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THE INTERVIEW
TUESDAY
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
IN THE HOT SEAT
Kofi Ankomah
Enterprise Account Director
The biggest shift is the speed at which valuable work can be achieved. Customers can build prototypes in hours rather than weeks, so they come into conversations already informed and already experimenting. The seller's job has moved from explaining what a tool can do to shaping the right vision.
THE SETUP
Kofi Ankomah is an Enterprise Account Director at OpenAI, selling one of the most talked-about products on earth to organisations still working out what to do with it. We sat down with him to find out what enterprise selling looks like when your buyer has already used your product before you ever call them.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
The long proof of concept is dying. Buyers arrive already experimenting, so sell best practice, vision and adoption.
Personal ChatGPT use is nothing like enterprise adoption. The real sale is security, governance and change management.
Unfreeze paralysed buyers with one specific workflow, never a finished AI strategy.
Automate the admin, keep the human. Kofi runs Codex as a personal chief of staff.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
A way to unfreeze buyers who are excited about AI but paralysed on committing
The move that turns surface-level familiarity into a real enterprise conversation
How one of OpenAI's own sellers uses AI as a personal chief of staff
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01 · The proof of concept is dying. Here's what replaced it
Kofi told us the long evaluation cycle is quietly disappearing. Buyers can test ideas themselves in hours, which means they arrive educated and mid-experiment.
That changes the seller's job into three parts:
Best practice. Show them how the best organisations are actually adopting.
Vision. Help them shape where this goes beyond the first experiment.
Adoption. Move them from tinkering to meaningful enterprise rollout.
The days of needing very long proofs of concept are changing. Many customers come into conversations already informed and already experimenting.
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DO THIS THIS WEEK
Audit your current opportunities. For each one, ask whether you're still explaining the product to someone who has already tested it. If so, switch the conversation to best practice and adoption.
02 · Everyone thinks they understand your product. They don't
OpenAI has a strange problem: near-universal familiarity. Most buyers have used ChatGPT personally. Kofi's point is that personal use and responsible enterprise adoption are entirely different things.
Using AI as an individual and adopting it responsibly across an enterprise are very different things.
The real conversation covers security, governance, use cases, change management, integration and how value gets measured. He kept coming back to one foundation: clarity on data.
We are very clear that the customer's data is their own. They control that information. That clarity is a foundation for trust.
STEAL THIS
When a buyer says they already know your category, agree, then move the conversation one level down. Familiarity with the surface is your opening to sell the depth.
03 · The cure for AI paralysis is a smaller question
Plenty of Kofi's prospects are excited about AI in principle and frozen in practice. The scale of the opportunity is exactly what stops them starting. His fix is to shrink the frame.
You do not need every part of your AI strategy fully defined before you begin. Start with a specific problem. That makes the opportunity tangible and gives the customer a way to build confidence.
The progression he described: move from a broad conversation about AI to a focused conversation about value, governance and execution.
TRY THIS ON YOUR NEXT CALL
When a buyer says they're still working out their AI strategy, ask which single workflow causes their team the most friction this quarter. Sell into that.
04 · The human part of selling is untouched. The rest is up for grabs
Kofi uses Codex daily as what he calls a personal chief of staff: follow-ups, account research, forecasts, tailored customer presentations. The admin around selling shrinks, and the time goes back into people.
The core of selling has not changed. It is still about connecting with people, understanding their problems, and finding solutions that help solve them.
His advice for anyone starting an enterprise career now follows the same line: use AI to remove friction from the work you already do, never to replace the things that make you exceptional.
THE MOVE
List every administrative task you did last week. Anything that didn't involve understanding a customer is a candidate for automation.
THE ONE THING
Start with a specific problem, never a finished AI strategy. Confidence is built one workflow at a time.
WHERE TO FIND KOFI
Kofi Ankomah is Enterprise Account Director at OpenAI, the AI research and product company behind ChatGPT and the API powering enterprise AI adoption worldwide. Find him on LinkedIn or visit openai.com.
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