Proponent announced that its AI-powered conversation intelligence platform, Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success, is entering an ambitious new development phase under the continued leadership of its original designer, Zicheng Gu. The platform recently earned dual international recognition—Silver at the 2025 New York Product Design Awards in User Experience (Product UX) and Silver at the London Design Awards for UX – Best Use of AI & Machine Learning—validating its innovative integration of advanced AI technology with human-centered design principles.
AI-Driven Platform Transforms Sales Conversations into Strategic Intelligence
Designed for B2B revenue and product teams, Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success leverages artificial intelligence to turn sales conversations into actionable insights. It addresses a pressing pain point in enterprise sales: the costly disconnect between what sales teams pitch and what customers actually need. By capturing and analyzing sales calls and meetings, the platform creates an "institutional memory" of customer feedback that can be shared across departments. This closed-loop system ensures that critical customer insights no longer remain fragmented in silos.
The platform’s AI capabilities deliver measurable value across multiple teams:
- Sales teams: receive real-time, AI-powered playbooks and instant answers to customer questions, drawn from a vetted internal knowledge base.
- Marketing teams: gain a centralized hub of validated content and messaging, ensuring all AI-driven recommendations are accurate and on-brand.
- Product teams: see data on which features and pain points truly matter to customers, helping prioritize the product roadmap based on real-world feedback.
By building a shared repository of conversation-driven insights, Proponent fosters unprecedented alignment across sales, marketing, and product functions. Every stakeholder stays attuned to actual customer needs, enabling organizations to become genuinely customer-centric at scale.
Expanding AI Capabilities Under Gu’s Design Leadership
As Founding/Lead Product Designer, Zicheng Gu will helm the platform’s next evolution, focusing on three major AI innovation areas launching through 2026-2027:
Advanced Predictive AI: Gu is designing new machine learning features that anticipate customer objections and needs before they’re voiced, enabling sales teams to proactively address concerns. This predictive layer will analyze patterns across thousands of conversations to surface early buying signals and risk indicators.
Generative AI Content Engine: The platform will introduce an expanded AI content generation system that creates hyper-personalized sales materials—from pitch decks to follow-up emails—tailored to each prospect’s specific industry, pain points, and conversation history. Gu is pioneering interaction patterns that make AI-generated content feel authentic and trustworthy.
Cross-Platform AI Integration: New AI-powered integrations will connect Proponent’s conversation intelligence with enterprise CRM, marketing automation, and product management tools, creating an ecosystem where customer insights flow seamlessly across the organization’s tech stack.
"Continuity in our design vision is crucial as we scale these AI capabilities," said Zicheng Gu, "The challenge isn’t just building powerful AI—it’s designing experiences where complex AI capability feels intuitive and human. We’re pioneering interaction patterns for AI-assisted selling that amplify human insight rather than replace it. My focus is ensuring that as our AI grows more sophisticated, the experience becomes even simpler for end users."
Design Philosophy: Making Advanced AI Accessible
Gu’s approach to AI product design centers on a core principle: technology should enrich human workflows, not complicate them. With a background spanning both AI technology and user experience design, she specializes in translating sophisticated AI capabilities into interfaces that feel remarkably natural. Her design work on Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success demonstrates this philosophy—complex AI operations like natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and generative content creation happen seamlessly behind an intuitive user experience.
"We’re seeing early customers reduce meetings by 60% due to the elimination of departmental silos, and close deals 38% faster," said Zicheng Gu, Founding Product Designer at Proponent. "Those numbers validate our design approach—when AI truly understands context and surfaces the right insights at the right time, it doesn’t just save time, it fundamentally transforms how teams collaborate and sell. The challenge isn’t just building powerful AI—it’s designing experiences where complex machine learning feels intuitive and human. We’re pioneering interaction patterns for AI-assisted selling that amplify human insight rather than replace it."
This design excellence, combined with measurable customer impact, earned recognition from international design communities. The dual awards specifically honored the platform’s success in making cutting-edge AI & machine learning accessible to business users—a notoriously difficult design challenge in enterprise software. Tech and design industry watchers will be following closely as Proponent’s award-winning platform continues to redefine how organizations leverage the voice of the customer for business success.
