AI Is a Team Sport Now
AI in the hands of your best few is a habit. AI that lifts the whole team is a system, and only you can build it.
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At one of our recent roundtables, one Solutions leader running a team of about forty described how his best people were building customer experiences now. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot of AI, using Claude or Glean to draft prompts and then Replit to build the experience. He said, “What we’re trying to do is build a skill library that people can reuse instead of everyone building from scratch.”
Then he said something every leader in the profession can relate to. “The thing I worry more about is not necessarily the skill or agent level, but how does an organization have one context layer for every deal that’s consistent and up to date, that then powers all of our AI use cases? And I don’t have a good answer.”
That is the honest state of most Solutions organizations right now.
Left alone, AI becomes a personal habit. A tool in the hands of whoever is curious enough to pick it up, producing private gains that live and die with that person. Turning it into a capability that runs across your whole team and not just the gifted and eager few, does not happen on its own. It takes intentional design from the top. That’s what separates an organization that gets better as a whole versus one that gets better in pockets - and this is where most Solutions orgs are stuck right now.
The hard part is not speed. It is scale.
Left to their own devices, good SEs will find speed. But what most won’t do is make that gain repeatable for everyone else. The hard part is getting the whole team to move together.
And when the team doesn’t move together, it creates extra, ancillary work. One VP of customer solutions running both pre- and post-sales told us she is watching AI acumen split her team. “If reps get a taste of one SE who is very forward-thinking, an early adopter building great demos, where does that leave the laggards?” she said. “Having to consistently upset expectations, knowledge-sharing, upskill the team and coach the stragglers really tends to be an ongoing challenge.”
As AI absorbs more of the repeatable work, that gap between a great SE and an average one gets more visible and more expensive. But the answer isn’t to slow down the people who are pushing the ceiling, rather we need to raise the floor so the whole team levels up to a new standard of expectation.
To do this, well, you need two key things:
A shared context layer: a single source of account intelligence, deal briefs, and confirmed facts versus working hypotheses that every AI workflow draws from, so the same deal is not researched five different ways by five different people. You can argue this is your CRM, but you need to make sure your CRM is connected to the right tools - Gong or Glean so that everything is truly pulled into one place.
A portable library of the team’s best prompts and personas, kept in plain text so it outlasts whatever platform your company standardizes on next.
A Solutions Consulting leader at a spend-management fintech described the shift. “We’re putting together a framework so it doesn’t just become something that the SE does, using the hero people that want to do that work, but that it actually becomes a functioning process,” she said. And that’s the point. The star SE isn’t the win, but the star SE creating a prototype for a capability that can be deployed consistently across your team is.
Without the system, speed turns into risk.
Speed you cannot control is not an asset. It is exposure and comes at you from two different directions.
The first big risk we see is quality. We all know AI makes it easy to produce a lot, fast, and not all of it is good. AI slop is real. And when slop reaches a customer that costs you credibility you do not get back, and at volume, someone on your team will send it if nothing stands in the way.
The second risk is more dangerous because it does not always look like a problem. A global pre-sales leader supporting a team of a hundred described SEs vibe-coding solutions that dazzle in the deal room and fall apart later. “You can quickly build something that on the surface looks really good and is almost more agile than the underlying solution,” he said, “but they lack the scalability, maintainability, upgradability and long-term supportability.”
A system is how you manage both. It sets a clear bar for what “done” means before anything reaches a customer: checked against confirmed facts, cleared against your security and compliance posture, and inspected by a human who owns the judgment.
One organization we’ve been working with recently described their AI culture as the “wild west.” The teams have seven or more distinct AI tools in active use, no regional standards, and certainly no global ones. Some use the company’s own platform; others skip it entirely for Claude or ChatGPT. Individual contributors are building genuinely impressive AI workflows, but none of it is being standardized or shared, so the org keeps reinventing the wheel. What started as open experimentation has become a significant headache to unwind. Bringing fragmented teams to a common standard is proving far harder than leadership expected.
Another sentiment we’re starting to hear more from leaders is that they want their teams using AI, but they’re afraid of their teams using it for the wrong things. And as a result are slowly losing the judgment that only a human brings. “Redesign the work so that the things humans do better, the judgment, the glue of everything, being the face for the company, that’s what humans do better,” said one leader. Let AI do the research, the structuring, the first draft. Keep the reading of a room, the risk calls, and the strategy where they belong, with your people. A system is what draws that line and holds it, so AI stays pointed at the work it should be doing.
This is an honest reflection of what we’re hearing from leaders right now. Moving a team from personal habit to real system is hard, most organizations are somewhere in the middle of it, and almost no one has it fully solved. If you are in the thick of it, we would like to hear where you have landed, what’s working and talk it through.
James & Jeff
P.S. Off The Record is back! The premier event for Solutions leaders is headed to the Bay Area on October 8. Seats are filling fast. Applications are still open at: solutionexec.com/offtherecord