How to train AI Sales Engineer on "tribal knowledge"?
There’s a difference between how people train an AI Sales Engineer (“SE”) and a human SE.
When training an AI SE, people throw a lot of text at it: docs, APIs, website copy, Confluence docs – you name it.
In other words, they train an AI SE on knowledge that has been “documented.”
But that’s not how you train a human SE.
When an SE joins the team, we don't hand them a stack of manuals and say, "Good luck!"
No way!
We focus on passing down "tribal knowledge" - stuff that never makes it into documentation.
We do this by:
- Showing them how to demo the product,
- Having them shadow sales calls,
- Adding them to Slack channels.
This “tribal” knowledge separates effective SEs from average ones.
That’s also why losing one of your veteran SEs feels like such a gut punch – they take a part of this tribal knowledge with them.
So, in training Sam - the AI Sales Engineer - we emphasize teaching it this “tribal” knowledge, as if it’s another colleague.
We feed it product demo videos, Gong sales calls, and have it join Slack connect channels.
Or, even better, customers let Sam shadow their best reps and SEs.
In a few weeks, it learns the nuances of messaging, objection handling, and solutioning that are never documented.
Just like a human SE.