AI-Enablement, Trends & Insights
Why modern sales enablement is becoming revenue infrastructure
By Ernst de Planque — On June 11, 2026
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AI-Enablement, Trends & Insights
By Ernst de Planque — On June 11, 2026
At Expedia Group, one of the clearest signs that enablement was changing, showed up in the way our sellers searched.
After we introduced Seismic Aura, sellers started asking longer, more specific questions instead of typing a product name into a search box. Platform access increased, but asset views and clicks started to trend down. While our sellers were still relying on Seismic as the source of truth, they were spending less time digging and more time getting to the answer.
To me, that captures where modern sales enablement is headed. Already within our own organization, enablement is becoming the infrastructure that connects trusted knowledge, seller behavior, AI, automation, and revenue outcomes.
Our Seismic journey began during the COVID-19 pandemic amid extreme disruption for the travel industry. We needed a way to give sales teams clarity when market conditions were changing quickly and customers needed answers.
We implemented Seismic in 10 days with an initial group of about 200 sellers. Today, that seller base spans multiple thousand people, but we remain committed to the job of giving our teams the right information exactly when they need it.
Back then, Seismic was the partner that could help us develop and integrate really quickly. But, over time, we found that enablement becomes more powerful in times when commercial teams need clarity, alignment, and confidence in moments that test the business.
Once we were live, our first priority was to make Seismic our single source of truth. That meant moving content into one place, retiring old repositories, and making it clear where sellers should go.
We managed to move really quickly and show that there was value in having a platform that was the single source of truth. That foundation matters because scale makes messy systems messier. If sellers have to guess which deck is current, which page to trust, or which answer applies to their customer, enablement has already introduced friction. Having that single source of truth ultimately helped us build confidence internally. For us, that confidence became the basis for everything that followed.
One of the biggest mistakes enablement teams can make is assuming access equals adoption. In reality, sellers build habits when a platform like Seismic becomes part of their working rhythm.
For us, that rhythm is our Sales Weekly Digest. We now run about 14 versions across the company, tailored for different teams, managers, and individual contributors. Each digest gives people the updates they need and links them back to Seismic. That weekly cadence drives roughly 40% to 50% of our engagement. Every week, we tell people what matters, where to go, and what to focus on. Over time, that consistency turns platform usage into a habit.
AI has made the content foundation even more important. The cleaner your library is, the more useful AI becomes. We saw this clearly with Aura. Sellers began asking more natural questions, and they started getting better answers earlier in the search journey. As a result, our people are accessing the platform more, and they're having to dig around less. That is a meaningful behavior change. It means sellers can move from searching for assets to finding answers. It also means governance is an AI readiness requirement, because you can't do any of the fancy AI stuff if you don't have the right content in one place.
The next stage of enablement isn't training everyone on everything. When teams scale to 1,000 or more people, that approach quickly becomes overwhelming. Some people already know what they are doing. Others need support in very specific areas.
That is why we started looking closely at top performer behaviors. We used conversation data and analytics to understand what our best sellers were doing differently. Sometimes the insight was simple, such as making sure a seller demonstrated a specific feature or handled an objection in a certain way.
Then we coached the people who had not adopted that behavior. The group we coached saw a 13% increase in win rate associated with those specific behaviors. I am careful about how I talk about that number. It doesn't mean one small course magically caused a win rate jump. It does mean that targeted coaching on observed top performer behaviors was associated with a measurable lift.
For enablement, that is the kind of connection that matters.
Practice is one of the hardest things to scale. Managers have limited time and sellers need repetition. And, quite frankly, the best practice moments often happen before the real customer conversation, not after.
That is why AI roleplay has been exciting to watch. We saw hundreds of sellers using AI roleplay within a few weeks, and it quickly became something people talked about across the business. The fictional characters used in the scenarios even became Slack icons. If you didn't know who Michael Davis was, you probably had not done the training.
That kind of adoption means practice felt safe, accessible, and engaging. It gave sellers a way to sharpen their message before they were in front of customers, and it gave enablement a way to scale skill-building without making every manager run every roleplay manually.
AI and automation are also changing the operating model for enablement teams. We have used Slack workflows to answer questions in the flow of work. When we launch a new product or feature and open an Ask Me Anything channel, a large percentage of questions can now be answered automatically. That reduces the manual support burden on the enablement team and helps sellers get answers faster.
We have also experimented with Claude and connected systems to generate decks, flyers, one pagers, and other assets from governed source content. The opportunity is to create consistent, useful assets faster and keep them anchored in trusted source material.
For a long time, enablement teams were measured on activity. Metrics like logins, content views, and course completions still matter, especially when diagnosing adoption gaps. But the real test is whether enablement contributes to business outcomes.
For us, that means looking at sales conversion, win rates, opportunity velocity, and deal size. When those numbers shift, we look deeper to see whether teams are adopting the right content, using the right play, and coaching the behaviors we need. That's how we've earned credibility with commercial leaders.
When I look at where enablement is going, I see a function that is becoming much more strategic, data driven, and operationally important.
The future of enablement rests on the ability to connect trusted knowledge, seller behavior, AI, automation, coaching, and revenue impact in one motion. This infrastructure gives sellers faster access to trusted answers and managers clearer signals about where to coach. It also helps enablement teams scale what works, giving commercial leaders more confidence that their teams are ready to make the most of every customer interaction.
Ernst de Planque is a sales enablement leader who built Expedia Group’s global enablement function from scratch, growing it into a practice serving thousands of sales and account management professionals across multiple geographies.
He specialises in turning commercial strategy into measurable behaviour change: from consultative selling and negotiation to executive presence and AI fluency with a track record of driving win rates, retention and revenue growth. Seismic has recognised his approach as an industry benchmark.
Based in the UK, Ernst-Jan is a native Dutch speaker with a background spanning sales enablement, product marketing and revenue and account management.
