The product and configuration expert
“That role will change dramatically, and may disappear in the sense that it will look completely different. AI-native CPQ lets anyone get to an accurate quote that fits the customer’s need.”
Q&A
AI knows the whole catalog. Now what?
Q&A With Threekit on CPQ & Talent in the AI Era
Traditional CPQ helped up to a point
CPQ was built to solve this, and for many years it has done real work for manufacturers. But as products have grown more complex and more people need access to that product knowledge, traditional CPQ’s limitations have become harder to ignore.
To see what gap remains, we asked Threekit's VP Marc Uible and the team to look back.
What did traditional CPQ promise that it never quite delivered?
“CPQ started as a way to do order entry for complex products. 25 years ago, that was state of the art. Getting to an accurate, makeable, in-stock configuration and price was hard.
“Those tools did great work keeping companies honest about what they could build and sell. Hundreds of billions of dollars run through CPQ today.
“But CPQ never became a tool that helps the seller. It’s still [largely] an order entry tool. The user has to be the expert: pick the starting SKU, then know every attribute, pricing implication, and cascading rule. That’s why it takes heavy training and 12-to-24-month integrations. Only experts can really use it.
“It never became a real sales tool that helps sellers sell more. That’s what we’re building at Threekit.”
Marc Uible, VP, Threekit
So even with CPQ, the catalog expert stays essential. Someone still has to know which options fit the customer, and a handful of expert reps can stall deals and cost revenue.
Enter Threekit, an AI-Native Solution for Sellers
Threekit built an AI-native CPQ for that gap. It starts in the guided-selling step before a traditional CPQ, turning whatever a rep already has, like a voice memo or a photo, into a valid, priced configuration in seconds instead of hours or days.
Traditional CPQ vs. AI-native CPQ
| Dimension | Traditional CPQ | AI-native CPQ (Threekit) |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Pick the right starting SKU | Start from what the rep already has |
| Who can use it | Experts, after heavy training | Sellers, dealers, customers, and AI agents |
| How it works | Attribute by attribute | Looks at the whole picture |
| Requirements change mid-quote | An hour or two of rework | About 10 seconds |
| Time to quote | Days or weeks | Minutes |
So that’s the product. But what happens to the people around it? When an AI agent carries the product knowledge, a seller’s value has to move somewhere else. Because Threekit works with 150+ manufacturers, it sees patterns that no single company can see from inside its own org, from who ends up owning CPQ to which roles get redrawn.
Who Threekit works with
CPQ is no longer one team’s tool
Who at a manufacturer owns CPQ today, and is that the same person who ends up owning the agent?
“CPQ touches a lot of teams: sales and sales ops, and increasingly digital, IT, and marketing too. That’s because CPQ holds your product truth. For a manufacturer, all your innovation and hard work is codified in that machine.
“More teams want to get value from it. They can’t, because it’s still a complex order entry tool.
“What Threekit does differently is two things:
- Product truth stays secure. Rules, logic, and pricing live in an accurate, secure layer.
- Access opens up. People and AI agents get to the right SKU, configuration, and price.
“A seller can say, ‘I don’t know which SKU to start with, but my customer has these specs and this price target.’ That’s a perfect use case for AI-native CPQ.
“Now CPQ is a real sales tool. Sellers and dealers quote in minutes, and your website gets a product genius that helps visitors find the right products.”
Where the roles go
That shift is already redrawing roles.
Which roles are getting redrawn? Is anything disappearing? Any net new roles?
“Most manufacturers and distributors rely on a team of product and configuration experts. They’re who reps, dealers, and partners call when a quote gets complex. [These] roles will change dramatically…”
Digital
“Other roles have an exciting future. Chiefly digital. AI-native tooling opens your commercial intelligence to everyone: end customers, dealers, pro channels, partners, and sales. That makes companies easier to buy from, the holy grail for most manufacturers. The digital role will be huge.”
Sellers
“Sellers change too. Reps spend 30–40% of their time building quotes. That goes away, and they get it back for selling and understanding the customer.”
The risk of waiting
Marc recently spoke with a CIO of a manufacturing company. Their take was that CPQ was too important and it proved to be too difficult to implement the first time, and that those are the reasons why they won’t touch it. But as Marc sees it, there’s a real risk in that stance:
“In three years, the top 20% of your competitors will be on AI-native CPQ. Buyers will get to their products from a photo, a spec sheet, a competitor quote, or a voice note. B2C-like experience in every channel. Incredibly easy to buy from.”
And the fear of another painful implementation may be overstated. “AI-native CPQ projects take 3 to 6 months,” Marc says. “It isn’t the risk people think.”
Threekit is living the shift, too
That’s the view from Threekit’s customers. The company has to answer the same questions about its own team.
Threekit runs as an AI-native operating system. Every employee contributes to a shared AI knowledge corpus. Most Slack channels and meetings feed into it, and anyone can query almost any part of the business through Slack or their own Claude.
The results show up in how the teams work:
- Engineering has 5x’d its output using coding agents.
- A new team exists: forward deployed engineers. These are senior software engineers sent to customers to implement complex products in Threekit’s AI-native CPQ and make sure it goes right.
So, how does Threekit hire now?
What do you screen for now that you didn’t three years ago? Anything you stopped screening for?
“Two things, and they have to go together: how AI-native is this person, and how clear is their thinking?
“Clear thinking means understanding what drives quality and quantity of output. AI-native means knowing how AI accelerates those fundamentals.
“Take a marketer, for example. They know YouTube drives AEO, and what drives viewership: headline, thumbnail, earning the first 10 seconds, then the next 30. Then they scale it.
“That used to be a full-time role. Now it’s expected to be less than 10% of someone’s job.”
The interview question that drives hiring
The Threekit team focuses on a very critical interview question throughout their hiring process.
“Tell me more.”
“Someone will say, ‘I ran this campaign and got a 50% lift.’ My next question is, ‘Tell me more.’ Then again. And again.”
Look for tactical understanding: why the customer bought, why they changed their mind, why a campaign worked. “Greatness is in the details,” Marc says. “‘I closed it because of timeline and budget’ doesn’t tell me much.”
A great answer
Names the outcome the customer wanted, the value delivered, and exactly why and how they got to that resolution.
The red flag
A candidate who can’t get into the details but instead tends to recite their resume from memory.
Why dig so hard? Because depth is where expertise lives now. As AI takes over the repetitive work that used to make people experts, Marc says, look at what they actually became experts at:
“Navigating complex CPQ screens. Knowing SKU 49067 is a particular product. That isn’t helpful. It’s like memorizing the Constitution word for word without understanding why it matters.”
The next generation will get good at the customer’s actual needs, budget, and timeline, and why they need certain products. “Not memorization,” says Marc. “True understanding.”
The CPQ hire has changed
The CPQ leader you hire next will likely work alongside an agent. Marc’s advice for anyone running a CPQ-heavy org is to try it. Threekit’s agent builder, Threehub, lets you “build an agent in 10 minutes based on your website or product catalog.”
That usually changes the conversation, including the one about who to hire. “Seeing it makes it real,” Marc says. “Even complex products get 10x easier and faster to set up and quote.” Start there, and the right hire gets clearer.