"Hold on, I actually have a document on that."

That's Sarah, mid-Zoom, eyes darting across her second monitor. On the other end, a CTO who measures his time in billable increments watches her pupils bounce back and forth.

Sarah's scrolling through a beautifully formatted, seven-page PDF summary that her AI assistant "helpfully" generated mid-conversation. By the time she finds the SOC2 compliance bullet on page four, the CTO has checked his email, answered a Slack, and mentally moved on.

The momentum's gone. Sarah just went from trusted advisor to librarian looking for a misplaced book.

This is the problem with most "real-time" sales AI.

We've all heard the pitch: AI sits in your calls, listens, and feeds you answers when you need them. Sounds like a superpower. But in practice, traditional conversation intelligence platforms like Clari deliver that "superpower" in a format nobody can actually use mid-conversation.

Getting a PDF or a dashboard during a live call is like being handed a city map in the middle of a car chase. Technically useful. Practically useless.

The real issue is cognitive. It takes serious mental energy to switch from "actively listening to a human" to "reading and synthesizing a document." When you're staring at a PDF, you're not listening to tone. You're not reading body language. You're not thinking about your next question. You're just... searching. And every second you spend searching, you stop being the expert in the room and start being a middleman between the prospect and a document.

So we built a rule for ourselves at Commit.

We call it the 1.5-Second Rule, and it's simple:

If a rep can't scan, internalize, and speak an AI nudge in 1.5 seconds, that nudge shouldn't exist.

No paragraphs. No background reading. No "comprehensive summaries." Just ammunition — one clear, punchy sentence a rep can use without ever breaking eye contact.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Say your rep is on a call with a FinOps leader discussing cloud cost allocation. In a traditional platform, they'd get a multi-page briefing doc they can't possibly read while listening.

With Commit, they get three nudges:

TELL: "XXX's Virtual Tags allocate 100% of cloud costs without touching any code or adding agents."

ASK: "How are you currently splitting shared cloud costs between your engineering teams?"

TELL: "A similar customer, Lyft, went from 80% to 96% cloud cost coverage across their entire infrastructure → Customer story"

That's it. Each one is a sentence. The rep reads it, uses it, and stays in the conversation. No scrolling. No context-switching. No "hold on, let me find that."

The key distinction is assistance, not autopilot. We're not trying to turn reps into robots reading a teleprompter. Commit gives them the ingredients — the data point, the case study name, the discovery question — and lets them cook. The rep frames it for the prospect in their own voice, their own style.

And the intelligence has to be current. If your product team ships a new feature on Friday, the AI needs to know about it by Monday. That means direct integration with your source of truth — Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, whatever you use. Stale data mid-call is worse than no data at all.

One more thing most platforms miss: the AI shouldn't just give answers. It should monitor conversation health. If a rep has been talking for four minutes straight, a simple nudge — "Check for resonance" — is infinitely more valuable than a post-call report telling them their talk-to-listen ratio was poor. By then, the deal damage is done.

The bottom line: the "I'll get back to you" tax is a revenue leak most companies accept as normal. But you can't expect every AE to be a walking encyclopedia of your product, your competitors, and every customer story. The fix isn't more reading material during the call. It's bite-sized, scannable intelligence that keeps your rep in the driver's seat.

Want to see Commit in action? Book a demo and we'll show you what real-time actually looks like.