372: From CRM Data to Revenue AI: How Sales Is Being Rebuilt with Gong Co-Founder and CEO Amit Bendov

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Amit Bendov is the co-founder and CEO of Gong, the revenue AI platform he started in 2015 after realizing that traditional CRM systems tracked outcomes but failed to explain why deals were won or lost. That insight led him to focus on customer conversations as the missing source of truth in sales. Since its founding, Gong has raised more than $580 million and reached a valuation of $7.25 billion. Today, Gong helps sales teams reduce manual work, improve performance, and better understand what customers are actually saying.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why traditional CRM systems track what happened but fail to explain why deals are won or lost, and how that gap led to the rise of Revenue AI as a new category. • How Gong’s Revenue AI differs from CRM by analyzing sales conversations, reducing manual admin work, and actively helping sellers prepare, follow up, and improve performance in real time. • The emotional cost of sales work, and how using AI to remove administrative burden improves both sales results and seller job satisfaction. • What it takes to build trust in AI tools that analyze customer conversations, including data stewardship, transparency, and delivering clear value to sellers. • How an AI-first product vision can exist years before the technology is ready, and what it means to design systems for autonomy rather than simple automation. • The reality behind “overnight success,” including early product-market fit tests, paid pilots that felt risky, and navigating growth slowdowns without abandoning the original vision.

Resources:

Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Amit on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI Is Changing Finance: Data Challenges, Collaboration, and Future Trends with Mike Schuster • Other episode mentioned in the show: On AI Design Philosophy and Building the Anti-PowerPoint with Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma