When we decided to focus first on commercial teams — sales, customer success, revenue operations — it wasn't obvious. A lot of the expertise-to-software framing applies equally well to legal review, underwriting, engineering, or clinical decision support.
The case for starting here
Commercial teams have a few properties that made them the right starting point.
The expertise gap is visible and costly. In most organizations, the difference in output between a top performer and an average one is stark — and everyone knows it. That creates urgency and willingness to invest.
The outputs are measurable. Did the deal qualify? Did the customer renew? Did the recommendation land? Revenue creates a feedback loop that's hard to fake.
The workflows are repetitive enough to encode. Sales and CS teams do similar work hundreds or thousands of times. That repetition makes the investment in encoding expertise worthwhile.
What we learned early
The first thing we learned is that commercial teams are surprisingly unsophisticated about their own processes. Not because they're not smart — because they've never had to be explicit. The expertise works, so no one has had to explain it.
Making it explicit is the hard part. The software comes after.
Where we're going
Commercial teams are the starting point, not the ceiling. The same architecture that encodes a qualification playbook encodes an underwriting framework or a clinical protocol. We'll get there. But we needed a place where the feedback is fast and the stakes are clear.