Moving from ambitions to outcomes on AI is a journey that every organization is engaged on, and there are plenty of brands competing for the role of guide. As Global VP Business Development for Dataiku, the Universal AI platform that aims to make enterprise-grade AI applications available to every business, Ahmad Amed Nayeb is profoundly aware of the risks of businesses feeling submerged by the sheer volume of AI-related claims.

“Businesses everywhere are overwhelmed by the AI choices being presented to them, and under real pressure to deliver rapid ROI,” he explains. “They’re increasingly sceptical about AI platforms that fail to deliver the combination of agility and governance that they fundamentally need. There’s a clear opportunity to create a standard platform for enterprise and agentic AI that can make governed and scalable AI accessible to everyone.”

Dataiku has a strong case to make for being that platform. Founded in 2013, it’s been helping businesses to find the right applications of AI for over a decade. That experience has helped to hone a go-to-market strategy that recognizes that each AI journey is unique – and every step of it involves different needs.

Meeting customers where they are on AI

“It’s critical to understand where a prospective customer is in terms of AI maturity, before you reach out and start talking about solutions,” says Ahmad. “It’s not just about finding the right people, but deeply understanding their company, their competitive space, and where they are in their journey. When it comes to outreach, it’s not just about finding people with a particular job title. You need a deep understanding of businesses which ensures that reps are genuinely confident that they can help a contact when they reach out to them. That puts the entire conversation on a different footing.”

The conversations that Ahmad’s sales teams have are focused less on individual use-cases or tools. Dataiku aims to help enterprise organizations establish a future-proofed foundation for AI that democratizes the technology and enables teams to innovate with confidence. “We help the organization as a whole to speak a common language on AI, which expands the number of people who can create models and agents for different tasks, and does this within a controlled framework for mitigating regulatory, financial and operational risk,” says Ahmad. “This gives them technology optionality, so they’re ready to respond to and adopt new tools as they become available.”

Re-imagining the role of reps for an AI era of sales

Bringing this strategy to life involves re-imagining the role of a sales organization for the AI era. Ahmad sees this as the latest evolution in a continuously transforming role that’s always responded to the technology available.

“When I started out, 14 years ago, success in sales was all about the depth of your product knowledge, and how many calls you could make in order to leverage that knowledge,” he says. “With the rise of technology, we were able to build more actionable personas to help personalize outreach, but over time that produced diminishing returns because it became really easy to scale outreach and really difficult to differentiate. Now, with the rise of AI, it’s changing once more. We’re going to see two types of businesses: those that are able to elevate the role of business development reps in an AI-driven world, and those that can’t.”

For Ahmad, the key to finding the right role for sales reps comes down to prioritizing the right human qualities. His talent acquisition strategy emphasizes grit and resilience, but also an essential curiosity that he believes is the key to deploying AI in a way that generates real value. Equally important is finding the right approach to measurement, and using metrics to help guide each team member’s approach.

“It doesn’t make sense to try and contact hundreds of people in a day with scaled outreach that nobody responds to, but it equally doesn’t make sense to spend hours and hours on research and only contact one or two,” says Ahmad. “The real question is how you balance it, and we can use the data from a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to peel that onion a little bit. We can check that our people are engaging with the right prospects in terms of readiness and maturity. We don’t just look at how many InMails people send, but what their acceptance rate is. We can look at the balance they have between contacting people and research. These things all help us to coach our people better, to ultimately drive better outcomes for the people we contact.”

It's a vision of empowered outreach by sales teams who are able to use AI-generated insights to cut through the noise. In a time of transformation, business buyers above all need to feel understood. Ahmad Amed Nayeb is on a mission to ensure they are.