Digital sales must be fast, informed and bespoke. To meet that expectation, IBM built a suite of tools to support our digital sellers—each with its own login and logic.

Over time, these tools and processes accumulated, growing to more than 20 in total. To prospect a single client, sellers often found themselves juggling multiple systems. Sales, content, product documentation and client data slowly spread across a maze of technical complexity. A system built to drive efficiency was beginning to work against itself.

The biggest challenge was navigating layers of internal governance to unify and transform existing tools. Important decisions were often held up by process, and projects lost momentum. A technical transformation could consolidate tools, but it couldn’t transform the culture. People—how they work, collaborate and make decisions—drive cultural change. So instead of idling, the T&O team started the engine. 

They assembled a small team of sellers and product developers and entrusted them with a cocreation project: build a generative AI—powered sales assistant to answer questions, retrieve insights and draft personalized outreach.

With developers working alongside sellers—their end users—the team reduced the bottlenecks, silos and red tape that might have otherwise stalled progress. 

Cross-functional collaboration made the team more agile and creative, enabling them to design a single, integrated AI suite. 

AskSales consolidates IBM’s sales support tools into one seamless experience. It also automated repetitive tasks, saving sellers hours on research and analysis each month. They used that time to ask AI more than 250,000 questions and generate competitive analyses, product recommendations and client-specific messaging in real time.