AI in Sales: How Enterprises Use Chatbots, Data & Automation to Close More Deals

AI is no longer just a buzzword in sales, it’s becoming the backbone of how companies engage customers, qualify leads, and scale go-to-market.

In this episode, I’m joined by Adis Ceman, Regional Enterprise Sales Director at Cequens, a company building AI-powered communication systems across channels like WhatsApp, SMS, and voice.

We go deep into how enterprises are actually using AI today, beyond the hype.

We cover:

•  How AI chatbots are replacing missed opportunities in customer support 
•  Why most companies fail at AI
•  How to structure your data and prompts to get real results 
•  How AI is used in enterprise sales (lead generation, qualification, demos) 
•  The role of human touch in high-value deals (and why it still matters) 
•  How to use AI internally to train teams, build proposals, and move faster 
•  What signals actually matter when selling to enterprise clients 
•  Why speed + personalization are the real competitive advantages in 2026 

One of the most valuable insights:
AI doesn’t replace sales teams, it makes them faster, sharper, and more responsive.

If you're building a product, running sales, or thinking about implementing AI in your company, this episode will give you a clear, practical view of what works.

Episode length: ~24 minutes

👤 ABOUT THE GUEST

Adis Ceman

Regional Sales Director at Cequens - UAE

→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adisceman/

→ Company: https://www.cequens.com/

🔗 WORK WITH VLAD

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Perfect. So hi everyone. Today I'm joined by Adis Seman. He's a regional sales director at Sequence in the UAE. Because today communication is super important across all channels for companies. There's a lot of hype around introducing AI in WhatsApp, SMS, voice agents, and so on. Sequence is integrating all these communication channels with an Agentic platform. I'm very excited to have Adis to tell us a little bit more about how he's pushing and selling these products to his audience, but also how he's using AI in his go-to-market. So thanks so much, Addis, for being here on the podcast. Thanks for your time.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Thank you. Thank you, Vladimir. I mean, a pleasure is mine to be. I'm the regional enterprise sales director at Sequence. So we have our own Gen AI platform. We do have uh different external and internal uses of AI, uh, where we uh help, let's say, our employees into getting information faster and easier.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Start maybe with Sequence. You mentioned that you are building solutions for your clients with this uh Gen AI platform. So maybe tell me a bit about maybe the last projects that you've uh implemented.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

So, how Sequence uses it. So, pretty much we have our own Gen AI platform where uh basically, again, what Sequels does, Sequels, we are a customer engagement platform. So we help our customers engage with their consumers or customers easily using different channels, like the CPAS, which is a communication platform as a service, like SMS, Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram, different channels. I will give you a quick example. You are a retailer where you sell, I don't know, tires, car parts. And I am a user and I'm browsing your website, and then I I'm checking, like, okay, I see I want to change my tires. And what you would do, you will ask me, like, you will go and you want to chat with somebody or call someone. But people usually nowadays they want to chat quickly, right? So it's easier for them. You will chat with me and ask me, like, how much are these tires for my car? Do you have the size? Do you have this and that? And it's 7 p.m. in the evening and we are closed. We work until 5, for example. You don't get a response. What will happen? You will go to the next one, probably, until you find somebody who is working or responding to you. So, pretty much the first one that didn't respond, they lost an opportunity. They lost the lead, they lost the customer. So, how we do a sequence, how we help the customer not lose traction or not lose focus with the customer in the lead, uh, we implement the AI. Basically, we are working with different LLMs. We have the Gen AI platform where the customer can come and they can upload the knowledge base of their portfolio of what they are doing. They can build different flows on our Studio Bot Builder so they can do it themselves. So, this is how how in general, uh, let's put it in a nutshell, we do it.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, very cool. You touched on like a couple of topics which I think come up a lot whenever you implement AI. I heard knowledge base. Uh, basically, if uh you want to change your tires, you know, and you reach out to a garage, they should have the information on you know, if then, which I should answer, and so on. The second topic that you mentioned is the CRM and the data from Hotspot, uh, which needs to be consistent so that you can fetch the number, the email to validate, you know, you're talking to the right person. And then finally, you also talked about security in a way, because if I ask my bank balance, you want to make sure that you're not you're not getting the bank balance of someone else and so on. In all these things, basically you need like clean data and orderly data. So, how do you usually go about cleaning this data? Is this something that you do yourself? Is it companies coming up with like clean data? Uh, how do you, yeah, what are like the you know top two, three things that people can do to give good data to AI?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

That's a very good question. What I always ask the customers is your data consistent? Is it real, like real-time data? You want to process real-time data or analytical data? You know, if it's real-time data, then you have to have, you know, fast systems, uh, you have to go on specific uh um, you know, you have specific attributes over there. If it's analytical data that you go, it's totally different. So you can upload it and you can just go and do analytics on it. When the data is structured, or if if you have it more or less like structured, you have to give proper instructions and prompting. That's very important. A lot of people just go and say, like, hey, here's my data, analyze it. But you didn't give me like what to analyze, what to eliminate, how to analyze it, what data you want, how you want it to be exported. You know, all these attributes. That's why um a lot of if you if you take a user like me and you, who will just like go and um clean up an email he wants to send, or just do a simple like tasks, or ask ChatGPT, for example, or AI Cloud or whatever, Gemini uh about different questions. That's a differentiator between that and the company that wants to implement AI because you need behind it to have structured data.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

The distinction between uh data lake and transactional data to understand how you want to fetch information is is quite a big topic because you probably don't want to run like an ML algorithm on the spot, but you think about whether it's live or if you run it in batch and then you display it. I think it's great that was gonna be uh the opportunity to take maybe a step back. Like, let's move away from sequence and talk about you and how you are doing as a sales director at Sequence. Just to set the stage, can you tell me a little bit more about how you're currently selling this product uh via which channels? You know, what what are the key activities that you do to sell to I think governments, banks? Uh, you mentioned retail, tire installers. So, yeah, can you just give us a bit of context on about that?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Amazing. Yeah. It's uh look, when it comes to sequence and how do we do the sales parts department that I'm uh managing, the enterprise department, we do have uh inbound and outbound uh sales, definitely like any organization. Mainly we do have uh direct sales that myself and my team are doing. We do attend like uh industry events. Also, of course, I do have from time to time uh recommendations from customers.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

So, yeah, 100% um I agree with you, even uh for me uh at elements 100% of the customers come from from referrals, uh, even though I try a bunch of things to reach out at the end. The best customers actually come from referrals. Yes. You mentioned events when I hear about this here, you know, putting my gen AI glasses or automation glasses, I see things that don't scale or you know that require to be physically present with a human touch and so on. So do you use AI today in your sales process? If yes, where and where do you think it's still falling short?

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Yeah, that's uh that's a great question. How we use AI, we use it uh pretty much to do lead generation. Basically, uh when we are at events, uh we we have our own uh chatbot that we implement on different channels, and we do have a QR codes everywhere, like pretty much like when we are in an event. Either it is on a pamphlet that you give to to customers or or or it's at the booth, for example. Or even when we go and if we are a delegate, we do uh tell them, like, hey, can you fill the survey or just scan uh I show them my phone and scan this QR code? They can go and fill in some information and then they can speak to our chatbot, right? The AI chatbot will ask some simple questions or or or frequently asked questions about what we do, how we do it, and all of that. And then the AI will ask them for their information, like uh what's your uh the the you know, the introduction, the name, email, uh phone number. If it's WhatsApp, apparently we will know it. Uh but the add like just introduction and our sales team pick it up and then we go and talk to them uh basically on what they were asking for. So so we we qualify the leads or we try to qualify the leads along with our marketing team, paying us with the we are also using the AI into also qualifying the leads, but as well as engaging with the with the with the with a potential lead, right? Showing them what we do. It's it's more or less a demo, I would say it because we are demonstrating it, but also we are uh generating leads. So it's like you are hitting, like we say it, like you are hitting two birds with one stone. Uh I don't like saying that because I love animals, so it would be a little bit like uh absurd. But again, how we are using it in in sales, that's one part of it. So in generating or or qualifying leads, for example, and use casing it, showing it as a demo. But as well internally, we use a lot uh our so we are using basically uh internally different LLMs to analyze what we have today. Because we have a lot of data internally, for example, like uh data on different like processes, sales processes, internal processes, how we communicate cross-departments, uh, what are our let's say um the compliances or certificates we have. As I mentioned, we work with governments, with banking sectors, we require to have ISO certificates, PCI, DSS compliances, all of these information that are being frequently asked and questions that customers ask. When we do onboarding of new employees or we bring in uh new customers, and when we talk to them, we have it in one place. So I can go and ask for reference, our internal tool that we are using and we built along with the connecting it with the Atlasian or Confluence that we're using, where we have the knowledge base of a lot of our playbooks and information, pricing, and all of that. We can easily navigate until the the the AI can build us even a quick proposal. So internally, externally AI is is pretty much used, probably not to the extent that we would wish it's it's becoming, but we are going towards there, like to automate things uh and and and connect it to different tools like uh automating uh the whole uh uh lead generation process and probably even automating some part of the sales for the SMEs, for example, the small, medium businesses or self-onboarding, that will be fully automated, and we are working on that. Today we are focusing only on big, large enterprises and corporate accounts, which still need uh human touch, especially in the Middle East region uh where you need to speak to people, show your face, discuss with them use cases, and AI probably will not understand in depth those cultural gaps and those things. But I'm sure that it will come up very fast.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

And so yeah, uh what I've come across building solutions for for companies selling to enterprise, uh, there's this thing around okay, there's a finite market, you know, you cannot reach out and do cold email to thousands of people every day because there are yeah, there's not like an infinite number of potential targets, so you have to be super focused. You cannot afford to like send out like generic stuff, first thing. And then the second thing is you need to know when people are ready to buy. And there's this top, there's there's this topic around signals. So I'm wondering, are you using like specific signals to identify, you know, you reached out to this guy or this this company at a specific event? When do you know that they're ready to buy? Is this purely based off conversation or do you actually use data and potentially like AI to figure this out?

SPEAKER_00 11:00

The signals that we can see, like usually, if it's if if if I'm speaking to the to the the to the customer directly, I would know how to qualify it, right? You have like some qualifying questions that will happen in the industry. As I said in the beginning, like uh when when when we have customers coming and asking, hey, we want to implement AI. Okay, wait, uh before you say the hype word AI, what do you understand about AI? Why do you want to implement it? How do you want? So I will know which direction to go to, you know, to do the priority, prioritized the customer. Is it uh uh an urgent one? I can close it in the next quarter or in the next month or in the next one year. Will it take consume time and all of that? On the human side, this is how we do it, right? The AI will help a lot there to identify that sentiment, to identify, first of all, AI can do a search, they can give you basically the position of the person, like uh what what I experimented basically. So I went and I said, like, hey, I'm working with with, for example, a retail or or a banking uh sector. So I'm I'm doing such and such sequences with what we are doing. We are customer engagement uh platform, we are technology/slash communication uh company, we have this set of products. Uh we are we want to target this set of uh industries. So it will bring you and give you some kind of um personas that you will target. But again, the problem comes where they don't know in depth this persona because what I've seen in different companies and I experienced it. I I was I was an account manager and sales manager, and different companies use different uh titles, right? For different uh positions. So, based on your title, doing and scrapping just information from the LinkedIn or from internet is not enough. You need to go and analyze the person, you need to see what the person is posting if we will analyze it in depth. Is it is he more relevant about the position, or it's just like you think in this position, my champion or decision maker is the chief uh marketing officer, or the C chief, I don't know, uh digital officer. Might not be, you know, it might be his title, but he's still doing totally different uh irrelevant things or focusing on other things than what I'm doing. So basically, AI can help in that, but when it reaches the point that it goes deeper into understanding that specific persona, what that person is doing, how they are doing it, like what are they posting, what are the narratives around it, what is their position in the company cross-functioning. I mean, LinkedIn will not be maybe sufficient with that. We can see what they are posting, how they are doing. But maybe I should go and check like, okay, if they were speaking in events, what topics were they speaking about, what are they working on? So again, AI can help with that because they can find a lot of information faster than I or you can do. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, so you're almost better off looking at the company level, and then whenever someone from that company speaks about a specific topic that is relevant to you, then you reach out to that person instead of applying filters on LinkedIn and looking for you know the digital transformation officer. You're gonna look at sequence and be like, okay, sequence talked about digital transformation. This was the speaker, this is the person I needed to talk to. So it's kind of top-down instead of bottom-up.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

No, definitely, yeah, I definitely we use, of course, our our marketing team, as well as myself and the sales team. I mean, we used a lot of sales navigator and other tools that you are using on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an amazing tool. I mean, I love it, or at least it was an amazing tool until it became uh Facebook. So until it became Facebook, I see a lot on uh relevant things. I basically uh before I go to sleep, I check my LinkedIn, and when I wake up uh in the morning, that's where I do the in-depth research. If I know that the person was in an event, for example, Gitex, I will go and see if he was a speaker, if he posted about it, okay, what he was speaking about, what his company is doing. Maybe he was not the speaker, but somebody else. So I will like connect the dots. So basically it's it's it's like that. The AI can help a lot indeed in identifying that.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yeah, it's uh it's great because you're naturally bringing me to the last uh topic, which is the experience using AI as a sales director. You mentioned that you have 16 years of experience in that space. You kind of learned the hard way over the years how to basically focus on the right person, sell the right product to the right person at the right time. All of these are learnings. So, how do you actually transfer that learning, connecting confluence to a cloud uh using the custom plugins? So, can you tell me a little bit more about this overall process, like teaching and training your team?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Amazing. This is this is a great topic because this is what we were uh touching base a few days ago. We have uh we have when you enter a new company, they give you a walk through and onboarding on the systems, on the tools they are using, on probably the pitch that they are using, how to sell the products and the products and all of that, the pricing, etc. Um, when you when you go through it the old school way and you go like if you are at school, you you book sessions, for example, like uh one hour, two hour sessions a day uh with different products, it it's it's becoming a hassle, right? For not only for you, but if you scale and you are a big company, then you become uh you have to do it more frequently. And the expert in that point, you are the only one. You will waste your time instead of doing other things. Like, for example, for me, as I said, I'm I'm managing a team that we are selling different products, we are uh in different regions. I'm also doing the sales and relationship management with different stakeholders in different companies. So I wouldn't like to waste my time a lot on sitting for two or three hours every day or every week talking about the same things all and all and all over. Uh specifically, you can do it in multiple ways. You can have different videos that you you pre-record, uh, you can have like different uh playbooks, you can have different things. Where how we are using it as I mentioned, we have different playbooks and uh data that we have stored over uh the past years on Confluence. Basically, that's our end on our different other ShareCoins that we were using. We use uh plugins from Cloud, definitely now uh that we are implementing, where our employees can go and uh if they have any topic, of course, we do onboarding to them, as I mentioned. Like human onboarding is definitely a must in the beginning. But once they are ready and understand what they need to do and we give them the materials that they need to study and go through, I encourage them a lot, and this is where we use we use cloth with confluence into understanding better the product. For example, if they have a question instead of coming to me every five minutes or every day and asking me a few things, they can go and try to learn it themselves. Of course, if they hit a wall and they don't know something, we will explain it more as more experienced uh, let's say seniors or or who are product managers, etc. But we are using it internally as understanding the processes and building better processes. So summarizing, let's say if I have uh let's say the strategy that we did all over the years now, and I want to summarize it into one quick explanation and see how we uh developed over the past few years, year over year, what were the challenges, how was the churn of the customers, what were the products or were the products that uh were we need to focus on. AI is the amazing uh tool, or AI tools are are are helping a lot there because you can build a narrative around it and you can see who are your again to go back to ICPs, uh, what personas that you were target, which industries, which products. And this is again what we are giving to the sales as well, and training them how to use it in their own benefits, how to help them uh become better, and how to help them navigate better. Because today time is very crucial, and you have a lot of competitors that are also working on the same customer with more or less similar products. The differentiator will be who is faster and who gives more attention to the customer. Those are the two differentiators. And AI will help with both of them. Time consuming, if you want to build something right, uh briefing or quickly do a proposal or fix it, you know, make it a little bit better looking amazingly, it can fix your grammar uh mistakes and all of these things, can can open your eyes a bit more instead of you going manually and checking it, so it can be checking uh through things, but also bringing you the information and data faster so you can have your customer when they ask you a question, you will be able to respond immediately, not wait for it and go back and forth with your other colleagues and waste a couple of days or hours or or weeks even to respond to the customer. So this is how I see it uh working, and this is actually where we at sequence are implementing it and using it.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Nice. So basically, for you as a sales director, you're using it as a assistant, uh, sorry, strategy assistant to like review the data, identify things that worked, refine the ICP, right? Refine the offer, and then you're like, okay, this is the new package, this is how we should go about it. And then basically your sales team can just have access to that same knowledge that you have added to Confluence via cloud. So you don't even have the onboarding in person and so on. But basically, everyone can fly on their own, have access to the same level of information, and on the spot answer questions uh to the customer to be faster and offer more custom uh recommendations.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Yes, yes. I mean, uh as I said, our management is very uh C level. We took the the license for uh for Cloud and other other we tested other LLMs, of course, uh and we are working with other LLMs. So uh our customers are benefiting because we have different LLMs that we are using for different customers based on their requirements, right? But we we have like the license for every uh almost every employee, whoever is interested in the relevant departments, they have the access to it where they can build their own, let's say, space and they can build their own space on Confluence and update, upload data from their own perspective and experience.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Yeah, I think you have a pragmatic approach, which is nice. You talked earlier about your customers, and the first question you ask them is why do you want to use AI? And for you, is once I use AI, is it actually helpful? So, like during the whole loop, you're trying to always evaluate and challenge AI, not assuming that it's always better than you, that it's necessarily helpful. You know, there's this thing about procrastination, and we feel like because we're using AI, we're productive, but at times we can actually lose time, uh waste time.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Do you have maybe an idea on you know how much more productive your team is with this tool? Do you see like a performance improvements in terms of quotas that they hit, in terms of the number of customers they can handle? Do you have like an order of magnitude on you know how your sales approach has evolved with AI?

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, yeah, of course. I did uh find a lot of uh progress there, definitely, not only on hitting the quotas, but also on understanding the today. We're using it to some extent, definitely, as I explained. But I think in the near future, as I said, like we will be using it also in acquiring customers or onboarding them, the self-onboarding ones.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

You know, three, four learnings on you know, how can you actually drive adoption of these tools in a company? You know, if you were to join a new company tomorrow, how would you actually drive and make sure people use these tools? Because it's one thing to have a license, it's a second to really benefit from these tools.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

I love one thing. Maybe we didn't touch base uh the vibe coding now tools that you have, lovable base 44 and those guys. They can teach you something that how AI can be used in a sense where you need to properly structure and give a proper prompt to get a proper output. So this is where I would always say yes, I will encourage using it, but advise, go after it and check and enhance your instructions and prompting. Once you have it to a level that you are comfortable with in your uh daily job or organization, you can continue and it will do its magic. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Yeah, amazing uh closing remarks. What I love about what you what you said is with coding, it's very clear whether the output is good or not. Yeah, either the app breaks or it works and it looks like you want it to look. Whereas with marketing and sales, it's a bit more subtle. So knowing how to improve instructions is maybe not as clear. So if you learn by learning how to prototype, it's gonna teach you this muscle basically to build intuition on how to interact with AI, and then you can reapply this intuition to more abstract areas and domains, which I think is a is a very smart and interesting way to look at it. Indeed. Indeed. Amazing. Thanks, thanks, Addis. Um, so if you want to follow Addis Cheman, you can find him on LinkedIn, Addis Cheman at sequence uh with a C. Uh so thanks, thanks so much, Addis, for this conversation. Hopefully we'll get to meet in person soon, even if we live in this a global village. Uh it's always nice to to have this uh in person uh chat eventually.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

No, no, definitely. Thank you so much, Vladimir, and it was great uh talking to you and