AI agents: Debunking the top 4 myths for revenue teams
June 11, 2025 
Senior Director, Product Marketing
Gong AI Sales AI
Senior Director, Product Marketing
The buzz around agentic AI is deafening.
As a revenue leader, you know you need to move fast to adopt this technology in a strategic way and fully understand how to get value from it. But how do you know which agents deliver real value and serve your needs? How can you tell which ones are just dressed-up automation that won’t deliver cost or time savings?
Right now, successfully adopting AI agents can feel like a game of fact vs fiction. It’s already got revenue leaders asking important questions:
What can agentic AI actually do?
Is it just glorified chatbots?
Can it deliver the ROI that boards demand?
Which will return more value: generalized or specific agents?
In a recent Gong webinar, our panel answered many of these questions and dispelled some common myths around AI agents. We discussed getting past the pilot stage, understanding what agentic AI is and isn’t, and using AI agents to improve how your teams work and sell. It resulted in the debunking of four myths that have already emerged in AI.
4 misperceptions about AI agents
| FICTION #1: Implementing an AI agent will lead to instant cost savings and dramatic time efficiencies. |
| FACT: Savings and efficiencies are possible, but they’re not a given. You’ll only get the ROI you want if you set a strategic approach to using AI agents before you deploy them. The more targeted your approach to agentic AI, the more likely it is that your investments will translate into tangible business value. Start by clarifying where the most time-and-cost-intensive challenges are on your team, and assess whether there’s agentic AI designed to tackle those problems. That’s where you’re primed to generate the highest impact. As industry expert Chris Hergesell from Accenture Song points out, “The cost of AI implementation and operation isn’t negligible, and value isn’t guaranteed.” (Chris is deeply knowledgeable on front-of-office transformation, and is paying close attention to agentic AI from that perspective.) He recommends choosing targeted AI agents that can tackle your greatest challenges with precision. Don’t just unleash general AI agents and hope that compelling use cases emerge. |
| SOLUTION: Gong Agents are designed to deliver measurable ROI by addressing specific pain points in your revenue process. For instance, the AI Deal Predictor assigns a numeric prediction score to your deal health so reps can prioritize high-impact deals and work to change deal outcomes. That can directly impact your deals and revenue growth as well as your team’s productivity. |
“This is the first time that not only are people interested in and excited about a technology, they’re also really innovating with AI — even those who aren’t tech-forward. Maximizing workflows where people already work really helps.” – Rae Cheney, Sales Technology Enablement Manager | Morningstar
| FICTION #2: AI agents can replace most of your team. |
| FACT: They can’t. Nor can AI agents take the entire administrative burden off your sales team. The reality is much more nuanced. Yes, AI agents can take on some tasks and free up your reps’ time for relationship building and moving deals across the finish line. But they can’t do 100% of their work. For now, AI agents excel at repetitive tasks like these (and many others), that can be automated: -Data entry -Scheduling -Drafting outreach emails -Generating basic reports Though they can work through multi-step processes involving assessments, they’re not yet primed for critical thinking, relational problem solving, negotiating, or engaging in more nuanced communication. Think of AI agents as capable of focusing on specific, well-defined tasks that support your reps. When you deploy the right AI agent across your sales team, you can streamline your reps’ workflows and provide them with data-driven insights that win deals. AI agents are there to make your team more efficient and effective, not to replace them. As Eilon Reshef, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gong noted, “Agents are supposed to augment human beings, not replace them. For every profession, AI’s going to take some of the drudgery away, but the profession will remain and morph into something that’s higher order.” |
| SOLUTION: Gong Agents can automate some administrative tasks on your team and significantly reduce the amount of admin work required on revenue (especially sales) teams. For example, AI Briefer automatically pulls information from all your customer interactions and organizes them into structured briefs so every team member has a clear, consistent view of the customer. Forget about manual work and secondhand summaries! Admins can configure it easily and it’s simple for both reps and leaders to use. |
“I’d rather have a seller focused on a customer and engaging in meaningful conversation and building trust than typing up call notes. That’s about smart labor allocation and asset allocation and making people more productive.” – Chris Hergesell, Managing Director at Accenture Song
| FICTION #3: AI agents are plug-and-play solutions. |
| FACT: Revenue teams love solutions that deliver quick time-to-value, and many agents promise to work right out the box. While time-to-value should be a priority when you purchase AI, the most effective agents will require some attention initially. After all, you’ll get more out of an agent that’s well-configured than a generalist that doesn’t precisely match your needs. The best agentic solutions allow you to define your inputs and outputs and preview your agents before you deploy them. It pays to align agents with your company’s unique business processes, data structures, and desired outcomes. Not surprisingly, the more complex your revenue team’s workflows, the more attention you’ll want to devote to setting up and monitoring your agentic AI upon launch. Ideally, you’ll do this without involving your IT team and creating an additional cost to the business. Instead, you should focus on deeply understanding your business processes beforehand so you can thoughtfully embed agents into those processes. Chris says that “Ultimately, your prioritization of what kinds of capabilities you turn on shouldn’t be about creating an easy pilot to run. Rather, think about the things that are going to drive profitable growth.” Rae agreed, noting that you should “Be realistic about what fits into people’s work processes. Don’t just have your IT team create another tool. The minute you ask reps to pivot tools, they can get distracted for up to 20 minutes!” |
| SOLUTION: What sets Gong Agents apart is their configurability. You can customize your Gong Agents using drag-and-drop fields in an intuitive Agent Studio before deploying them. You’ll also get pre-built templates based on years of revenue expertise, for a strong foundation. Administrators control which data Gong Agents use, what they produce, their level of autonomy, and how they behave. |
“Previously, CRM changed how you manage sales data and helped drive managing workflows. But the promise of agentic AI to really supercharge your sales organization is unlike anything that I’ve seen in my career.” – Chris Hergesell, Managing Director at Accenture Song
| FICTION #4: AI agents can work effectively with any data and any system. |
| FACT: As Rae emphasized during the webinar, an AI strategy is intrinsically linked to your data strategy. AI is only capable of delivering highly accurate and actionable insights when it has access to high-quality, contextual, trustworthy data. Plus, breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and customer success is essential to creating a unified data landscape; the kind in which AI agents thrive. Without a data strategy or a unified information system, it will be tough to move out of the pilot stage: Despite 63% of companies planning to implement AI agents this year, only 26% of orgs have moved beyond pilots. That’s often because they don’t have an AI or data strategy. The right platform can also capture your customer interactions and make historical and real-time data easy to access. You need to make sure your AI agents are driven by the right context if you want to make the expected improvements. For revenue teams, the most valuable data and context come from direct interactions with your customers and your own systems for business context. Your agents should be able to access that context, wherever it’s found, otherwise, their power is diluted. After all, AI is powerful, but it’s not magic. |
| SOLUTION: Your AI agents should draw from the full context of your customer’s journey (i.e., all the data associated with their account). Gong’s AI Briefer uses templates to standardize and streamline knowledge sharing across accounts, deals, and contacts so everyone’s on the same page. AI Ask Anything also provides your revenue teams with accurate and timely answers to any questions about deals, accounts, or contacts. Both capabilities are directly enhanced by the well-structured data and collaboration available to teams that use Gong. |
“Every business transformation should start with asking what you’re solving for; what outcome you want. Think long term and get clear on your strategy. Then consider your data; it’s critical because AI is only as good as the data it gets. Figure out where your data comes from and how AI will process it, and assess whether it can help you achieve your desired outcome.” – Eilon Reshef, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gong
Embrace AI agents purpose-built for revenue teams
As you assess this new technology and sort fact from fiction in agentic AI, you’ll find that only purpose-built, specialized agents deliver the capabilities and value your revenue teams need. More generalized agents are likely to be glorified chatbots that are incapable of the precision and insights that revenue teams require.
When you work with Gong Agents, you’ll be able to connect your teams across GTM workflows, eliminate manual work, boost productivity, and empower teams to drive revenue. Use them to access the full context of any account — all while you streamline workflows, surface actionable insights, and help deliver personalized customer experiences. Our agents were purpose-built for revenue teams like yours, and will enable you to get the ROI you’re looking for from this new technology.
“When we launched AI agents, we wanted them to be practical. We thought about how agents like Deal Reviewer and Call Reviewer would work end to end. We wanted something that would work from day one and get better over time.” – Eilon Reshef, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gong
As Rae said during the webinar, “Gong is the only vendor I’ve seen that’s actually delivering really tangible, visible ROI from its AI.” Chris summed it up by saying that ”The risk of waiting and not getting on board with this technology is that your competition is.”
Find out exactly what Gong Agents can do for you.
Table of Contents
