Something significant has changed in how people learn.

YouTube started it years ago. Need to understand something, repair something or learn a new skill? Find someone who knows and learn from them, pretty instantly.

AI takes that much further.

Ask a difficult question and you’ll probably get a good answer. But increasingly, AI doesn’t just answer. It helps you go further, asks what you’re trying to achieve, adapts to your situation and works alongside you.

We are entering an era of learning self-sufficiency.

For companies, and particularly sales teams, that creates a tremendous opportunity. Because most companies already possess the most valuable learning content their salespeople could access. Their own expertise.

They know things about customers, applications, problems, decisions, implementation, risk and value that have accumulated over years.

Much of it is tacit. It lives in the heads of founders, technical experts, experienced managers and long-serving employees. Some of it emerges in everyday customer conversations.

The problem isn’t a lack of expertise. It’s that the expertise isn’t usable. It hasn’t been captured as clear answers. It isn’t codified into a playbook. There may be no agreed standard. People aren’t fluent in it. And it certainly isn’t available as guidance when somebody is actually talking to a customer.

AI tooling changes the mechanics and crucially the economics of all of this.

Companies can now:

– Capture their know-how and turn it into company-approved answers, questions and narratives.

– Make it available for self-learning, allowing people to interrogate, practise and build fluency independently.

– Connect learning with execution, providing company guidance before, during and after customer conversations.

– Continuously improve the system, so better answers and approaches discovered anywhere can benefit everyone.

This is particularly important for companies pursuing significant growth over the next two or three years. Traditionally, acquiring deep company expertise at a seller level took years.

But the people who thrive in this new environment won’t wait years. They will work with AI, interrogate knowledge, practise, self-correct and continually improve.

The opportunity for companies is to give them something uniquely valuable to work with:

the accumulated intelligence of the company itself.

AI doesn’t just give us another way to train salespeople. It gives us the opportunity to compress years of company learning into weeks and months. The sales teams that are learning the fastest, are growing their companies faster, and more profitably.