Gladly was undergoing a massive strategic shift. After building a successful omnichannel customer support platform over 10 years, they made a bold decision: to offer their AI layer as a standalone product, separate from their core platform. This opened enormous growth opportunities—but also created new go-to-market challenges.

The company needed to scale sales motions across new verticals and segments without linearly scaling their Solutions Engineering team. Their new SMB sales team needed to move quickly—closing 10-20 deals per week—but didn't have dedicated SE support. If sellers had complex product questions, their instinct was to disqualify the deal rather than spend time researching.

Gladly deployed Ava as an AI teammate who could provide SE-level expertise without requiring an SE on every deal. The key insight was that Ava's value came not just from her capabilities, but from her ability to be trained with rich context—about products, brand narrative, and messaging—in a natural, conversational way.

Christian and his revenue leadership team spent about 8 hours doing a "brain dump"—uploading documentation, explaining why it mattered, and shaping how Ava should apply that knowledge to real sales situations. This wasn't just throwing PDFs at an AI; it was strategic knowledge transfer, similar to onboarding a new team member.

Christian's experience deploying Ava revealed important insights about AI adoption in sales organizations undergoing transformation:

Gladly plans to expand Ava to their mid-market team, where SEs are being leaned on too heavily. The goal is to continue scaling go-to-market motions without linearly scaling headcount—while maintaining the consultative, strategic approach that defines their sales process.

As Christian puts it: "This is a moment to be bold. Lean into the ambiguity. Test things out. Find those partners who will hop on a call and walk you through it. Position AI as helping your teams run faster and earn back time for the more impactful work they want to be doing anyway."