66% of Sales Leaders Don't Trust Their Own AI Insights — Highspot's CRO on Build vs. Buy

Highspot CRO Stuart Gammon is arguing against the binary that dominates most revenue-AI planning: build everything proprietary, or buy everything off the shelf. His case for a hybrid approach starts with a trust problem — Gartner research he cites found 66% of sales leaders report low trust in AI-generated insights within their own organizations, and separately, 36% point to misalignment among revenue leadership as a cause of go-to-market execution breakdowns. Gammon’s rule: build proprietary AI only where it creates genuine competitive differentiation, and buy mature, purpose-built go-to-market capability for everything else. Either path, he argues, requires the same foundation — unified data access across customer-facing functions, integration of pre- and post-sale signals, governed permissioning, continuous learning from actual revenue outcomes, and grounding recommendations in trusted business intelligence rather than generic model output.

The build-side risk Gammon is implicitly warning against has a number attached to it. Outreach’s own build-vs-buy analysis cites the Standish Group’s CHAOS 2020 benchmark: only 31% of IT projects were fully successful, 50% were over budget, late, or under-scoped, and 19% were canceled outright — a base rate that makes “we’ll just build it” a genuine gamble, not a neutral default. On the buy side, Outreach’s customer data shows what a mature platform can return when adopted fully: Cisco’s highest platform adopters saw 85% more activity, 9% more pipeline, and a 5% higher close rate; Siemens reached a 70% forecast-submission rate after standardizing on one platform; RUCKUS estimated $2 million in annual savings from forecast consolidation.

Gammon’s closing point is procedural rather than technical: establish clear ownership of AI systems and standardize governance controls before deployment, and calculate full lifecycle cost — development labor, vendor fees, testing, support — before choosing a path, not after.

For sales and RevOps leaders sitting on a build-vs-buy decision, the 66% trust-gap number is the one to interrogate first: a homegrown tool nobody trusts and a purchased platform nobody adopted fully both fail the same way, for the same underlying reason.