ARG’s AI journey, more than seven years in the making, taught the company the value of its data and how AI can unlock productivity, not just efficiency.

Currently, ARG uses an AI platform to process and pattern data in its Salesforce system of record. The platform provides LLM-generated insights from 34 years of accumulated data to vet vendors, assess products and evaluate customer technology needs.

Earlier this year, the company appointed Stephen Murphy as VP of data analytics and AI enablement, and it is training all its employees in AI, with plans to certify each in prompt engineering. ARG CEO Mike Shonholz told Channel Dive the firm has reduced its client-facing employees’ administrative tasks to help them focus on customer interactions.

“You’re taking the most capable and expensive resources in any organization and letting them use their unique skill, which is relationship-building and understanding the unique needs of their customers, versus the administrative tasks of note taking and proposal generation — just remove that,” Shonholz said.

Shonholz said ARG’s internal AI use case could serve as a blueprint for other technology advisors to follow, provided that their AI applications are built on an established system of data.

The company laid the groundwork for AI adoption seven years ago by migrating decades of data from its original database into a Salesforce-based system now called ARGenius.

The information housed inside includes data from third-party intent-based marketing firms, customer leads, presentation materials, trouble tickets and supplier commissions.

“This year, we'll do 8,400 client meetings, we'll resolve 10,000-plus tickets, we'll execute a couple thousand pricing and RFPs, and then on top of that, we've got 34 years of data, and it's all integrated. So how do we harness the power of that?” Shonholz said.

ARG brought in a third-party consultant and surveyed its employees about the potential AI use cases. A cross-organizational team then convened to discuss ARG’s long-term AI priorities.

First, the team wanted AI tool to be separate from its data platform in case ARG wanted to switch CRM vendors in the future. As a result, the AI model connects to ARGenius through a model context protocol server, rather than being embedded directly inside it.

Second, President James Larsen said ARG stressed the goal of productivity rather than efficiency. Efficiency is “table stakes,” Larsen said.

“If our goal was to make our pricing analyst more efficient, we could have done that by simply focusing on getting the pricing information normalized and quickly given back to the consultant or salesperson,” Larsen said. “But instead, what we thought about was, how can we get to a decision faster and therefore ultimately drive additional sales?”

Competitive implications

Advisors at ARG historically constructed their client proposals based on memory and notes. Now they use AI to process transcripts from all previous meetings with the customer and generate a document that the advisor uses to build their proposal. Murphy said the new process allows for a "great aha moment in front of the customer, saying, 'Here's all the stuff that we talked about over the last six months.'”

ARG has engaged in “prompt-athons” to find new insights on its customer base. That includes analyzing voice sentiment from meetings to establish and rank customers’ true priorities for selecting a vendor, and comparing a client project to previous projects of a similar size and scope.

Although the AI model came with impressive data-processing capabilities, it required extensive training from ARG to understand the context of what a technology advisor does. “It's like a really, really smart, Harvard-educated MBA who comes to your company and doesn't know anything, but in a couple of weeks, it's pretty useful,” Larsen said.

Larsen said ARG has no intention of replacing any of its 80 employees with AI. 

“Our goal is that every single employee at ARG is certified in AI and that every single one of them ultimately will have their own AI assistant to help them do their job better, faster, stronger,” he said.

ARG’s AI integration reflects how the value of a TA is changing.

TAs often function as brokers, helping businesses evaluate multiple vendors. Shonholz said TAs need to bring deeper insights and data points to their clients as the clients use AI to access vendor information.

“If the value proposition is exclusively, 'I'm going to go get you some pricing so that you can evaluate which one of these things is least expensive for your company long-term,' and then the value in delivering that solution is yelling really loud at the supplier when things go wrong, you probably don't have a long shelf life in this industry anymore. Because customers can get there. With some of these tools, they can get in the ballpark,” he said.

Correction: In a previous version of this article, James Larsen’s name was misspelled.