Tech Magazine: 7 Ways to Explain Generative AI to Non-Technical Stakeholders

ShiftUp excerpt with CEO and Co-founder, Nick Valla. To read the full article go to:
https://techmagazine.io/qa/7-ways-to-explain-generative-ai-to-non-technical-stakeholders/

In 2014, standing on a Manhattan street corner frantically waving at occupied taxis while running late to a crucial meeting was an accepted part of doing business. The inefficiency was so normalized that we built entire buffer periods into our schedules just to accommodate the unpredictability of urban transportation.

Then Uber arrived, and within 18 months, that same street corner experience felt as antiquated as using a rotary phone.

Today, B2B sales is experiencing its identical inflection point. And if you're in sales leadership, your response to this moment will likely define the trajectory of your career for the next decade.

The Performance Chasm

The early adoption data reveals a performance chasm that's expanding rapidly. According to Salesforce research, 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year versus 66% of teams without AI. This 17-percentage-point gap represents the difference between market leadership and competitive irrelevance.

Organizations implementing AI Sales Intelligence are seeing transformational results: 80% of sales reps say it's easy to get the customer insights they need to close deals versus 54% without AI, with deal velocity 38% faster and a 45% increase in seller efficiency through AI smart prioritization.

A Structural Revolution

The comparison to Uber's transportation revolution isn't hyperbolic—it's structural. Both industries faced the same fundamental challenge: massive inefficiency caused by information asymmetry and coordination failures.

Pre-Uber transportation suffered from three critical gaps:

• Visibility gap: No real-time awareness of available resources
• Coordination gap: Manual, inefficient matching of supply and demand
• Intelligence gap: No predictive insights about demand patterns

These are precisely the same gaps plaguing sales today. Static territories lead to unequal opportunities, prioritization problems, and coverage black holes, creating misallocated sales quota capacity causing gaps in market coverage and missed revenue.

Just as Uber didn't just improve taxis but reimagined transportation infrastructure, AI Sales Intelligence isn't improving traditional sales, it's reimagining revenue generation infrastructure entirely.