From hype to high impact: How real revenue teams are winning with AI

A recap of the Pavilion x monday.com webinar: “The AI-Powered Revenue Org”

AI might be the most talked-about trend in sales and marketing right now, but for forward-thinking revenue leaders, the question is no longer if to use AI, but how to use it well.

In a recent Pavilion webinar hosted by monday.com, two seasoned operators, Elizabeth Gerbel, CEO of consulting firm EAG, and Christopher Douglass, Sales Manager at monday.com, shared how they’re using AI not as a gimmick, but as a strategic multiplier for their teams.

Here are the top three takeaways from the session.

1. Start small, win fast

So how did EAG bring AI into their workflows successfully without overwhelming their team or their tech stack? It started with small, strategic wins.

Elizabeth described EAG’s AI journey not as a sweeping overhaul, but as a series of small, practical experiments, each tied to a clear business outcome. The first success? A lightweight rollout of ChatGPT among the executive team, helping them reduce time spent on repetitive work like PowerPoints, content drafts, and client emails.

That early momentum built confidence and curiosity. As the team began to see real value, they started exploring how AI could assist with tasks like summarizing call notes, generating outreach templates, or surfacing timely lead insights.

Her advice for leaders just getting started? Don’t aim to transform everything at once. Instead, focus on one high-impact use case, test it thoroughly, and expand from there. Quick wins build buy-in and show your team what’s possible.

 2. Measure ROI in time saved and focus gained

With that early traction, the next hurdle was proving AI’s value. Not in theory, but in day-to-day execution.

Elizabeth was clear: the most important ROI metric for AI isn’t just revenue, it’s time. Her team evaluates every tool through a simple lens:

Is it saving us time? Is it generating real value? Is it worth scaling?

This mindset helps EAG filter out hype and focus on tools that multiply their team’s capacity. For example, ZoomInfo’s AI-powered insights help surface key account data automatically, and ChatGPT accelerates messaging and content creation, allowing the team to reallocate time toward strategy and execution.

Cost structure also matters. While consumption-based AI pricing models can spiral if left unchecked, flat-rate pricing provides stability and encourages experimentation. But even then, Elizabeth emphasized the need for clear governance, sharing an anecdote about accidentally burning through monday.com AI credits in a single day after one team member used the feature without guardrails in place.

The bottom line? AI tools should buy back your team’s focus, not add noise or financial unpredictability. Time saved is only valuable if it’s spent on the work that matters.

3. AI is only as good as your data

But none of it would have worked without a solid foundation. Because when it comes to AI, your inputs matter more than your ambition.

AI doesn’t magically fix broken processes. In fact, it magnifies them. As Elizabeth Gerbel put it,

To get the value out of AI, you have to have solid data.

Without clean, centralized, and trustworthy inputs, even the most advanced AI tools will produce irrelevant, or worse, misleading results.

EAG’s early experimentation with AI revealed a painful truth: their CRM data was inconsistent, scattered, and in many cases, unusable. Data lived in spreadsheets, email inboxes, Smartsheet tabs, and legacy systems. None of it was structured well enough to support intelligent automation, let alone personalization at scale or predictive forecasting.

Rather than try to clean the old system piecemeal, the EAG team made a bold move: they rebuilt their CRM from scratch inside monday.com, starting with zero data. From there, they manually imported only what they trusted, focusing on verified leads, contacts, and accounts, cleaning as they went.

It was time-consuming, yes. But it was worth it.

The team also integrated ZoomInfo to enrich their records automatically, then reviewed that data regularly to catch gaps or inaccuracies, particularly with global companies where ZoomInfo sometimes misaligned HQ vs. regional contacts.

With clean data in place, EAG unlocked several high-impact AI use cases:

• Smarter outreach: AI-generated summaries of prospect activity and web presence
• Faster personalization: Automated email drafts based on enriched lead data
• More accurate forecasting: Reliable pipeline insights from trusted CRM inputs

And perhaps most importantly, it allowed the team to adopt monday.com’s built-in AI tools with full confidence knowing that insights, predictions, and automations were being driven by data they could trust.

By establishing monday CRM as the single source of truth, EAG eliminated data silos and ensured that AI-powered workflows actually got used.

The takeaway? If your CRM is messy, your AI will be too.
Before layering on tools, invest in the foundation: align your data, enforce consistency, and designate one system of record. Then let AI amplify what’s already working.

Conclusion: The right system turns clean data into real impact

Getting your data in order is step one, but the real transformation happens when that clean, trusted data is put to work. That’s where monday CRM delivers.

It’s not just a place to store your customer records. It’s a platform built to turn accurate, well-structured data into intelligent, scalable workflows. With monday.com, revenue teams don’t just organize their data. They activate it. Whether it’s surfacing key insights, generating personalized outreach, or forecasting with confidence, monday.com helps teams stay aligned, efficient, and future-ready.

As EAG’s story showed, the combination of clean data + a flexible, AI-ready system = real results. From visibility and automation to smarter decision-making, monday CRM gives you the clarity and control you need to scale with confidence.

Watch the full webinar on demand