Gartner Report: Why Demos Are Key for AI Agent Products

The product experience (#demo and #demoautomation and interactive demo) news you've been waiting for! Publishing for #Gartner clients tomorrow, this report makes it crystal clear that if you want to market and sell AI #agent and #agentic products, you have to show them to users and buyers. While the need to demo obviously is not news, knowing that multiple product experiences (ranging from POVs, which were most important, to free offers to sandboxes and interactive demos) comprise >50% of the most valuable ways for buyers to engage and evaluate products can help you shorten sales cycles, aid discovery, and understand and inform buying teams. Agents/agentic are poorly understood by most buyers, and as a result, their application and potential outcomes may be mysterious. This is why POVs (proofs of value) are so important, but defraying the mystery and showing the value are also key early on. #presales #b2bmarketing #b2bsales #productmarketing

  • graphical user interface, text, application
Justin McDonald

Co-founder & CEO at Saleo | Incredible Live Demos

1mo

David Yockelson well said - we continue to hear this as a weekly challenge for sales and presales teams. Agentic features and AI co-pilots are incredibly powerful, but notoriously difficult to demo. Their very nature is predicated on having a production LLM as the backbone (sales teams don't have that luxury in their demo environment), which means the result is an unpredictable and poor demo experience. The only way to solve this is to ensure the Live production environment has the demo data it needs to render correctly and accurately based on the scenario the sales team is looking to demonstrate. It's why we built and architected Saleo to operate in the live production environment.

Agreed, AI is notoriously hard to demo. It’s dynamic, can be unpredictable, and easily misunderstood. That’s why a live, tailored product demo matters more than ever. Buyers don’t just need to see value, they need to experience how the AI works for their use case in order to build trust. 

Chris Mabry

VP Solutions & Partnerships @Reprise | GTM Strategist

1mo

This aligns with what I'm seeing too David. Agentic AI is hard to demo. It's powerful, fluid, dynamic - and unpredictable. Building environments add stability while letting your team be creative is the key

From what we've seen, the real challenge for companies building agentic and AI products is not just explaining the technology, but actually proving its value. We believe a great demo is the most effective way to do this.

#nailedit customers often need a tangible 'reason to believe' in their own data environments before embarking on the people, process, and organizational change needed to maximize the value that agents can unlock

This is spot on. "Agents are poorly understood" is the perfect way to put it. The only way to combat that is with a high-fidelity, interactive product experience.

Sam Hillestad

Director of Product Marketing at Reprise

1mo

100%. Agentic AI has to be demystified, but that doesn't just happen with good website copy. Customers have to see it in action across a variety of product experiences before they can trust it.

Very relevant topic thanks for sharing David Yockelson! Basically every single one of our SaaS customers is asking about the best ways to show off their AI chat or agents in an interactive demo.

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Harshit Jain

only product marketer who lives inside cursor | principal pmm @ e6data

1mo

if you don't have product accessible (no demo automation stuff) on the website, then I know you don't sell product, you sell professional services. i won't buy your AI agent if it ain't accessible. none of the $100M in 1 years startups have any demo automation stuff. you don't need them in AI. let your product do the talking.

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Meghan Spork

Marketing @ TestBox | Storyteller & Strategist for B2B SaaS

1mo

100000% This is right on the money and lines up with a lot of what we've been hearing at TestBox, David Yockelson. With AI & agents especially, the skepticism is at an all time high. Buyers need to see it in action and often play with it themselves. No hardcoded simulations, no faking it. It can't just look good, it actually needs to work -- and even better if a buyer can test it out for themselves!

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