AI is supposed to accelerate revenue. So why are deals still falling through?

Deals can fall at the final hurdle for all sorts of reasons. But losing one because of slow internal processes is unforgivable. And yet it happens far more frequently than most are willing to admit. 

In fact, it’s one of the main reasons why businesses are so quick to invest in artificial intelligence. The hope is that by enabling faster decisions and greater precision across the entire sales process, AI promises a version of the future where this entirely avoidable problem is eliminated. 

However, despite all this investment, according to new research from Conga, a staggering 93% of businesses say that deals struggle to move smoothly across sales, legal, finance, pricing and IT. While AI can help accelerate processes like pipeline generation, the presence of AI may actually be making this problem worse, as already inadequate connections between teams become even more overwhelmed. 

So, what’s the issue? 

More often than not, it’s organisations treating each function across the sales pipeline in isolation, optimizing the function of individual systems rather than looking at the whole picture. AI alone cannot fix what’s not connected, meaning that when each process in the commerce chain is operating in isolation, the hoped-for acceleration of the entire deal fails to materialize. 

For most businesses, there’s no better example of this disconnected drag on overall business efficiency than the relationship between pricing, quoting and contracting. 

The power of intelligent pricing 

The one constant in the last five years has been volatility, whether that’s from freak market disruptions or changing customer expectations. This means the ability to pivot quickly has become an absolute necessity, and pricing teams must form the foundation of that agility. This is one of the key emerging areas of AI benefit for businesses — faster, more market-responsive pricing. 

AI-powered pricing capabilities allow businesses to adjust dynamically and, more importantly, quickly to whatever turbulence the market is currently experiencing. It also enables greater consistency across regions and channels, meaning teams don’t have to waste their valuable time on wholly preventable pricing disputes. Take a sudden tariff shift for example, where a traditional pricing team might take weeks to recalibrate, AI surfaces updated recommendations in hours — turning disruption into advantage.  

However, like all AI decision-making, sensible pricing suggestions are entirely dependent on the data being fed into the AI, and that doesn’t just mean external information like market fluctuations or supplier costs. Without additional context from internal factors like win rates, revenue impact or deal velocity, to name a few, the outputs will be less informed and therefore less useful. 

But there’s another reason for connecting your pricing to the rest of your commerce chain that is equally, if not more, important. Pricing represents the way a business agrees with a buyer on the value being delivered. It is the heart of the commercial agreement, the keystone in the bridge between the product being sold and the value it delivers to a customer. And if that pricing strategy isn’t clearly connected with the rest of the commercial system, everything downstream has less information, is less clear, and can become disconnected from the buyer expectation; a fact that quickly becomes apparent once it comes time to send over the quote. 

Quoting with confidence 

Quoting is where the theory around pricing strategy becomes a customer’s reality, and a smooth, well-executed process can make or break a deal. After all, it is the first, most formative interaction a prospective buyer has with a business. 

But while many organisations may think that their quoting process is fit for purpose, the data tells a very different story. Nearly half of the organisations surveyed (45%) reported that they had lost a deal in the last six months due to slow quote approvals. That’s a huge amount of revenue from interested buyers that’s been lost solely because internal functions weren’t operating as well as they should. 

That’s not to say that quoting isn’t a complicated process. Multiple teams — from sales and finance through to legal and IT — all may need to review, and each handoff introduces the potential for delay or confusion. Yet that very quoting process often dictates whether a business is able to secure revenue, and so building operational cohesion into the quoting process must be a priority. 

Put simply, a modern quoting system needs to streamline decision-making and improve clarity in complex deal environments, not muddy the waters further. The speed of quoting is directly linked to whether each team has the information it needs. Sales wants to build relationships and push the deal through, finance wants to protect margin, and legal wants to reduce exposure, but they all need information and context to do so, which is only possible when quoting is fully connected to the rest of the sales ecosystem. AI-powered approval can route direct quotes to the right reviewer automatically, eliminating the back-and-forth between teams that could slow momentum.  

Connected contracting 

After the quote comes the contract, which formalises and locks in all the decisions and terms made up to that point. As a result, it’s crucial that contracting is connected to pricing and quoting to ensure that nothing is overlooked or miscommunicated before the terms are written in stone. 

However, contracting doesn’t just sit passively at the end of the commerce chain, only receiving information from the processes upstream. Legal teams must provide feedback quickly to reduce the friction that slows down, and often loses, deals. This means that effective contract management, fully connected to sales, finance, customer success, and so on is an essential requirement for a healthy commerce engine.  

That’s because it’s not just legal teams who are impacted by inefficient contracting processes. Without visibility into the contracts, finance teams can’t forecast as accurately, procurement teams lose their leverage and the business’s compliance risk increases. But when the contracts become an active intelligence layer, able to be reviewed, analysed, and understood, connected into the rest of the commerce chain, organisations  improve how they manage deals while also strengthening the whole sales process end-to-end. AI has a key role here too, accelerating not only contract review, amendments and clause creation, but also presenting leaders with a clear view of overall contract risk, and potential new risk associated with every deal. 

A self-reinforcing cycle 

Pricing, quoting and contracting make up the backbone of the commerce chain. If one of them is weak or disconnected, it creates bottlenecks, impairs decision-making and, in the worst-case scenario, holds businesses back from generating revenue. 

But when these stages are aligned and powered by intelligent systems, it enables organisations to move beyond avoiding missed opportunities to actively identifying and capturing new ones. Because instead of being an isolated function in a linear flowchart, each system in a strong commerce chain feeds into the other — and is stronger for it. 

Successful businesses prevent deals falling at the final hurdle as the result of slow, inefficient, and poorly informed response to buyers. By connecting their commerce chain and investing in the right technology to power it, they can, and will, be more responsive than their competitors, deliver a better buying experience to their customers, and ultimately drive profitable growth in even the most disrupted, complex markets.