What 15 Years of Pre-AI CPQ Got Right That AI Teams Now Re-Learn
I keep reading agentic AI postmortems that arrive at a conclusion I learned in 2011: the model is only as good as the product catalog underneath it.
The framing is new. The lesson is not. I have spent 15 years working with Salesforce CPQ and CLM, currently serving as Lead Product Owner on the T-Mobile account through Mphasis. On that program, I led a transformation that drove $20M+ in annual revenue impact, $3M+ in licensing savings, and a 50% reduction in contract creation time. None of those numbers came from a clever model. They came from product modeling, validation rules, and catalog hygiene done correctly first.
The 2025 MIT NANDA study quantified the cost of forgetting this. Despite $30 to $40 billion in enterprise generative AI investment, the report found 95% of organizations getting zero return, based on a review of more than 300 public AI initiatives, interviews with 52...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
