Karin Gerhardy, how can the acceptance and effective use of AI in sales teams be promoted?

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Artificial intelligence has long played an integral role in marketing and sales, with a steady and noticeable impact on daily processes. In an interview, Karin Gerhardy, Senior Sales Leader Telecoms at Google, explains the successes and benefits brought by AI, how it has improved customer interaction, and how the acceptance and effective use of artificial intelligence can be promoted within sales teams.

Artificial intelligence has significantly transformed the sales and marketing landscape. What specific successes or advantages have you observed in your area of responsibility at Google through the use of AI?

In our daily work with our partners, we see that AI tools enable them to reach their customer segments much more specifically, allowing them to spend and invest their sales and marketing budgets more efficiently.

The trend is moving toward delivering tailored campaigns. With AI, you can automate and create advertising materials much more specifically for individual target groups. This doesn’t mean that designers are suddenly out of a job, as everything still needs to be conceptualized in advance. Today, AI can be used to multiply and modify advertising materials, but people are still needed for strategic composition.

How has the integration of AI into sales and marketing processes specifically improved customer interaction and retention? Can you provide some examples of successful AI applications in this context?

Companies can target customers more effectively and have the ability to better understand where the customer currently stands. This applies to all industries. If you are approached as part of an upsell or cross-sell campaign and it doesn’t really take into account which product you have from this company and what you’ve invested in before, it’s not very fitting.

AI helps to make this match clearer, to find out where the customer stands, what problems and needs they have, which products they recently bought, and what they are interested in. Based on that, the right offer can be made.

As a leadership coach, you likely have insights into the challenges that leaders face when integrating AI into their teams. What recommendations do you have for promoting the acceptance and effective use of AI in sales teams?

The most important thing is to be open and explore what can be done with specific tools. It’s essential to foster a mindset that eliminates fear about one’s job being affected or becoming redundant through the use of AI tools.

Certainly, workflows will change, but we can improve together. Building trust in companies to develop things collaboratively is very important, and employees should be encouraged to keep developing themselves, to experiment, and to use work time to test new tools to see if they could be interesting for the company.

At Google, we have 20-percent projects, where we can spend 20 percent of our time on other topics that may not yet fit into our current workflow, might evolve into a product, or could simply be exploratory research that doesn’t lead to a result.

This openness is needed at both the leadership and employee levels so that everyone develops together because right now, we’re all learning something new every day. We’re learning how to simplify workflows, how certain things work well, and how others may not yet work as well. This openness is crucial for us to improve overall and redefine our working world together.

What is the title of your talk, and why should attendees at the Customer Focus Summit on April 9th look forward to it?

I will be covering a lot on the topic of AI, including how AI can already be used today and in what direction it is heading. I might also bring something that I can’t define today, as the field is evolving rapidly.

I’m also very excited about the questions and discussions before and after the talk because this is a subject that develops daily and reveals new facets. We can all contribute together to make our companies more successful and optimize our ways of working so that we can apply our talents while minimizing standard tasks through AI tools where appropriate.

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