Terrapinn’s first company-wide AI rollout stalled at about 50% adoption. AI sales coaching is what moved it forward. Asghar Maqsood, Terrapinn’s Group Digital and AI Director, told the story at aiblLIVE London 2026, in conversation with Samantha Stephens, AVP at Gong.
Instead of giving everyone a tool and hoping, Terrapinn gave its sales team one clear use case. It used Gong’s call data to rebuild its sales playbook, and now every call is scored against it. Here is how it worked.
All figures as stated on stage by Asghar Maqsood.
Because access alone did not give people a reason to use it. Terrapinn rolled out Gemini to everyone, chosen mainly on commercial terms. Training and workshops followed, but adoption never rose above about 50%.
It is quite easy to give a tool to everybody, but if you want to have an impact, you need to design for it.
Asghar Maqsood, Group Digital and AI Director, Terrapinn
Terrapinn gave sales a defined use case. Gong’s conversation data exposed weaknesses across the team. At first, managers reviewed a call here and there when they had time, which did not change much.
So Terrapinn rebuilt its sales methodology and wrote a playbook. Every call is now scored against it, and managers coach each rep from concrete, scored examples.
The pattern points that way, though Terrapinn is careful not to overclaim. Across about 70,000 calls, reps who use Gong more close more deals. The most engaged tier brings in about twice the revenue of the least engaged tier. Terrapinn treats this as a correlation, not proof of cause.
Buy the foundation, then build the difference. Maqsood buys commodity tools that everyone needs and builds only what gives a defensible edge. Gong is the foundation. Terrapinn’s own playbook and custom flows are the difference, built by a specialist team and released centrally to control duplication and AI credit costs.
You have to literally take the process, put it apart, and rebuild it with AI and governance and everything that goes with it.
Asghar Maqsood, Group Digital and AI Director, Terrapinn
Asghar Maqsood is Group Digital and AI Director at Terrapinn, the B2B events organiser behind about 39 brands and more than 90 events a year. Samantha Stephens is AVP at Gong, responsible for its revenue teams across EMEA. They spoke on the Growth track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If your team has the AI tools but not the results, this is the model to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in the speakers’ own words.
For CROs, sales leaders, COOs and digital or AI leads whose AI rollout has stalled. Six pages, about an eight-minute read.
