AI x CXO: The playbook for transforming revenue orchestration with AI agents

The enterprise software industry is undergoing a massive architectural shift.  

For decades, business leaders relied on stagnant point solutions to store data, track activities, and measure performance. Now, the market is moving rapidly toward platforms that take action.

I recently sat down with Seth Marrs, the chief strategy officer at Sandler and a former Forrester analyst who helped create the revenue orchestration category. We discussed this exact transformation during our AI x CxO series. We explored how artificial intelligence is changing the way software delivers value to large organizations.

The core premise is clear: AI agents are redefining how sales teams operate, scale, and drive growth. Technology is finally acting in the service of people, taking over mundane tasks, and equipping sellers to unleash their best performance.

The new center of gravity: agentic revenue orchestration

To understand the impact of AI on sales, leaders need to understand how revenue orchestration platforms work alongside CRM. CRM remains the system of record for account and opportunity data. Revenue Orchestration is the layer where the work happens: conversations, emails, meetings, workflows, and increasingly, AI-driven actions. A Revenue Orchestration platform like Outreach is where the actual conversations, emails, and meetings take place.

As Seth pointed out during our conversation, revenue orchestration platforms are critical for revenue teams. "The source of truth to me for everything that's happening in a deal, conversations, emails, phone calls, that is Outreach," he noted.

The real value of agentic AI depends entirely on having access to this rich interaction data. Without a constant feed of real conversations and activities, AI agents cannot function effectively. They need the context of previous buyer interactions to generate meaningful insights and take appropriate actions.

When businesses rely on fragmented point solutions, they create severe funnel bottlenecks. For example, a business might increase its digital marketing spend to generate a high volume of inbound leads. If that company lacks an automated outbound workflow to follow up on those leads, the investment is wasted. Localized optimization does not solve the overall business process flow. Revenue leaders need an agentic AI platform to connect every phase of the buyer journey seamlessly.

AI agents can solve for capacity problems

One of the most persistent challenges in sales is rep capacity. Currently, sales representatives spend only 26% to 30% of their time actually selling. Most of their days are consumed by administrative tasks, manual data entry, and internal meetings.

AI agents provide a direct solution to this capacity problem. Purpose-built agents can take over manual work like updating CRM fields, researching target accounts, and drafting personalized emails. They can listen to meetings and track action items, but they do more than just deliver insights, they act on the next best steps to close a deal.  

Because agents have instant access to historical data and work around the clock, they execute these tasks much faster and more accurately than a human ever could.

This technological shift introduces the concept of the "super rep." When agents handle the administrative burden, sellers reclaim massive amounts of time. They can redirect that energy toward strategic planning, complex negotiations, and relationship building.

Seth highlighted the financial implications of this shift. "I do believe that there will be less reps in the future,” he explained. “But I do believe that the reps that are there will probably be paid double what they were before because their capacity to sell and their capabilities are going to be so much more valuable.”

Building the human-agent ecosystem

The future of enterprise sales centers on a unified ecosystem where AI agents and humans work together seamlessly. AI serves as an augmentation tool that acts autonomously within specific workflows alongside human sellers.

Attempting to build this ecosystem from scratch using open-source models presents massive risks. Implementing AI in a corporate environment requires strict governance, data privacy controls, and predictable outputs. Enterprise-grade features enable consistent execution at scale with proper security, trust, and compliance.  

Without these guardrails, businesses risk rogue behaviors and data breaches.

Platforms like Outreach enable this secure model through end-to-end integration. By embedding agents directly into the revenue workflow, organizations can orchestrate complex actions while maintaining total visibility and control over the business outcomes.

Evolution across the org: CROs and all

The impact of AI agents extends far beyond individual seller productivity. It is fundamentally reshaping the organizational structure of enterprise companies.

Historically, the chief revenue officer (CRO) role was intended to oversee sales, marketing, and customer success. In practice, this unified leadership has been difficult to achieve due to disjointed data and conflicting departmental goals. Buyers often suffer through a fragmented experience, receiving different messaging from marketing, sales, and support teams.

AI is bridging these historical divides. By pulling interaction data into a single source of truth, technology is forcing the convergence of these revenue-generating functions. A future CRO is the revenue orchestrator: the leader responsible for designing an intelligent revenue system where sales, marketing, customer success, and AI agents work together toward shared outcomes. With the right platform, the CRO will reduce manual work, eliminate disconnected data, and align every team around a more cohesive buyer journey.

This evolution will also disrupt traditional software purchasing models. The standard seat-based pricing model becomes unsustainable as AI handles more work and augments sellers. We’re seeing the shift already happen; it's about capacity and skills - the more you buy the more capacity and skills you get from an agent. The industry will likely shift toward outcome-based pricing, aligning software costs directly with the tangible business value delivered to the organization.

The future of sales will be orchestrated  

Sales execution is moving from insight to action. For revenue leaders, the opportunity is to rethink how work moves across the entire revenue organization, rather than just adding AI to disparate individual tasks.

That shift requires more than isolated automation. If one part of the funnel becomes more efficient while the rest remains manual, the bottleneck simply moves somewhere else. AI agents are most powerful when they operate inside connected workflows, with access to the right data, systems, and guardrails.

The next chapter of sales is being defined by teams that can orchestrate people, data, and AI around the buyer experience. That is how organizations turn AI from experimentation into measurable revenue impact.

I want to thank Seth Marrs for joining me for this conversation and for sharing his perspective on where revenue orchestration is headed. His insights offer a clear reminder: the future of sales will not be built by adding more tools. It will be built by connecting the work that drives growth.

Watch the full conversation  

This interview is part of our AI x CxO series where we explore how enterprise leaders are driving adoption, scaling AI, and realizing real business outcomes. To catch up on earlier episodes, check out the resources below.