Salesloft.

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The CRO + CIO Playbook for

Revenue-Driving AI Agents

A tactical companion to The Sales Leader's Guide to AI Agents

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Table of Contents

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Action 1: Start with partnership

Action 3: Build the agentic foundation

Action 4: Operationalize the system

Get ahead of the “no” by partnering with your CIO

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Get the green light faster from your CIO, featuring proven tactics from Salesloft’s Information Security lead

Today, with CIOs leading 71% of enterprise AI initiatives,
 your revenue AI rollout won’t get approved if it doesn’t meet your CIO’s standards. But if you partner with your CIO from the start, you can unlock unprecedented durable revenue growth together. This is your blueprint for making that partnership work.

Salesloft teams have seen how fast things move when revenue and IT align from the start. Mike and Mark share tips for revenue leaders to partner with IT leadership and work together to establish agentic AI that gives you a competitive edge.

In this playbook, you’ll learn how to:

Align with IT and security leaders from the start [Image: X1]

Operationalize AI directly inside seller workflows [Image: X1]

without breaking compliance

Move fast thout breaking compliance

K eep reading to see how to j oin forces with your IT or tec h
 leader to unlock AI' s full potential — safely, scalably, and wit h
 real revenue impact.

Mike Browne

Mike Meyer Salesloft CIO

Mark Nixon

Mark Niemiec

Salesloft CRO

Salesloft.

Salesloft.

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Action 1:

Start with partnership

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CIOs are often seen as the ‘process police’ because we care about compliance and locking things down. But our job as technology leaders is to enable the business to achieve its desired outcomes through technology.

Mike Meyer Salesloft CIO

The first step is shifting your mindset: your CIO is a partner, not a gatekeeper. They are your most essential partner in bringing AI to life. CIOs are responsible for data security, policy enforcement, and vendor governance. But the best CIOs see themselves as enablers of business outcomes. Their goal is to ensure the systems you rely on can scale safely and sustainably.

What CROs are solving for

Reclaiming seller time

Boosting pipeline and revenue

Delivering faster cycles

Scaling personalization

Showing payback in quarters

What CIOs are solving for

Enabling the business with technology

Protecting customer data

Policy enforcement

Vendor governance

System reliability

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That’s why leading organizations are establishing AI governance

committees. These cross-functional decision-making bodies drive adoption and reduce downstream risk.

They set direction, vet use cases, define policy guardrails, and monitor rollout performance. Coauthorship accelerates trust. Approvals happen faster. Feedback loops are tighter. Everyone knows who owns what.

Who’s who on a typical AI committee?

IT & Security

Oversees system architecture, data protection, and platform integrity [Image: X1]

Owns implementation, workflow integration, and adoption support [Image: X1]

Sales Leadership
 Defines business outcomes and AI use cases [Image: X1]

Legal & Compliance

Ensures policy alignment, regulatory compliance, and risk mitigation [Image: X1]

To do:

Reframe the conversation from tool procurement to strategic transformation.

Even the most advanced platform will stall without the CIO’s buy-in. But when CROs and CIOs approach agentic AI together, it becomes a durable and defensible growth strategy. [Image: X1] [Image: X1]

Establish an AI committee with other key stakeholders.

This cross-functional group should:

R eview and approve A I use cases and vendors

D efine agent behavior, boundaries, and policies

Track adoption and impact across teams

Salesloft.

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You can’t treat AI like just another sales tool. You need

the right team to operationalize it. The CRO

defines the goals, but it takes the technology leaders,

RevOps, and Legal partners to get it right.

Mark Niemiec

Chief Revenue Officer at Salesloft

Tip: You can find more information about this topic in our Revenue Leader’s Guide to AI Transformation.

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Action 2:

Align on Strategy

As a CRO, you need to be able to
 translate sales pain and requirements
 into IT priorities.

CRO into IT priorities.

Mark Niemiec

Chief Revenue Officer at Salesloft

Joint ownership starts with shared goals. A CRO might focus on pipeline velocity or seller capacity. A CIO might care more about vendor consolidation or governance automation. To achieve strategic alignment, you’ll need to define what success looks like for revenue and IT.

For example, say you want to reduce seller admin time. Your CIO will need to understand how the AI system will preserve data integrity, comply with governance policies, and avoid shadow tool behavior. It’s not about softening your case. It’s about showing you’ve thought it through.

Once you build your strategic groundwork together, you can approach the AI committee with aligned OKRs and a cohesive plan that gives you
 a running start for approval and implementation.

CRO CIO
 Sets business
 Builds the systems
 priorities to achieve them Shared goal
 Drive durable results with AI

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Revenue OKR

Reduce time sellers spend on admin by 30%. [Image: X1]

Use AI-generated insights in 75%+
 of manager 1:1s. [Image: X1]

Improve forecast accuracy by 10%. [Image: X1]

Deploy AI-driven workflows across 100% 
 of strategic accounts. [Image: X1]

Aligned IT OKR

Consolidate redundant tools by 25%. [Image: X1]

Ensure AI-generated coaching meets audit criteria for accuracy and fairness. [Image: X1]

Integrate AI outputs into core BI systems without manual intervention. [Image: X1]

Implement a usage dashboard tracking agent effectiveness, adoption, and ROI across
 business units. [Image: X1]

To do:

Learn to speak the same language as your CIO.

That means translating revenue objectives into IT-ready terms. You don’t need to be fluent in governance and compliance, but if you show you’ve done the thinking and can meet the CIO halfway, you’ll move faster.  [Image: X1]

Define mutual priorities.

By defining mutual priorities — like pipeline growth for sales and system consolidation for IT — we’ve been able to launch and scale AI agents with clarity and control. [Image: X1]

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Joint ownership also improves rollout speed. When both leaders sponsor the effort, their teams are more likely to support integration, adoption, and feedback loops. AI becomes part of the way work gets done not just a feature that needs promotion.

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Even the most advanced agentic AI requires the right groundwork.

Action 3: Mike describes an agentic AI triad that any business unit must optimize and

bring together for success with agentic AI: data, prompting, and action.

Build the agentic foundation

If you can get these three things in one “ place, your team is going to thank you. Because they are going to generate more pipeline, close deals faster, and ultimately drive more durable revenue.

Mike Meyer Salesloft CIO

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CONSIDERATIONS FOR REVENUE

AI performance depends on access to timely, structured inputs. But sales data is often fragmented across CRMs, calendar apps, call recordings, and email.

Without a unified system, governed by policy and access control, your AI will return incomplete results.

And your CIO won't approve a tool that scrapes sensitive data from multiple sources without oversight.

TALKING POINTS FOR CIO COLLABORATION

• What systems does the agentic AI need access to? • How will the AI integrate with all relevant systems? • What security and compliance considerations do we need to plan for?

The system must reflect the way your sellers actually sell.

A large language model by itself isn't enough. You need a tool that's tuned to the nuances of revenue work: understanding buyer behavior, stage progression, urgency, and persona.

Off-the-shelf tools won't recognize pipeline risk or coach reps effectively.

• Is this LLM purpose-built for revenue workflows? • Will agentic AI add complexity to the revenue workflow or simplify it? • Will it help us upskill and coach sellers?

Agents only drive outcomes when they operate within the workflow.

If sellers have to switch tabs to see insights, adoption will falter. Agents should prompt actions, surface insights, and act on behalf of your sellers from inside the systems they already use.

Embedding AI into your workflow will help sellers stay focused and ultimately spend more time engaging with customers.

• Does it perform actions and deliver guidance autonomously, as well as providing insight on request? • Will sellers have to switch between windows? • How will we measure adoption and seller improvement?

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To do:

Optimize and bring together the agentic AI triad of data, prompting, and action.

[Image: X1]

The organization needs shared ownership and the right foundation to make it scalable, governed, and effective.

Maintain transparency and trust with a shared dashboard with audit trails and agent telemetry.

IT will need to know which agents are active, what data they touch, and how controls are enforced. Revenue will want to see which actions drive results, where sellers struggle, and how adoption is trending.  [Image: X1]

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CIOs are being very cautious and thoughtful about deployment because there are security, government, governance, accuracy, and performance issues that still need to be resolved.

Tom Coshow

Senior Director Analyst of AI at Gartner

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Action 4:

Operationalize the system

“Revenue action orchestration, a new sales technology market, merges capabilities across sales engagement, revenue intelligence and SFA markets into a unified, AI-driven solution. Sales operations leaders can harness RAO to optimize sales velocity and future-proof the sales organization.” [Image: X2]

— Revenue Action Orchestration: A Gartner Trend Insight Report by Dan Gottlieb and 
 Steve Rietberg at Gartner

Once you have the foundation, it’s time to build your infrastructure. Salesloft uses a model called Revenue Action Orchestration, a closed-loop system that captures signals, applies reasoning, and triggers actions inside seller workflows.

Capture

Reason

Act

Takes action inside the workflow: assigning tasks,

Captures signals from emails, meetings, CRM updates, and calls

Uses sales-trained AI to reason across urgency, persona, stage, and risk

T akes action nudging reps, and updating CRM fields

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The more visible and governable your AI is, the sooner revenue and 
 IT will see a return on investment.

AI accuracy Unrivaled accuracy and relevance

Feel confident that seller actions drive revenue impact with insights derived from a robust data model comprising over 5B+ buyer-seller interactions.
 [Image: X1]

In our work with dozens of enterprise teams, we’ve found that time-tovalue improves dramatically when the underlying AI follows clear rules. Our AI is based on four clear principles:

Contextualized AI Transparent and explainable

Always understand the “ why ” behind the recommendations the AI surface s
 with in-product explanations, building trust in the AI model and in sellers ’
 own intuition. [Image: X1]

These principles result in better adoption, cleaner data, and lower risk. Sellers save time and get direction, leaders gain accurate data without manual logging, and CIOs see explainable behavior inside a
 governed system.

Purpose-built AI Drive impact where it matters

No more guessing: agents identify the right actions to take directly in the seller workflow, so you get to revenue outcomes quickly without disrupting a seller's day-to-day routine. [Image: X1]

AI security I ndustrial-grade pr otecti on

The world’s most security-conscious companies trust our AI to power personalized, adaptable buying experiences without compromising governance, control, or flexibility. [Image: X1]

Salesloft.

Salesloft.

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To do:

Build a business-backed use case.

What problem are you solving? What does it unlock for revenue? Think call summaries to reclaim seller hours or prioritization 
 agents to boost pipeline velocity. [Image: X1]

Establish an architecture and integration map.

Where does the agent sit? What systems does it touch? Where does the data flow? Who has access? [Image: X1]

Create a governance plan.

Establish auditability, controls, and fallback mechanisms. Demonstrate that you know how to keep AI explainable and within bounds. [Image: X1]

Involve InfoSec from Day 1.

Don’t wait until the contract’s on the table to ask for an InfoSec review.  [Image: X1]

Avoid “just a pilot” shortcuts.

Document oversight mechanisms from the beginning, including audit logs, scope limits, and rollback procedures. [Image: X1]

Salesloft.

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For the CIO, it simplifies your life. Instead of wrangling with multiple vendors to connect data, AI, and sales tools, you’ve got a unified platform. You become the hero who gave the revenue team a competitive edge.

Mike Meyer Salesloft CIO

Salesloft.

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For the CRO, it’s about accelerating your selling motion. Agents help your team prioritize leads, personalize conversations, and automate repetitive tasks that kill productivity. You see faster sales cycles, more pipeline, and ultimately more revenue.

Chief Revenue Officer at Salesloft

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Revenue teams don’t

have months to ramp

Salesloft delivers meaningful productivity, deal visibility, and pipeline action within the first 10 days, so your team can focus

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Every week, Salesloft hears from leaders who want to act on AI but are unsure how to start. The intent is there. The opportunity is

Get ahead of the

clear. The hesitation comes from uncertainty around risk, oversight, and impact.

“no” by partnering

We believe the best way to start is with a partnership. When CROs and CIOs develop a plan together, you can establish infrastructure to drive durable revenue growth for years to come. Because the

with your CIO

platform matters, and governance matters, but what makes AI successful is the alignment between those who use it and those who approve it.

Salesloft builds AI agents that meet the expectations of revenue and IT teams alike. If you’re ready to explore what that looks like, get a demo (and bring your CIO along with you). What I hear over and over from “ every technology leader I talk to is: ‘We want to take advantage of agentic capabilities, but we honestly don’t know how to go about it.’

Mike Meyer Salesloft CIO

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