I sat down with Matt Darrow, CEO of Vivun, for a conversation that stayed with me long after we stopped recording. Vivun means “lever” in Finnish. That’s not a throwaway detail. It’s the whole philosophy of the company. Give sales teams leverage, and the rest takes care of itself.

Their flagship product is called Hero. And the name fits. Hero is an AI teammate built specifically for sales, and it does something most AI sales tools don’t even attempt. It shows up in the live conversation. Not before the call. Not after the call. During it.

I asked Matt what problem Hero solves. His answer cut through forty years of sales technology noise: execution. Every rep has felt it. You’re on a call, a tough question comes up, and you don’t have the answer in your head. Matt told me about ADP, a company running 7,000 sellers across 100 product lines. Their reps now bring an AI teammate onto the Zoom call itself, like another person in the room. When a 23-year-old rep in Missouri gets a question about payroll law in a specific municipality, the teammate jumps in. The deal keeps moving. Nobody says, “let me get back to you.”

That’s the bleeding edge. But Matt also described something more conservative, and honestly more relatable for most sales organizations today. He calls it whisper mode. The AI listens in the background, off to the side of the call, coaching the rep in real time. The customer never knows it’s there. The rep just performs better.

What struck me most was Matt’s honesty about where AI pilots succeed and where they stall. He sees strong results on the bookends of the sales process, in prospecting and in customer support. But the middle, the live execution zone where deals get won or lost, is where most pilots never make it to production. He’s blunt about why. Companies tried to custom-build agents themselves, or they rolled out tools that saved reps a few hours here and there. Sales leaders don’t want a few hours. They want velocity, win rate, and faster ramp time.

Matt also made a case I didn’t expect. He believes Claude, not Gong or Salesforce, may be the bigger disruptor to how sales teams work every day.

His closing thought is the one I keep coming back to. AI isn’t going to replace the sales organization. It’s going to be the Ironman suit. The human stays in the seat. The tools just make the seller stronger.

Want to hear more from Matt directly? He’ll be presenting alongside two senior sales leaders from ADP at the AI Sales Summit Sept 2-4, sharing how their teams are putting this into practice at scale. Register free with this code: https://bit.ly/4uEFIhB

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Selling Power. He has interviewed Marc Benioff and hundreds of the world’s top sales leaders and authors over a career spanning more than four decades. Reach him at gg@sellingpower.com.