How Amazon, Workday, and LinkedIn leaders use AI to transform sales

AI promises greater efficiency, but how are tech giants like Amazon, Workday, and LinkedIn integrating it into their strategies?

In this special episode, recorded live at Gong’s Celebrate event, Dana Feldman hosts a panel discussion with Kate Ahlering, Sara Anderson, and Jo Bercot about how they’re using AI to transform sales enablement, streamline workflows and empower their teams to achieve more.

If you’re ready to see how AI is shaping the future of sales at the world’s biggest organizations, this episode is a must-listen.

Dana Feldman:
What do the world’s best CROs have in their playbooks? This is the place to find out. This is Reveal, the Revenue AI Podcast by Gong. I am your host, Dana Feldman. Welcome. Good morning. And for everyone that is online with us, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.

I am Dana Feldman, and I have the privilege of leading our enterprise sales team here at Gong. Without a doubt, one of my most favorite things is getting the ability to go and spend time with customers and really deeply understand some of their revenue goals, what they are trying to achieve, what obstacles might be in the way, and then also what are the tools and technology that they are trying to use and meld together with the human element to get there.

I am really excited because today we have a customer panel where we are bringing three incredible enterprise clients to tell their story to all of you. But additionally, I also have the privilege of being the host of our podcast called Reveal, The Revenue AI podcast. And this is where we get to interview some of the world’s most renowned CROs and actually understand their playbooks, and you get to hear what they are doing and actually take lessons learned.

And so, for anyone that might not yet be a subscriber to our podcast, please take a look at this QR code. You can give it a scan to subscribe and listen. And as a special treat today, we are actually going to be recording this customer panel for a future episode of Reveal. So if you have never been part of a live podcast before, surprise—you get to today! So with that, I want to welcome up my guests, and we are going to get this conversation going.

Dana Feldman:
So Kate, Sara, and Jo, come on up.

All right, well, let us kick it off. Just a couple of minutes for quick intros, and then we will get into some of the questions.

So first, I have Kate to my left here. Kate is the Vice President of North America Sales for the Sales Solutions Division at LinkedIn. She is behind the teams of their flagship product, Sales Navigator—one of the great loves of my life in my sales tech stack. And previous to that, Kate was the CRO at Calendly and at Glassdoor. And I think this is your third time as a Gong customer at this point?

Kate Ahlering:
Yes.

Dana Feldman:
Welcome. We are so excited to have you.

In the middle here, we have Sara Anderson from Workday. Sara is Principal Global Sales Engagement at Workday. She is very, very passionate about bringing people and processes and tools together, and as part of Workday’s global sales engagement org, really, really passionate about getting that behavior changed, and she has been really crucial in their AI strategy.

Dana Feldman:
So welcome, Sara. We are so excited to have you, too.

And then rounding it out with Jo Bercot from Amazon. Jo is a strategic leader at Amazon Advertising, and she is driving their tool strategy and their go-to-market initiatives, making sure that the sales teams are empowered, they are innovating, they are growing. And she also has been very, very critical in their AI strategy at Amazon Ads.

Welcome, Jo.

Dana Feldman:
We have had an incredible morning around AI, and both Shane and Amit touched on how we are really moving past the AI hype. And I think one of the things that probably a lot of you want to really get into is, how are companies actually executing with AI?

So I am going to kick us off with the first question, and I would love Kate and Sara for you to take this first. How are you using AI in your teams today and in your companies?

Kate Ahlering:
Yeah, thanks so much, Dana. Great to be here. Appreciate Gong hosting us.

So as you think about AI, of course, at LinkedIn, we are infusing AI into all parts of both the platform and our business. And, you know, we like to say that we have planted 100 seeds across the company on AI initiatives or new technology initiatives.

I think this is a really interesting moment as a revenue leader inside LinkedIn, but as a revenue leader, generally speaking, we are being asked to do two things at once. We are being asked to deliver certainly in the present, this quarter, this year, this fiscal year—there is still a very high degree of intensity on performance.

But we are also getting the questions from our leadership teams, from our exec teams, and from our boards around our AI strategy. What is your AI strategy? And so what we have found is, you know, that is sort of almost impossible to know right now. We are in such early innings of AI.

And so what we are encouraging—and sort of like our hack for this—is to just find your AI win, like what are the one or two simple habit-changing things that we can encourage with our teams over the next six months?

So that has been our mentality as a revenue leadership team at LinkedIn is like, what are these simple, like I can click a box and be more prepared for this meeting, or I can click a box and understand more about this lead. And so we have looked for those wins as a part of our strategy to bring it into real life.

What we are actually doing, of course, we are using Sales Navigator, and it has been reimagined with a bunch of these AI features that make it really easy to find the right person and have the next best conversation. But then once you have those people, we are also using Gong, of course, to get really, really prepared for that conversation and understand where we have been.

And so those are just two examples of, like, in the flow of work. We are not asking anyone to do something completely different as a part of their job, but we are giving them the ability to harness the little magical moment of AI so that they get used to it, and they understand the power of it. So that when we are ready and the world figures out what we are going to do with all this technology, they will be bought in to the process. So that is broadly how we are thinking about it and what we are using—finding the win and these simple ways to build habits with our team.

Dana Feldman:
Yes, I definitely think it resonates around the idea of having existing workflows that you are plugging AI into versus creating whole new ones and trying to get a win on both ends with the teams. Sara, talk to us a little bit about what is going on in your world and how you are using AI over there.

Sara Anderson:
Yeah, from an enablement lens, we really do not have the luxury of time. Specifically, recently—and Workday has been using artificial intelligence now for about a decade, a little more—but we owe it to our customers to bring the best sales force where it is not just a buzzword. We need to bring tangible results.

So specifically from an enablement lens and in the new down-market sales organization that we recently launched, we have been focusing on how we can leverage and harness that superpower for velocity in our deals, bringing a more prescriptive point of view to our sellers to where they can truly understand where their client is coming from, how we can help them sell better, faster, stronger, and make it easier for customers to buy from us.
So it is really giving more fuel into that engine that is the key revenue driver, which is our sales organization.

Dana Feldman:
I think Bradford from Reddit just a minute ago on stage said something really interesting, right?

He said you have got to earn the right to ask for change. And I think as we really get into this world of AI and introducing AI to our teams, change management is something that we all really need to be thinking about. And so I would love to spend just a couple of minutes, Sara and Jo, learning from you a little bit about kind of what was your approach with change management, with bringing AI into your organizations and really getting the buy-in behind it. So I might start with you, Sara, and then go to you, Jo.

Sara Anderson:
Sure. Yeah. So I think it has been a common theme earlier that sometimes there is some disparity between an initiative or a directive and the reality of how it is going to be adopted and absorbed in the field. So again, bringing that enablement lens and understanding that enablement is not the initiative; it is the outcome we want to achieve.

My role is to identify:

What do we want our sellers to know?

How do we want them to feel?

And what specifically do we want them to do based on whatever this directive or initiative is?

And we have to ensure that we can translate it. I sometimes say I am the Rosetta Stone between corporate initiatives and the field, and I truly align with the sales leadership, our sales organization, and understanding.

I usually ask two questions when rolling out to drive adoption and behavior change:

How is it going to help them sell better, faster, stronger?

How is it going to help our customers have easier access to work with us?

If we can narrow down some big idea or initiative, it can be very attainable.

An example: when implementing Gong, I mentioned earlier that we recently launched a smaller down-market sales organization. Imagine a group of sellers, a lot of them all at once, on a stranded island, and there is this directive and initiative and revenue goal kind of out in the middle of the ocean. We needed to figure out a way to bridge those gaps and identify getting our sellers from point A to point B.

Lo and behold, we have a boat on the shore, and we can use that as a vessel to get us from where we are to where we need to be. But we do not have the luxury of the winds and using a sail. We need to row, and we need to be effective and efficient.

Our sales methodology, we knew worked. We had seen it in our other segments, and we knew we needed to get that in the hands of these emerging sellers so that they could be successful and move in the direction towards that revenue goal.

We found out—and Shane stole a little bit of my thunder earlier—about the impact leveraging the principles of sales methodology. But we saw, just in a little over one quarter, almost two quarters, when we looked at the opportunity health of closed deals, our sellers, by instituting and leveraging the power of AI and Gong, closed at a 30% higher rate when they mentioned the seven principles in the sales methodology, and their deal sizes were 136% larger.

Those are powerful numbers. Truly connecting to how it is going to impact a seller’s performance, I think, is a lesson we have learned in driving an initiative in behavior change.

Dana Feldman:
It is incredible. That is some incredible results. I think, too, really thinking through when you are about to implement an AI strategy, like, what is in it for the company? What is in it for the end user? And then also, what is in it for the customer? Right. Where does this get better with the customer relationships, too? And then, of course, saving the sales team from having to manually enter things is always a win.

Jo, I would love for you to chat a little bit about your experience at Amazon and implementing AI.

Jo Bercot:
Well, I like what you said about the enablement being the outcome. I think that really resonates with me. So thank you.

I think of this definitely as a narrative that starts at the top and how we talk about the change coming and what we expect of people.

This may sound a little cliché, but I have to, in my role, remind our leaders—and that means not just sales leaders; this is product leaders, finance, et cetera—that, you know, sales is an art and a science. We should help with that balance where we can.

While we can do things like automate workflows and sales motions and data and Salesforce entry—all the things that we have talked about today—what are we doing with that extra time that you are helping your reps be more balanced?

So, where are you helping with their art? How are you using what you have not just to sell, sell, sell, which is their job, I get it, but they are there because they have relationship-building skills? They are there because they have what they bring to the table that is unique and what makes them successful.

Jo Bercot:
So while I am driving automation and these other things, I am also reminding our leaders often that it is their team that is going to get them over the line.

A good example of that is being out in the field. I often hear, “Oh, I have to get home,” or I see them on their phones doing their LinkedIn updates in Salesforce because Monday morning they have to make their call, and they need to show all their meetings and things. And I tell them, “Sunday afternoon, you should be at brunch or, I do not know, whatever you are doing, not entering things.”

So, when a rep says to me, “Jo, you know, how many hours of selling time did you give back?” I say, “Look, I am reminding leaders that this is about balance.” You are supporting your reps. We will help with automation, but where are you helping them be a balanced seller and have that time? Just let them be people first.

I think that is a good reminder in the narrative as we are just pushing a lot of tools. They all should help, too.

Kate Ahlering:
Just taking a kind of a different lens on change management. I think change management is the topic right now for all of us as leaders as we embrace the evolving world of work.

Our research tells us that not only is the world evolving very quickly, but that the skills that will be required, of course, are different. So we did a whole bunch of data work against the skills that are listed in job recs today and what will exist tomorrow.

For sales, specifically in sales roles, we think somewhere between 60 and 70% of the skills—the jobs to be done of a seller—will be at least augmented, if not completely replaced, by AI.

So, if 60% of your job is going to be at least different, you are looking at a completely different role type and a completely different set of skills that will be required or emphasized into the future.

How we are thinking about change management at LinkedIn is we are assessing the skills that we have today on the team and the technology that we have today and where we are going. And then, what skills will we need in this new world where the job itself looks very, very different?

We are doing a whole bunch of skills-based curriculum around that, really emphasizing two categories of things: human-based skills and AI literacy.

I think the combination of those two looks like modern selling.

And so we have rolled out this curriculum. We have made coaching available on these topics to all of our employees and to our team. We think this is really like the strategy—the skills-based strategy—to take us into the future as it relates to change management.

And then just building on what has been shared, it has to start at the leadership level. So, there has been a call to action across our leadership team to be out in front on using new tools and new technology and talking about how we are using them and embracing that and running towards this future instead of being a little bit anxious about it.

And so, as a leader, the combination of leading on this, being open, being a little bit vulnerable—that it is new, and that we are all learning together—and then really infusing this skills-based curriculum as part of our strategy too.

Dana Feldman:
I think, too, we have the change management in terms of how are we rolling this out with our teams, but AI has quite a bit of hype behind it.

And there is also this change management idea of how do you get buy-in from the tops down at your organizations? How do you actually communicate that back through the channels, get those various leaders to understand it?

And so, I would love to kind of go around and hear a little bit more from you all on how you have done that at your organizations—getting the tops down, communicating, and really getting them comfortable with AI. So I might kick it off to you first, Kate.

Kate Ahlering:
Yeah, I think going back to how I opened, a big part of this is like chunking it out and keeping it simple.

If you have some grand vision and you are going to implement a whole bunch of technology and we are going to dramatically change in 12 months, and I am going to promise a whole bunch of productivity gains in the first year, I think you are setting yourself up for failure.

So, how can you work your way into this through pilots, through testing, through experimentation, and prove and get the results that we heard from the panel that these are astounding results?

And if we can scale these, this is really going to matter for us.

Internally, for us, we have looked at a couple of different use cases for Gong specifically, and we can see that when Gong gets used and certain features inside Gong get used—just like my fellow panelists—the return is pretty good.

And so, that is the story that gets told. It is not part of this grand complicated strategy, though. It is, again, these simple wins where we are trying to give some time back to our team.

We are trying not to over-promise on the productivity gains that might yield yet because we think it is going to take a few years for that to really click in. So, you know, keeping it simple but pointing to real-life experimentations would be my guidance on it.

Dana Feldman:
And you certainly are in a culture and an environment at LinkedIn where, and you just said it, you all want to get in front of this as leaders and really embrace it and test and be vulnerable about what that means. So, I think that certainly helps too, to have that culture behind you as well.

Kate Ahlering:
Yes, huge culture of experimentation.

Jo Bercot:
I might want to add on to what Kate was saying. I like the basics. We have kept it simple as well and focused on deciding what muscles matter.

One of those is determining, for our salespeople but also for our partners, what is in it for them? If only the sales team uses it, and nobody outside of the sales team uses it for what they need, how is that really helping the bigger organization and ultimately the customer, like you said?

So we have dedicated a lot of time to automating the workflows and sales motions, but then we have given access to our internal teams to automate and improve their own workflows down the line as well. So we did not just keep it to ourselves.

Outside of product, I would say finance is a big customer of ours in terms of our data set. By having our sales teams focus on getting their calls recorded—literally the basics—we have been able to build the integrity of our data downstream, which has had, you know, maybe we do not even know the number yet, but the impact is tremendous.

It has saved minutes of time for the reps, but it really has a neat trickle effect. And it has been fun to watch how many times I get a knock on my door asking, “How many Gong calls do we have? How do I get in there?”

It is exciting to see champions emerge in other teams and to watch innovation happen from the actual calls. I think Bradford’s point earlier about earning the right to ask for change is so relevant. It feels like we are in the first phase, but this is where our core focus is.

If we get really good at just recording calls, we can start to measure quality over quantity. And that, I think, is the ultimate goal.

Dana Feldman:
I know one of the operating principles at Amazon is to test and measure, which is where I know a lot of this began many years ago with your team. But I would love it if you have any kind of best practice around how the test-and-measure approach became successful. How did you get that buy-in from the tops down across the organization for an initiative like AI?

Jo Bercot:
I am a big believer in carrot over stick. My second big belief is FOMO—it is real.

Fear of missing out is a powerful motivator. I did not want to make my job about racing around, chasing people, and saying, “Log in—you only have 10% of your calls recorded.” Instead, I focused on selling the concept to sellers.

I needed them to want to use Gong. And if I believe in Gong as the core of what we are doing, I had to create demand for it internally.

We consistently showcased the results of the teams that tested it—constantly sharing wins and digging into the results. We avoided overcomplicating things by showing too many features. Instead, we kept it simple, made onboarding easy, and looked for hand-raisers who wanted to lead the way.

By focusing on proficiency among users rather than mandating usage across the board, we created quality outcomes. The results spoke for themselves, and people began leaning in rather than us chasing them. That approach made all the difference.

Dana Feldman:
As you rolled out AI initiatives, were there any surprises—either things that worked better than expected or challenges you did not anticipate?

Sara Anderson:
Touching on the point of the reality of the evolution of the workforce, I think what surprised me the most was the fear at the beginning. There was some anxiety about what AI meant—concerns like, “Am I going to be replaced?”

But once we clarified that AI was a tool to augment, not replace, and showed sellers how it could make their lives easier, those fears quickly disappeared.

At Workday, we frame AI as a “little robot sidekick” or “superpower buddy.” You can choose to embrace it and augment your work, or go it alone. What we found was that going it alone was not nearly as successful.

Kate Ahlering:
One of the surprising elements for me has been how quickly the team has adapted and begun to expect efficiency.

When we roll out tools that make their jobs easier, they immediately notice the tasks we have not yet automated and ask, “Can we do that too?” It creates a culture of expectation around technology, which is great for driving progress but does require us to stay ahead of the curve.

Jo Bercot:
I have to echo that. The wow moment for me has been the internal demand from other teams—ones that do not even engage directly with customers.

For example, our product teams and even other arms of Amazon have shown interest in using Gong to analyze calls and collaborate more effectively.

When we opened up Gong for broader access, the collaboration across teams improved significantly. It was a reminder of how AI can drive not just sales but innovation throughout an organization.

Dana Feldman:
Let us transition into some wow moments. As you have implemented AI in your organizations, what moments have stood out as particularly transformative or impactful?

Sara Anderson:
I think the most exciting wow moment for me has been seeing the connection between implementing AI and delivering immediate, tangible results for our customers.

For example, at Workday, our AI tools have helped reduce time-to-hire from 40 days to just 40 hours through gig work and automation. That kind of efficiency is a game-changer for our customers.

It is not just about faster hiring, though. AI has also driven profitability, one of our core pillars. By integrating AI to enhance customer interactions and optimize processes, we have reduced turnover, improved talent acquisition, and made a measurable cultural impact for our clients.

I love ideas and innovation, but I am equally thrilled when we connect those ideas to outcomes—like converting opportunities into wins. Seeing those results fuels my excitement.

Jo Bercot:
For me, the wow moment was watching how Gong enabled collaboration across teams, even those that do not deal directly with customers.

One great example is how we use Gong to capture the voice of the customer. Feedback from calls is automated and integrated into our product system, driving improvements based on real-world insights. Initially, I thought this functionality would be cool, but I underestimated how excited our internal teams would get about it.

Now, teams across Amazon are asking for access to Gong, not just to analyze calls but to use the data to innovate and collaborate internally. That cross-functional enthusiasm has been one of the most rewarding outcomes.

Kate Ahlering:
I will share a quick story. We held a customer event in New York a couple of months ago, and afterward, I went to dinner with some LinkedIn colleagues. I ended up sitting across from a frontline manager who shared how she had proactively adopted AI tools like Gong to transform her leadership approach.

She explained how she automated administrative tasks and routine reminders, freeing up time to focus on coaching her team and driving performance. She took the initiative to learn the tools, implement them, and create meaningful change for herself and her team.

I was in awe. This was a perfect example of growth mindset in action—an employee fully embracing technology and leading us into the future. It was inspiring to see someone seizing the opportunities AI offers and setting an example for others.

Dana Feldman:
This has been such an insightful discussion, and I want to thank all of you—Kate, Sara, and Jo—for sharing your experiences and wisdom.

AI is not just a tool; it is a transformative force reshaping how we work, sell, and lead. Hearing how each of your organizations has embraced this change has been inspiring.

For everyone listening, be sure to follow Gong on LinkedIn for tactical takeaways from this conversation, including some of the best plays to add to your playbook. And do not forget to subscribe to the Reveal podcast so you never miss an episode.

Thank you all again for being part of this live podcast and sharing your journey with us.

All Panelists:
Thank you!

Dana Feldman:
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode.