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The latest episode of Presales Podcast featured an insightful conversation with Nalin Senthamil, Founder and CEO of Storylane, who shared his vision for how AI is transforming the presales landscape in 2026 and beyond. Hosted by Jack Cochran, General Manager of Presales Collective, the episode explored how solutions engineers can leverage AI not just for demo automation, but as strategic partners in the buyer journey.
Listen to the full episode now!
The Hidden Cost Per Demo
While marketers obsess over CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), Nalin pointed out a metric that gets far less attention but carries significant impact: cost per demo. "There is a lot of cost per demo that happens," he noted. "The impact from demo automation on the cost per demo is significant."
The overhead comes from multiple sources. Sales engineers spend considerable time on demo prep and building custom solutions. In some cases, the costs are staggering. Nalin cited Nutanix as an example, where "building up VM, virtual machine, clouds, and everything costs like in six figures" for a single demo instance.
Beyond infrastructure costs, there's the human element. AEs often join calls unnecessarily, and administrative overhead piles up. The solution? Automation powered by AI that can reduce demo prep time to just five to ten minutes, while providing AEs with predefined templated demos complete with clear talk tracks for live calls.
The Missing Piece: AI at the Infrastructure Level
When asked what demo automation vendors are missing, Nalin was direct: "The biggest thing that they miss is the time to value using AI to spin out things very quickly." He emphasized that AI shouldn't be treated as an add-on feature, but rather needs to be built into the infrastructure level of demo platforms.
This architectural approach enables rapid customization and deployment, allowing presales teams to respond quickly to buyer needs without sacrificing quality or personalization.
The Rise of RepEx: Beyond the Chatbot
The conversation took a forward-looking turn when discussing Storylane's new offering, RepEx. Unlike traditional chatbots that have existed for a decade with rule-based logic, RepEx represents a new category of AI-powered buyer engagement.
"They don't want to talk to a chat," Nalin explained. "What they really want to do is giving voice to your website, firstly, because I always believe website is your first product where people land."
RepEx allows prospects to have natural conversations, including video interactions, and can actually demonstrate product features during these exchanges. Prospects should be able to self-educate extensively before ever talking to a human, making those eventual conversations far more strategic and valuable.
The Context Handoff Problem
Jack opened the episode with a universally frustrating scenario: calling customer support, entering all your information into an automated system, only to have the human representative ask for everything again. This experience gap, Nalin argued, is exactly what presales teams need to avoid in the buyer journey.
"Pre-sales need to have visibility into what's happened in the buying journey so far," Nalin emphasized. While many teams do prep calls before customer meetings, they often lack knowledge of the detailed buyer journey—website visits, interactions with AI agents, specific questions asked, and interests expressed.
Imagine a presales engineer joining a call already knowing: "They visit the website. They talk to my RepEx. They had this conversation. Here's a transcript of what they spoke, what they were interested in." Armed with this context, the SE can skip the generic overview and get straight to tactical discussions: "I know they have a GCP that I need to integrate with. Let's get back to the talk of how many Kubernetes clusters you're running in my GCP that I need to integrate."
This is what modern buyers expect. As Nalin put it: "People's expectation is if I've been interacting with you in any way, you should know that you should have it on hand when you talk to me."
Presales as Strategists: The 2026 Vision
Looking ahead to the next 12 to 18 months, Nalin's advice for presales leaders was unequivocal: "Think like presales is going to become strategists. So they're going to build a relationship."
To enable this transformation, he recommended that leaders invest in the right AI tools with a long-term perspective. "Don't look at short term, look at it as a long term. Don't look at something to be ripped off in three months. It didn't work for another way. Think a long-term investment and put in the effort."
His recommendation? Build a center of excellence within the presales organization focused on AI enablement. This is about fundamentally reimagining how presales teams operate and deliver value.
The Strategic Shift
The episode painted a picture of a presales function in transition. As AI handles more of the administrative burden, qualification conversations, and basic product education, SEs are freed up to focus on what they do best: strategic thinking, relationship building, and solving complex business problems.
The key is ensuring that the handoff between AI-powered self-service and human interaction is seamless, contextual, and value-adding. When prospects arrive at a live conversation, they should be well-informed and ready for deep, tactical discussions. And SEs should have complete visibility into that journey to make those conversations as impactful as possible.
As Nalin noted, a lot is going to happen in 2026, and presales teams that embrace AI as infrastructure rather than an afterthought will be best positioned to deliver the strategic value their organizations need.
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