Conga’s Dave Osborne Bets AI Can Shrink the 30-Day Deal as Revenue Leaks Between Silos

Signing a large commercial deal still takes about 30 days and half a dozen people. It moves from pricing to quote to contract, and money slips out at every handover. Dave Osborne, chief executive of Conga, thinks AI can close most of those gaps. He doesn’t think it will take people out of the loop entirely.

Osborne is a self-described “go-to-market CEO” who splits his time between Houston and Boston. In February 2026 Conga completed its acquisition of the B2B business of PROS, adding price optimisation to its contract and quoting tools. I met him at Conga Connection in Amsterdam, the day the company launched its new MCP server and AiMe capabilities. We talked about autonomous workflows, jobs, and why Europe now matters more to Conga than its revenue share suggests.

On AI and the Commercial Workflow

Conga is expanding AI across the commerce lifecycle, from contracts and pricing to invoicing and document automation. How fundamentally will AI change the way businesses operate over the next five years? Could entire commercial workflows end up running without people?

Think about how long it takes to go from price to quote to contract. It’s around 30 days on average, with six or so people involved. You’re going to see that shortened significantly in time, and probably in people too. But I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where AI is just firing out contracts on its own. What businesses want is to do this faster and more accurately, and to use AI to see where they can maximise revenue and margin. That’s what we’re trying to show.

Companies need to close deals faster without adding risk or losing control of cost and compliance. How can AI remove the bottlenecks while keeping governance intact?

Common data and linkage are critical, and you have to use them across every function, not just one. The process is extremely complex, and revenue leaks in the gaps between these steps. Use AI to connect them and you will speed up the business. Everybody wants to close deals fast, especially at the end of a quarter. The discipline most organisations are missing is closing the deal while still maximising price and margin. That’s where AiMe, our AI, comes in.

Conga’s new Model Context Protocol server lets customers query live contract, quote and obligation data through tools such as Microsoft Copilot. Are we moving away from employees working across several enterprise platforms, towards simply asking AI to get things done?

People are always going to ask AI to get things done. The real question is whether they’re doing it right. Do you have the right data in your system so that AiMe, or any AI tool, can pull it out properly? That’s where all the work is going to go. And there will always be a QA process at the end, which is the people.

On Revenue Leakage

Pricing, quoting and contracts are often fragmented across large organisations. How much value is lost in those silos, and could connecting them become a decisive advantage?

The industry puts it at around 12% of revenue lost between those functions. The worst lose 20%, and the best lose 3%. If you have a connected commerce chain with AI running as the layer beneath it, you can dramatically improve that.

On a business turning over $10bn to $30bn, that is an enormous sum. Are customers coming to you, or are you selling to them?

It’s a mix of both, and we’re not finished yet. We’re pulling this together as we speak. Price optimisation is already largely AI-driven, and it does reduce leakage, but only at one point in the chain. Our view is that you get the biggest effect on revenue leakage when pricing connects to contract lifecycle management, document automation and CPQ.

On Jobs and the Workforce

As AI takes over contract review, compliance screening, forecasting and admin, how will sales, legal, procurement and finance teams change? Is AI about cutting costs or freeing people for higher-value work?

Both, but I think the bigger opportunity is enabling people to focus on higher-value work. AI can take on repetitive, time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to spend more time on strategic decisions, customer relationships, and activities that drive business growth.

Look at audits, for example. The big firms don’t make their money from audits. They make it from strategic work inside organisations. If AI handles more of the routine audit work, people are freed up for things that matter more. That probably holds in every industry.

Is the wider AI industry going to wipe out jobs on a large scale?

There’s certainly a lot of hype around AI, and organizations are still figuring out where it can deliver the most value. The first wave is about being better, faster and smarter. The next will be about translating those efficiencies into measurable business outcomes.

What will separate the companies that harness AI from those that fall behind? Will the breakthrough come from autonomous agents, deeper integration between enterprise systems, or entirely new business models?

All of the above.

On Strategy and Growth

What is your long-term vision for customers?

Our tagline is about helping organisations become more connected and more intelligent, and understand their own business as well as they can. If we can stop revenue leakage, improve margin and make results more predictable, they can move faster. Predictability matters most to me, because if something is off I can deal with it sooner. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

What is your biggest challenge over the next two years?

Speed. We want to move faster, and you can only do so much at once. There’s a sequence to these things. If I add 100 engineers, I can’t just build 100 more things. Our challenge is building the right things at the right time.

How important is Europe compared with the US?

Europe is about 20% of our business today. That’s a decent share, but it understates the region. Of our top 30 customers, roughly 35–40% are in Europe. We see significant untapped potential in this market. We’re now increasing our presence, putting feet on the street and running events like this one, and I see real room to grow.

And Asia and the Middle East?

Both are big opportunities. Asia is about 5% of our business today, but manufacturing there offers real potential. The partner model is critical to growing in these markets, allowing us to expand our reach and build on established local expertise. We’re strengthening that ecosystem, from the Big Four to local firms, and had our biggest-ever partner turnout this week. Once those partners are fully enabled, I see significant opportunity for growth.

My Read

Osborne’s 12% figure is the number that matters here. It turns AI from a productivity story into a margin story, which is a much easier sell to a CFO. His caveat matters just as much: AI is only as good as the data underneath it. For European companies running fragmented commercial systems, the first fix is cleaning up the data, and the AI comes after that.