How IBM uses AI as a force multiplier across go-to-market

What does it mean for technology to be a force multiplier for sellers?

When we started our relationship with Seismic, we were trying to solve the problem of whether we could equip sellers with the right information at the right time. That's a really important question teams continue to ask, but we're moving to: can we help sellers bring more value to their clients immediately?

It doesn't mean connecting 500 different tools. It means making sure the tools and insights sellers get are integrated in a more singular way, saving time for the field and making the experiences they have with clients as valuable and impactful as possible.

When technology is a force multiplier, it means you have to change something significant. To think about exponential change, we have to think about the behaviour technology is helping to enable, not just providing more tools but providing a different way of working. There's a risk now, with the amount of AI on the market, that we see a lot more tools and capabilities added. But the potential is not to automate the experience and workflow: it's to think very differently about how we want to empower our sellers to work with our clients.

How has integrating across platforms changed how IBM's field engages with clients?

The integration between Seismic and some of our other IBM platforms has helped our field engage with clients in a very different way. It integrates tools in our CRM, our data systems and our content platforms, and provides real-time coaching at the same time. Meeting prep has changed from taking hours to taking 15 to 20 minutes, so sellers can spend more time practising and honing their storey instead of researching, pulling materials together and doing manual content work.

We call the experience watsonx Workshop. It's a singular space where sellers come in, use the content, and engage and practise with the materials they need. Instead of navigating CRM, content platforms, research tools, data providers and any number of other tools, they have one single place to go.

After the meeting, instead of waiting to review manual notes or using general AI note-taker, their meeting summaries are directly correlated to who was on the call, what specific actions were agreed to, and how to send that out as an agreed action plan between all teams. Again, that's moving from hours to minutes.

How do sellers feel about AI and technology in their daily work?

Our sales team loves AI. That's probably not a surprise when you think about IBM: our sales teams are very aggressive and hungry and seeking out new technology. But what they don't like is 12 different places to look for information, and repeating work they know some of their colleagues have already done.

Having a headless experience enabled us to create a singular platform for the field. It lets us bring incredible trusted content, real-time coaching and feedback, and real-time data and insights from the many sources we have access to into a dynamic experience, as they prepare for a client meeting and review it afterwards.

How does IBM approach data governance and trust in this experience?

IBM is a big believer in data governance, and that culture is critical to how we operate when our sellers talk with clients. We look at the data we have about our own company, and the data our clients entrust to us, as really critical content in the experience.

There are a million places today where you can get rapid access to information. LLMs search the internet and will find your latest transcripts, public interviews and so on. What they don't have is the context that sits inside the company: what we know uniquely about a client. That's content we would never share outside the firewall. It's one of IBM's most trusted and cared-for assets.

When we first integrated Seismic with watsonx Workshop, sellers said it seemed good, but they weren't really sure where the information was coming from. So we've started to expose some of the history of our small language model, so we can show where different materials originate. The content is highly curated and matches our governance principles on trusted content from the right product team, with the latest information about our products and the material impact they've made on our clients.

Now when sellers use watsonx Workshop to pull together the latest information for a meeting, they see information from a smaller set of resources that come from a trusted pattern. They don't need to scrape the internet. They're getting the latest information, curated for them, from a source they've come to trust. By exposing where the content is coming from, they can see it's curated, it matches our governance standards, and it's the latest on product, industry, return on investment and references. That means we can ensure sellers are bringing the right information to clients at the right time.

How has IBM's approach to enablement evolved?

IBM's relationship with Seismic goes back quite a few years. We started by asking how we help sellers create a trusted place for information. We had more than 20 different locations where sellers could find information, and who knows how many others weren't even on our radar. So our journey began with whether we could help sellers get access to the right information. Today, it's how we add intelligence and actionable execution ability – backed by data – to the field.

We've shifted what enablement means significantly, from enabling around what the storey is to enabling around how we help sellers tell the best storey they can with our clients. As we looked to modernise the experience, we started to think about conversational intelligence: how do we help with coaching in real time, and how do we take out some of the friction in preparing for, or following up after, a client event?

It's important to say that the relationship with Seismic really reinforced a very strong belief in trust and governance, which aligns with our cultural values. When we saw how IBM treats data and how Seismic treats data, it opened up new doors with our CIO team, who actually sought us out to ask whether Seismic could help with something. The answer was yes.

What did partnering with a forward deployed engineer change?

Seismic was very willing to work with us on a different way of having conversational intelligence show up in the flow of work for our sales teams. When they paired us with a forward deployed engineer, it helped change not just the way we implemented it, but I think some of IBM's own experience also found its way back into the product set.

When we first installed the sales conversation coach, we launched it to over 18,000 people, but we found some of the behaviour wasn't as simple or as integrated with our systems as we'd like. By working with our Seismic forward deployed engineer, we could change some of the ways the experience rendered for our sales teams, and use some of our own insight and rules, as we operate in different countries, along with some of the UX we wanted to share with the field.

What's next for AI at IBM?

When IBM thinks about the future of AI for our field, our innovation is only limited by our imagination. This is the beginning of a tremendous journey. We're changing the way our sellers work, the way they work together, the way we work with our partners and the way we work with our clients. We're moving from AI that helps us bring new insights to AI that helps us operate in a completely different way.

We will not be automating the processes and systems of 10 years ago. We're rethinking them for 10 years from now. That means working with people in very different ways, unlocking new insights and partnering with people we may not have even considered before. We're sitting on a massive data lake of information inside everybody's company, and unlocking that will open up huge new opportunities for every role.

I get excited about the beginning of the process. When you think about calling someone for the first time, or a random phone call you get, what if they actually knew what you needed to work on and were able to help you? You might actually take that call.

Enablement is going from thinking differently about content to thinking differently about coaching, workflows, and how people work together. We're not thinking about the technology we need and how to make it work better. We're thinking about how the technology can help people work better, and that is the most fun project to be working on.

Congratulations to IBM! Explore more on IBM's success storey, and other award winners in the Seismic blog.