In this episode of the Intelligent Sales Podcast, Vijay Raja Gopalan, Partner & General Manager at Microsoft, joins Vishnu Shankar, VP of Data and Platforms at Draup, to unpack Microsoft’s multi-year transformation toward agentic sales workflows—and what it takes to move from CRM-first selling to AI-first selling experiences.

Vijay shares how Microsoft evolved from AI as a “companion” (recommendations and next-best actions) to agent-driven flows that can help acquire customers, nurture leads, and accelerate deal velocity, especially in complex enterprise licensing environments. He also breaks down the biggest adoption lesson: sellers don’t instantly build “prompting muscle memory,” so product teams must design for habit loops, great first-run experiences, and seamless transitions between sales chat and CRM when needed.

The discussion includes topics such as how the consistency of the customer data is non-negotiable in terms of the agentic strategies, how AI enables new opportunities in creating inclusive selling experiences in terms of voice and language, and how AI, as an enabler of new-age products, asks business leaders to embrace non-determinism, speed, and the concept of continuous improvement rather than perfection.

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Quotes:

“Don’t start with the technology. Start with what’s the business problem we’re trying to solve.” – Vijay Raja Gopalan

“[When] we shipped something… sellers would use it for a few days and then disengage and go back to CRM.” – Vijay Raja Gopalan

“Having a really strong data strategy is very important… a single source of truth is key to any agentic strategy.” – Vijay Raja Gopalan

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#agenticai #aisales #salesenablement #copilot #salesproductivity #crm #datastrategy #aigovernance #enterpriseSales #customersuccess #revenueintelligence #salestransformation #microsoft #draup #intelligentsales
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Moments You Can’t Miss:

02:10 – Fully agentic vs assisted agentic flows (and where each works)
03:30 – The early adoption surprise: prompts, habit loops, and seller behavior change
06:10 – Why “single source of truth” data is critical for trust in AI experiences
10:00 – Leadership lesson: shipping in a non-deterministic world
11:05 – The “Know Your Customer” starting point and account research agents
15:10 – Governance + evals + interoperability: scaling agentic transformation
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Key Takeaways:

- Adoption is a product + behavior problem: Sellers need guided prompts, great first-run experiences, and incentives to build new “habit loops” in sales chat.
- Agentic selling is a spectrum: Some segments can be fully autonomous, while others work best with assisted agent flows to accelerate core tasks like deal creation and quoting.
- Trust begins with data: If there is a disconnect between CRM and the agent experience, trust is not there for sellers.
- AI-first products require a new leadership mindset: Drop the need for perfection, determinism, and switch to speed, iteration, and fast-follow improvements.
- Governance and Interoperability are scaling levers: Well-functioning evals, deployment discipline, and agent-to-agent protocols are helping large enterprise adoption scale faster.
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More About Vijay Raja Gopalan & Microsoft Customer Zero:
Microsoft’s Customer Zero program makes Microsoft the first large-scale user of its own products. Microsoft Digital (internal IT) deploys new technology across the company, tests it in real-world conditions, and shares feedback with engineering teams to improve the product before and after it reaches customers.

More on Draup:
Draup is an AI-powered intelligence platform that supports over 200 global organizations in enhancing their talent and sales strategies. Draup enables enterprises to make informed decisions in workforce planning, talent acquisition, and account-based marketing