SalesTechStar Interview with Stawan Kadepurkar, CEO and Co-Founder of Provus

Stawan Kadepurkar, CEO and Co-Founder of Provus chats about the various ways in which agentic AI can power sales cycles and experiences in this SalesTechStar interview:

__________

Hi Stawan, tell us about yourself and your role at Provus?

My name is Stawan Kadepurkar, and I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Provus. I started the company about four and a half years ago, after spending more than 27 years in the services industry.

What we’re solving at Provus is something I’ve experienced firsthand, both as an individual contributor and as an executive. No matter the company or industry, the challenge was always the same: services quoting remained painfully manual and time-consuming. When AI started to mature, I started asking myself how can we bring intelligence into every part of that process? That question is what really started our journey.

How is Provus’s agentic AI feature beneficial to revenue teams?

The problem with services quoting is that, unlike product quoting, where you know the cost of a product and just decide on the price, services quoting is a massive team effort. It involves delivery, finance, operations, and sales all working together, talking to the customer, and constantly getting feedback. It’s an ever-evolving process.

Most companies rely on a few “superstars” who keep everything in order and make sure quotes are accurate. With agentic AI, our digital workforce becomes that additional asset, almost duplicating the effort of those superstars so that their knowledge is now available across all teams in a more consistent, scalable way.

How can revenue departments capitalize more on agentic AI to boost the speed of sales cycles?

The biggest slowdown in most sales cycles comes from waiting. People wait for information, for scenario models to be completed, or for approvals and inputs from other departments.

Agentic AI helps remove that waiting. These agents can learn from past deals and start predicting what different stakeholders typically need. For example, if a CFO has asked for the same type of data in several recent deals, the AI can recognize that pattern and have the information ready in advance. The same goes for a CRO who might request competitive insights; the agent already knows what to pull together.

This proactive behavior speeds up the cycle. The most significant delays aren’t with customers; they’re internal. Agentic AI fills those gaps and keeps everyone aligned. It takes on the manual, repetitive work that slows things down, like gathering data or researching trends, so teams can focus on strategy and communication.

Our goal is to empower salespeople with the right information at the right time so deals move faster and more smoothly.

What should businesses be mindful of when using AI to hasten these cycles while keeping the human element and balance intact?

Businesses need to remember that a digital agent is just like an employee. You have to give it the right access and information. If it’s kept in a vacuum, you’ll get bad results. The agent needs context — internal, external, and process-related — to produce meaningful output.

A lot of people assume AI agents are magic, that they’ll automatically create the perfect answer. But they’re really like humans who learn over time. They just have more memory, work faster, and don’t sleep. The key is setting the right level of autonomy and giving them access to accurate data. If you feed bad inputs, you’ll get bad outputs.

In our framework, every agent’s autonomy is defined. At first, they provide insights that sales, finance, or delivery professionals can validate. With feedback, the agent learns and stops repeating mistakes. For example, if you tell it not to use resources from a specific geography due to regulatory reasons, it remembers and adapts.

AI isn’t replacing people; it’s amplifying them. It removes repetitive work and frees teams to focus on higher-value, strategic activities. When people aren’t stuck pushing paper or chasing down approvals, they can do more meaningful, creative work. That’s how you keep the human element intact — by letting AI handle the routine and humans handle the intelligent.

A few thoughts on the future of Sales, SalesTech and AI?

AI is here to stay, and it’s going to make a big difference in SalesTech. Platforms that aren’t adaptable to AI will eventually fade out. That’s how technology evolves.

For sales teams, AI will make life easier. It will surface more data about which clients to target, what to prepare before meetings, and which opportunities are most promising. The challenge isn’t whether companies will adopt AI, but how they’ll ensure everyone benefits from it —not just the top performers. Every team member needs to be uplifted by this wave, not left behind.

The good news is that tools like ChatGPT and others have already made AI familiar to everyone. Just as Google changed how people search for information, AI is now changing how people sell. It’s becoming the starting point, not the last step, in how deals are built, analyzed, and executed.

Five takeaways you’d leave everyone in B2B Sales and Salestech with before we wrap up?

First and foremost, embrace AI. Don’t shy away from it. Learn it, test it, and start using it.

Second, look for areas in your own work where AI can help before waiting for your organization to automate something. You can start small and build from there.

Third, talk to your customers about AI. Don’t assume they already know how it applies to them. Having those conversations opens up opportunities for collaboration and learning on both sides.

Fourth, push your company to adopt new AI technologies. If you don’t, you’ll risk being left behind. When you move to your next role or company, you’ll find most organizations already using AI as part of how they operate.

Fifth, don’t be afraid of AI taking jobs. Every major wave of technology, from electricity to the internet, created new opportunities. Humans are adaptable, and AI will create new types of work that don’t exist yet.