Revenue magic in action: What we learned at Celebrate ’26

Revenue leaders are being asked to grow faster, adopt AI, develop talent, and create more productivity across their entire revenue organization. With that much pressure, it can feel like you need a magic wand, so at Celebrate ’26, we explored what it takes to make magic a reality.

Hundreds of revenue leaders gathered in Las Vegas for two days of keynote announcements, customer stories, breakout sessions, industry workshops, and conversations about the next era of revenue.

Across the event, one idea came through clearly: Revenue AI is moving from insight to action. When you combine trusted context, human expertise, and AI agents, you help teams work more efficiently, sell more effectively, and create more revenue per rep.

Here are the highlights from Celebrate ’26.

Udi Ledergor, Gong’s Chief Evangelist, opened Celebrate with a little help from magician Murray SawChuck — and asked the question on every revenue leader’s lips:

“How do I just sell more?”

Revenue organizations face mounting pressure from every direction. Boards want AI adoption and growth. Leaders need to develop talent and improve productivity. Reps are expected to do more with less, often while navigating disconnected systems and incomplete information.

But revenue leaders are building new ways of working in the middle of a major technology shift. “We’re not magicians,” says Udi, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t make magic.”

That was the purpose of this year’s Celebrate: to help revenue teams understand the challenges ahead, learn from leaders tackling those challenges inside real organizations, and leave with practical ways to “just sell more.”

Shane Evans, Gong’s Chief Revenue Architect, connected the event’s creative theme to a business priority every revenue organization understands: productivity. At Gong, the formula is: effectiveness x efficiency = productivity.

“Efficiency is about more time spent selling ... effectiveness is doing that even better … and productivity is what we're violently chasing as revenue professionals." —Shane Evans, Chief Revenue Architect

Productivity today means more than helping sellers move faster. It means helping teams work with greater efficiency and effectiveness by creating more time for selling, improving the quality of customer interactions, and driving more revenue per rep. That requires a new model in which people and AI agents work together.

Shane highlighted the role of the Revenue Graph in Gong’s own transformation. By connecting customer conversations, business signals, and revenue context, the Gong Revenue Graph gives teams a trusted foundation for understanding what’s happening across their revenue organization so they can decide what to do next.

By wiring its business around this model, Gong reduced seller ramp time by 30%, boosted rep attainment by over 50%, and drove a 90% lift in productivity over 36 months.

The opening keynote also brought productivity to life through customer stories from Cisco, AT&T, and Anthropic.

John Wunder, Cisco’s SVP of Sales Strategy and Planning, returned to Celebrate by video to reflect on the progress Cisco has made since last year’s event.

Cisco is applying AI across a massive sales organization, with more than 18,000 sellers representing multiple sales personas. The company’s focus is not simply on deploying AI, but on making sure it creates value for sellers, customers, partners, and the broader business.

Oleg Tolchinsky, Cisco’s Head of AI Seller Experience, joined Shane on stage to share more about how Cisco is approaching that transformation in practice. With over 50,000 outreach programs already conducted through Gong flows, and about 4,000 Gong Engage cadences run globally, Cisco’s top-adopting teams are seeing tangible results, including 32% larger deal sizes and 26% higher win rates.

“Gong gives us incredible context as to what we should be focusing on to serve our customers better.” —Oleg Tolchinsky, Head of AI Seller Experience

Sellers are now sharing calls with the broader team, so everyone’s “talking about the future, not trying to rehash the past,” as Oleg put it.

Carissa Cassin, AT&T’s Head of Advanced Analytics, offered another view of productivity. Her team connects Gong conversation data with AT&T’s operational data — including orders, churn, and revenue — to understand which behaviors influence business outcomes.

That analysis helps AT&T identify the conversational patterns associated with winning outcomes, connect those patterns to training, and route insights to the teams responsible for product marketing, sales, and retention. It also revealed that coaching drove an immediate impact, with reps seeing a 7% lift in attainment with coaching, and achieving 5% higher attainment in months when they were coached compared to months when they weren’t.

With this approach, AT&T reached 85,000 recorded calls in a single month — growing 30% month over month — and achieved 80% adoption across 5,000 sellers. Across all 12 Gong features they evaluated, users consistently outperformed non-users, with sellers who leveraged new AI capabilities seeing a 25% to 35% difference in quota attainment.

"If we compare the top quartile of Gong users to the bottom quartile, we see a 16% difference in attainment toward quota." —Carissa Cassin, Head of Advanced Analytics

At AT&T’s scale, Revenue AI extends well beyond sales coaching. The same conversational signals that help reps win deals are giving retention, marketing, and product teams early visibility into churn risks, competitor trends, and market demands.

Anthropic is growing rapidly, but its AE headcount has not grown at the same pace as customers and revenue. That means each rep manages a broader surface area, but still needs to spend time in meaningful customer conversations. Travis Bryant, Anthropic’s Head of U.S. Mid-Market GTM, shared how the company uses technology to protect reps’ time.

Anthropic’s north star is the number of live, synchronous conversations reps have with customers. Because each seller covers hundreds of accounts, eliminating routine administrative work is essential. By automating CRM updates and turning meeting prep into a five-minute task, the team clears hours back onto seller calendars for high-value interactions. “Claude can't do everything,” Travis noted. “You need humans for relationships ... so we've got to be ruthless with how we free those sellers to go do what’s human.”

"What you can control is the way you deploy your time and the caliber of conversations, and obviously Gong is instrumental for us getting a signal on their quality." —Travis Bryant, Head of U.S. Mid-Market GTM

Travis also highlighted Anthropic’s bi-weekly “film room” coaching sessions, inspired by legendary football coach Bill Walsh. Every two weeks, sellers and coaches study game tape together from rep-nominated calls. Using Claude and Gong to flag standout conversations and clip the most instructive moments, the team crowdsources winning behaviors so reps can learn directly from each other's plays. “We all get better when everyone is helping each other,” says Travis. “... A way to do it at scale is where we lean into our connection to Gong and Claude."

Amit Bendov, Gong’s CEO and co-founder, took the stage to outline how revenue technology has evolved, from capturing conversations, to generating insights, to acting on those insights. Where reps once spent 77% of their time on non-selling activities, AI has truly evolved to change the shape of their days.

“It’s not just AI that tells, it’s AI that sells.” — Amit Bendov, CEO

This next era involves using agentic AI as a system. AI systems can increasingly understand what happened, determine what should happen next, and help execute the work required to move revenue forward. But that opportunity comes with a challenge:

Revenue teams need the right data, connected context, and a governed way for humans and agents to work together.

With this in mind, Amit talked through exciting innovations coming to the Gong Revenue AI OS to help teams unlock greater productivity, including:

1. Deep Mode in Gong Assistant: Conducts exhaustive searches across your revenue history to answer big strategic questions directly inside Gong
2. Agent Builder: Lets anyone build custom autonomous agents with simple prompts to automate tailored revenue workflows
3. Gong Enrich: Agentically sources and verifies buyer contact data and job changes, slashing bounce rates in half while doubling phone connects

Together, these innovations help teams investigate complex questions; automate custom workflows; bring more complete, trusted data into the flow of work; and instantly scale winning seller behaviors across the entire organization. The announcements also underscored a broader shift: Revenue AI is a connected system that brings together data, context, reasoning, and action.

To learn more about the exciting updates coming to Gong, check out our press release about Celebrate '26 and our Mission Callisto post.

Gong’s Chief Customer Officer, Simon Frey, hosted the Executive Showcase, where he sat down with revenue leaders from Experian, Thomson Reuters, Adyen, and Snowflake. Each leader brought a real-world playbook to the stage, walking through how they tackled specific operational hurdles within their organizations.

When Adyen acquired two companies simultaneously, for instance, their VP Revenue Operations, Evelina Petrova, used Gong to evaluate their innovative messaging early on, rather than waiting for lagging indicators. “The sooner you can do those litmus tests and understand how the market is reacting,” she noted, “the more room you have to adjust your own strategy.”

The keynote set the direction for Celebrate, while breakout sessions and industry workshops gave attendees a chance to explore how those ideas apply to their own organizations.

Sessions were organized across three tracks:

This track focused on building the talent, coaching systems, and enablement programs that help revenue teams perform at their best.

Gong experts, including VP of GTM Enablement, Stacey Justice, and Head of Go-To-Market AI, Graham Miller, shared actionable playbooks for uncovering competency deficits and training sales teams to master agent-driven processes. The sessions explored how to build an enablement engine that delivers, create a repeatable coaching formula, and modernize the talent playbook for an AI-powered revenue organization.

This track examined how teams can turn their best-performing behaviors into repeatable plays.

Speakers like Elizabeth Mulford, Sales Enablement Manager at Experian Employer Services, and Connor Ashenbrucker, Senior Manager of GTM Quality Programs at Samsara, shared how their teams automate proven motions and turn high-leverage workflows into agents that run themselves. Topics included automating winning plays, closing gaps before the customer walks, and scaling the habits that help top performers succeed.

This track explored the infrastructure behind effective revenue AI.

Sessions covered how to transform better data into bigger wins; decide whether to build, buy, or combine both approaches; and activate the Gong Revenue Graph across the organization. Leaders like Erika Morris, GTM Systems Administrator and Sales Operations Tools Lead at Sprout Social, and Travis Chichester of ServiceTrade broke down how to close critical contact and account data gaps inside seller workflows.

On day two, bestselling author Daniel Pink took the main stage to share five practical, science-based ways revenue leaders can navigate what’s next over the final 90 days of the year.

With teams facing rapid AI disruption and conflicting economic headlines, Pink pushed back against the traditional instinct to analyze endlessly before making a move. In times of unprecedented change, he argued, you cannot forecast your way to clarity. Action itself is a form of understanding, and running small, deliberate experiments is the fastest way to bring the future into focus.

When leaders do act, however, they often fall into a second trap: reflexively piling on more work.

“When smart people try to solve problems, their muscle memory is to add stuff. Your calculator has other buttons. It has a subtract button—and you’ve got to start using it.” — Daniel Pink, bestselling author

Drawing on decades of behavioral science, Pink challenged leaders to test five simple practices over the next 90 days:

• Create a “to-don’t list”
• Emphasize the “why” over the “how”
• Schedule regular outdoor walk breaks
• Make feedback forward-looking and actionable
• Bias toward bold action over safe inaction

In a world that’s moving fast, he emphasized that progress doesn't come from doing more; it comes from having the discipline to simplify and the courage to take the next step.

Celebrate ’26 showed attendees what happens when revenue teams stop treating AI as a collection of disconnected experiments and start building a connected system for revenue execution.

The organizations making the most progress with AI bring together trusted data, human expertise, and governed AI agents to help their teams work more efficiently, sell more effectively, and create better customer experiences.

That’s how revenue teams make revenue magic a reality.

Watch the Celebrate ’26 sessions on demand.