Innovating Pre-Sales Processes with AI: Emerging Tools for Automating Product Demonstrations
Adish Rai , Account Manager Amazon Web Services Inc., USAAbstract
Product demonstrations represent a critical stage in B2B sales cycles, enabling prospects to evaluate software capabilities before purchase decisions. Traditional demo approaches require sales engineers to manually configure environments, populate sample data, and customize presentations for each prospect's use case. This process consumes significant pre-sales resources and limits the number of demonstrations teams can deliver. Artificial intelligence and automation technologies enable scalable demo delivery through automated environment provisioning, intelligent data generation, personalized demo paths, and self-service exploration capabilities. This paper presents a framework for implementing AI-assisted product demonstrations in B2B software sales. We describe demo environment automation, AI-driven personalization, self-service demo platforms, analytics and optimization approaches, and implementation considerations. The framework addresses common pre-sales challenges including resource constraints, demo quality consistency, and prospect engagement measurement. While examples reference B2B software contexts, the principles apply across industries where product demonstrations drive purchasing decisions.
Keywords
pre-sales, product demonstrations, sales engineering, artificial intelligence, demo automation, B2B sales, sales enablement
References
Gartner, "Best practices for pre-sales teams," 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/topics/presales (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
McKinsey & Company, "The future of B2B sales," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/these-eight-charts-show-how-covid-19-has-changed-b2b-sales-forever (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
PreSales Collective, "State of pre-sales report," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.presalescollective.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Consensus, "Product demo best practices," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.goconsensus.com/demo-automation/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Harvard Business Review, "The new sales imperative," 2017. [Online]. Available: https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-new-sales-imperative (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Salesforce, "State of sales report," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-sales/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Docker, "What is a container?," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Kubernetes, "What is Kubernetes?," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Consensus, "Demo automation platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.goconsensus.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
G2, "Best demo software," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.g2.com/categories/demo-software (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Demostack, "Product demo platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.demostack.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Forrester, "The state of pre-sales," 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/category/sales-enablement/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Navattic, "Interactive product demos," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.navattic.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Storylane, "Interactive demo platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.storylane.io/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Amazon Web Services, "What is cloud computing?," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Google Cloud, "Cloud computing services," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-cloud-computing (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Synthesis AI, "Synthetic data generation," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://synthesis.ai/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
TechTarget, "Demo best practices," 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Product-demo-best-practices-Tips-for-sales-engineers (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Pendo, "Product analytics platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.pendo.io/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Mixpanel, "Product analytics," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://mixpanel.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Amplitude, "Digital analytics platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://amplitude.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Heap, "Product analytics," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://heap.io/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Salesforce, "CRM software," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.salesforce.com/crm/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
HubSpot, "CRM platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
LinkedIn, "B2B buying committees," 2023. [Online]. Available: https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/resources/b2b-buying-process (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Gartner, "The new B2B buying journey," 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Productboard, "Product management platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.productboard.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Sales Hacker, "Sales engineering best practices," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-engineer/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
DevOps Institute, "DevOps practices," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.devopsinstitute.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Winning by Design, "Sales methodology," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.winningbydesign.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
PreSales Collective, "Pre-sales training," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.presalescollective.com/resources (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Demostack, "Demo automation," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.demostack.com/product (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Navattic, "No-code demos," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.navattic.com/product (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Storylane, "Demo platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.storylane.io/features (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Loom, "Video messaging," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.loom.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Vidyard, "Video platform," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.vidyard.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Amazon Web Services, "AWS overview," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://aws.amazon.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Terraform, "Infrastructure as code," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.terraform.io/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Sales Management Association, "Sales metrics," 2023. [Online]. Available: https://salesmanagement.org/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Revenue Collective, "Revenue operations," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.revenuecollective.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Trust Radius, "Software reviews," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.trustradius.com/ (Accessed: October 15, 2025).
Download and View Statistics
Copyright License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of theΒ Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.


Engineering and Technology
| Open Access |
DOI: