Four company announcements landed within 48 hours of each other this week, and each one describes the same retirement. A quote, a contract, a weekly report or a piece of seller guidance used to live in a spreadsheet, an email thread or a document library, and it now lives inside a system that updates itself.
What the four companies describe
Quotes at Ericsson
SAP’s feature on Ericsson describes quotes tied to multi-year framework agreements with negotiated pricing and customer entitlements. A customer returning months after signing had to contact an account representative, who gathered the information, validated the contract terms and prepared the quote. SAP says that process could take more than two weeks in some cases. Using SAP Commerce Cloud, Ericsson now offers dedicated storefronts built around each agreement, where customers generate quotes and place orders themselves, and SAP says many requests are completed in minutes or even seconds.
Aaron Thomas, Ericsson’s global product owner, said: “We want to be easier to work with as a partner to our customers.” Ericsson is now evaluating whether AI agents can prepare proposed quotes for human review, and SAP says employees remain responsible for oversight.
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Contracts at Tottenham Hotspur
Salesforce’s announcement about Tottenham Hotspur covers the club’s fan-facing agent, and it also covers the commercial side. The club now processes premium hospitality, conference and events bookings through an integrated Salesforce stack. Salesforce says that replaced manual, spreadsheet-based contracts and finance tracking with automated quoting, contracting and real-time payment visibility through Stripe and Workday.
The Monday report at Klient
Klient’s release for Klient Insights starts from a familiar scene. Someone exports hours, invoices and the resource plan, then rebuilds a spreadsheet to answer four questions about margin, capacity, unbilled time and client health. Klient Insights puts those answers on live dashboards inside Salesforce. CEO Yanick Abraham said: “The data was already in Salesforce.” Klient adds that each person sees only the records their Salesforce access allows.
Guidance at IBM and Seismic
Seismic’s recap of its Shift 2026 opening day carries the same idea for sellers. CEO Rob Tarkoff said: “The best guidance will no longer sit in a dashboard waiting to be found or growing outdated as AI moves faster.” IBM’s enablement team embedded Seismic in its own AI platform, and one IBM seller said prep work that took two to three hours now takes 15 minutes, with meeting notes landing in the CRM automatically.
The four cases also differ in scale. Ericsson works with customers in more than 190 countries, according to SAP. Tottenham Hotspur counts more than 4.6 million fan accounts. Klient serves professional-services firms of 50 to 1,000 people. The shared habit shows up at every size, which suggests it is a feature of how revenue teams work and has little to do with company scale.
Why the spreadsheet was there in the first place
A spreadsheet is what a team builds when the system of record cannot answer the question being asked this week. It is flexible, nobody needs permission to start one, and it can hold a pricing exception or a half-agreed discount that the quoting tool has no field for. The cost is lag and copies. Klient describes the numbers as a few days old by the time the sheet is ready, and Ericsson’s old quote path depended on one person assembling the facts by hand.
In our reading, the common move in these four cases is to put the rules into a structure first and add automation second. Ericsson digitized its contract and pricing rules and put them in front of customers before it began evaluating agents. Tottenham Hotspur spent two years connecting more than 10 systems before launching its agent. Klient built ready-made templates before offering an AI agent that builds a custom view. An agent needs something to read, and a spreadsheet in someone’s inbox is not it.
All four accounts come from the companies involved or from their vendors, so every time saving in them is self-reported. Ericsson’s minutes-or-seconds figure is SAP’s phrasing, the IBM prep figure comes from one seller, and Klient’s dashboards are rolling out now. They are claims to test against your own numbers before they become planning assumptions.
What it means for the sales leader
Quoting and pricing sit closest to revenue, so they are the first place to look. Earlier SalesTech coverage of SAP’s AI-assisted quoting preview and how sales teams can make estimates easier to trust points the same way: speed in the quote is a buyer-facing feature. The recurring weekly report is the second place. If a manager rebuilds the same sheet every Monday, that sheet is a requirements document for a dashboard, and the questions it answers are already defined.
The permissions detail deserves attention too. Klient’s dashboards inherit Salesforce access, so each viewer sees what their role allows. A spreadsheet emailed to a team carries everything its author could see. As quoting, contracts and reports move into live systems, the access model moves with them, which makes it easier to answer who saw which price.
How to evaluate a move off the spreadsheet
Start with an inventory. List the spreadsheets that touch pricing, contracts, forecasts and pipeline review, and note who owns each and how often it is rebuilt. Rank them by how many people wait on the output. The sheet that makes customers wait, like Ericsson’s old quote path, goes first.
Next, ask what the sheet knows that the system does not. Pricing exceptions, approval paths and customer entitlements are the usual answers. If those rules cannot be written down as fields or workflow steps, no agent will draft a correct quote from them either. Finally, measure before and after on the same task. IBM’s seller reported time on a prep task, and Ericsson reported time to a quote. Pick one task, time it for a sample of people now, and repeat the measurement after the change. The result is a number a finance partner will accept, and it tells you whether the next layer of automation has something solid underneath it.
Source: SAP News Center
