How Sales & Finance Can Harness the Power of AI

Why does AI represent the next major step-change in how businesses operate? And how can Sales and Finance departments utilize AI to get more value from their CRM & ERP, and improve business outcomes?

You’ve heard (and will continue to hear) a lot about how AI and LLMs will drastically change our working world. As a new set of tools helping companies mine for new value and efficiencies, senior leaders everywhere are pressured to adopt a growing array of AI products. The sheer speed with which new AI-centric technologies are getting released hints strongly that this latest tech wave is different from the last few that have gotten similar hype. Anyone remember IoT? How about the ever-present lurking of crypto?

While those tech waves have yet to prove their value at a wide scale, it’s clear to most that AI is different. Like electricity, it represents a new kind of energy that companies can harness to meet their goals: better customer experience, improved financial performance, increased team productivity, and more.

But energy requires fuel — until the laws of thermodynamics are conquered once and for all, AI, like energy, will require fuel in order to work. We all know that AI relies on massive amounts of compute as one type of fuel in order to function, but that’s not the whole story. What else does it need? In a word, Data.

In a recent interview, OpenAI’s head of developer relations, Logan Kilpatrick, emphasized an inescapable truth about AI: “Context is the only thing that matters.” He continues: “It so deeply wants to answer your question…without that context, it’s just hard to give you anything of value.”

These are powerful statements that address the heart of every important AI implementation issue point blank: With context, AI can provide a transcendent level of insightful output — the kind of next-level response that massively accelerates how people work — and that most leadership strives for.

With the right context, you can get AI to do amazing things, even in the most unlikely places.

Without context, you get generic, irrelevant responses that might make you question why you’re using AI in the first place.

What Does This Mean in the Salesforce Ecosystem?

For Sales and Finance teams working within Salesforce, the implication is clear: the value of AI is directly proportional to the quality and richness of the data it can access. A Salesforce instance populated only with CRM data gives AI a partial picture. But when you integrate financial and ERP data — invoices, payments, subscriptions, purchase orders — AI suddenly has the full context it needs to deliver genuinely transformative insights.

Imagine AI that can predict which deals are most likely to close based not just on sales activity, but on the prospect’s actual payment history and financial health. Or an AI assistant that can flag at-risk accounts by correlating late payments in your ERP with declining engagement in your CRM.

This is the promise of AI in the Salesforce ecosystem — but it requires the right data foundations to be in place first.

Why choose Breadwinner?

• Lightning-fast Integration with minimal manual setup
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