundant. Tomorrow judgment is priceless."
At this year's Shift, Seismic is proud to partner with Operation First Response (OFR). The nonprofit provides swift, compassionate financial assistance to active-duty service members, disabled veterans, first responders, and their families. Since 2004, OFR has supported nearly 38,000 families with essentials like rent, groceries, utilities, and transportation.
Founder and President Peggy Baker, the mother of a combat veteran, shared her deeply personal story of turning heartbreak into action. As she explained, veterans often face long waits for benefits and struggle with challenges that can lead to devastating outcomes. OFR steps in during those critical moments to provide hope and dignity.
Seismic has proudly donated $10,000 to support OFR's mission, and attendees are invited to join the cause.
We'll be back with news from our product keynote, breakout sessions, and more. For real-time updates and intel from Shift, check out Seismic on social media. Give us follow on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, or Facebook!
