Will AI replace solutions and sales engineering? Not likely—but it will change everything about how we work. I feel lucky to be in constant conversations with SE leaders. We’re trading notes and hearing about what’s the top-of-mind across calls, meetings, and private dinners that we host. We recently started asking folks on what themes around AI exploration are top of mind for their teams. Here’s what comes up again and again: Clarity on what AI can and can’t do. There’s a lot of AI companies — large and small — that promise the world and incredible outcomes. Leaders get excited, learn more, test in a POC (or even purchase), and then get disillusioned. It’s a cycle that we keep hearing about. Unfortunately, there’s no true shortcut here except more education on the latest LLM / RAG / agents research. A good proxy can be seeing the type of companies that have successfully implemented the AI solution and how long they’ve been using it in production, but it’s not a perfect one. At Arphie, here’s our philosophy as we use AI agents to help respond to RFPs, DDQs, and security questionnaires: We’re very clear from the get-go on what our AI agents can and can’t do. For example, folks sometimes ask if they can ship out the answers our platform provides out-of-the-box to customers. We tell them that on average, 50-70% of the answers can be used as-is, 20-30% can be used with minor edits, and the remaining will likely need more significant workshopping. Over time, as we ingest more company-specific knowledge and understand their writing style, we’re able to increase the % of usable answers — but we think human-in-the-loop is the right way to approach mission-critical responses. Are there other themes related to AI that are top of mind for you?
Andrew Snell
2w
I wonder how AI will be considered and potentially developed for live sales demo/presentation support, and how much human interaction would both sellers and buyers want to remove from that engagement.
Hayk C.
2w
What challenges do you see with human-in-the-loop AI in SE roles? Are there ways to make it work better?
Head of Finance @ Rillet | CFA
2wyeah, agreed. It's similar with our accounting software. We can auto-reconcile up to 90% of your transactions, but at least in the short term (and maybe forever), there will need to be some human review for that last 10-20%.