Apollo, Gong and ZoomInfo Want the Work Your RevOps Team Was Hired to Do

Between September 30 and October 1, three of the best-known names in revenue software pitched the same buyer. In San Francisco, Apollo used ApolloNEXT to announce Builder Studio, which turns a plain-English description of a workflow into working pages, databases and automations. SiliconANGLE quoted Matt Curl, Apollo's CEO since February, saying teams "no longer need a RevOps army" to build a working engine. In Las Vegas the same day, Gong unveiled Mission Callisto at Celebrate '26. Its centerpiece, Gong Enrich pulls contact and account data from 10 partners into Gong's own workflows, with Apollo and ZoomInfo among them. A new Agent Builder lets teams set up agents that fire on events they define. The next morning, ZoomInfo launched Agent Teams, coordinated agents that run whole plays inside its GTM Studio. ZoomInfo said they come with "no new SKU or contract required."

On a feature list, these look like three vendors adding AI to their products. From the buyer's side of the table, they're aimed at the same two lines in a RevOps budget. One pays the people who configure the stack. The other pays for the data contracts that feed it. Apollo wants the first, Gong wants to sit in the middle of the second, and ZoomInfo is using the second to take a share of the first.

In most revenue teams, a new workflow still starts as a ticket. A rep or a manager asks for a lead-routing rule, a sequence trigger or a dashboard, and someone in operations builds it when the queue allows. Builder Studio's pitch is that the ticket becomes a prompt the rep types. If that works, the ops backlog stops limiting how fast a sales team can change its process. And the people who worked that backlog lose their monopoly on changing it.

The product isn't fully here yet. Apollo's release lists Builder Studio as coming soon, so the budget argument arrives ahead of the software. By Apollo's own count, daily credit consumption rose 10x between March and August. A rep who builds a workflow without RevOps is generating metered usage. The work leaving the ops queue shows up again on Apollo's invoice.

Builder Studio follows a launch on September 17, when Apollo shipped Agents to run outbound prospecting end to end. Agents automated the rep's repetitive work. Builder Studio goes after the operator's. When Curl took over, Apollo was approaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue with close to 100,000 paying customers, per Revenue Brew. Most of them are smaller companies that never had an ops army to replace. For them, the realistic target is the single ops hire they were about to make.

Gong and ZoomInfo are using the data contract as the wedge

Gong Enrich works like a waterfall. A customer connects the data providers it already pays and sets the order Gong should query them in. When one comes back empty, Gong moves down the list. Where the customer's own subscriptions run out, Gong fills the gap with partner data billed in Gong Credits. Gong's product post says this lets RevOps manage enrichment costs "all in one place," and that one place is Gong. Which provider supplies a record becomes a setting. Gong CEO Amit Bendov listed Gong Enrich first among the release's highlights in his launch post.

Apollo’s place on that list says a lot. On the afternoon Apollo pitched itself as the system a revenue team should run on, it also appeared in a competitor's enrichment menu. It was one of ten suppliers there, alongside ZoomInfo, Lusha, LeadIQ and RocketReach. Two of the best-known names in contact data are now interchangeable inputs inside a third company's product. The margin has moved away from the data itself. Clay's pricing page sells more than 150 data partners through credits, and HubSpot bought Clearbit in 2023 to put company data inside its CRM. Either way, the platform holding the workflow decides which data vendor gets called. SiliconANGLE's report adds a detail buyers should note. Gong relies on its providers' statements about opt-out and suppression status and doesn't verify them independently.

ZoomInfo answered from the other side of that menu. Agent Teams is built on DoubleO.ai's orchestration technology, and ZoomInfo announced the DoubleO acquisition only a day before the launch. Per SalesTechStar, its plays include tracking champions when they change jobs and finding lookalikes of closed-won accounts, then reaching their buying committees. ZoomInfo's CEO Henry Schuck named the problem in his launch post: today's best GTM workflows have "a user base of one," the GTM engineer who built them, while everyone else still digs through Salesforce for context.

Apollo and Gong sell against the same problem. The pricing is what changes the buyer's math. A standalone AI SDR or workflow-agent tool has to justify its own line item at renewal. ZoomInfo's agents arrive inside a contract the customer was going to renew anyway. So a CFO ends up comparing a separate invoice against something that looks free. The cost is still there, inside the data contract's price. It's harder to isolate there, and easier for ZoomInfo to defend when a customer asks for a discount. Bundling turns agent pricing into a renewal weapon against every point tool that sits beside the data contract today.

ZoomInfo took the same play a step further on October 14. It said Workbounce, a company it acquired in 2024, now powers a knowledge layer in its GTM Context Graph that joins call transcripts, emails, decks, account notes, Slack threads, Google Drive folders and Notion pages to its company and contact data, served to agents through GTM.AI's API and Model Context Protocol connection. The release says every input can carry lineage, confidence and entitlement controls, which means the vendor that sells the contact data would also ingest and govern the team's internal records. It doesn't say what the layer costs or whether it's in the existing contract, the same question to put to ZoomInfo about Agent Teams.

The headcount data points to fewer builders and more owners

The independent data fits this split better than the "no RevOps" slide does. PredictLeads, which sells job-postings data and has no stake in any of these launches, compared US postings in the 30 days to September 5 with the 30 days before. Postings for sales operations specialists fell from 247 to 54. Postings for directors of revenue operations rose from 36 to 53. The data covers one month of postings, and the counts are small, so treat it as an early signal. It still points the way these launches do. The build tier thins out while the people who decide how the system works keep getting hired.

Gartner made a related point from the engineering side the day before Apollo and Gong took the stage. Its analysts predicted that 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built by vendors' forward-deployed engineers by 2028. Customers that let a vendor build the system never develop the ability to run or change it. Self-serve products carry a version of the same risk. A workflow a rep describes into Apollo lives in Apollo, and the reason it exists can leave with the person who typed the prompt.

The counter-case worth taking seriously

The best argument against all this is that self-serve builders will grow the RevOps workload. Every generation of no-code tooling has left half-documented logic for somebody to untangle later. A hundred reps each building their own routing rule is a governance problem, and governance is a RevOps job. Apollo's builder also hasn't shipped. Any claim that it replaces anyone rests on software customers can't use yet.

The bundles could also raise total spend. A customer that keeps its direct ZoomInfo contract while buying gap-fill through Gong Credits pays two vendors for enrichment. Gong hasn't published its per-record credit price. ZoomInfo's announcement doesn't address whether Agent Teams usage is metered or capped, so "no new SKU" could change in later years. On LinkedIn, X and Reddit we found executives and wire stories amplifying all three launches, and no independent RevOps reaction yet.

These objections may slow the shift without reversing it. The governance work that builders create needs a smaller, more senior team than the one that hand-built every workflow. The postings data already shows that shape.

What this means for RevOps leaders

Before the next enrichment contract comes up, list every place the company buys contact data. That includes direct vendor agreements and credits in Clay, HubSpot, and now Gong. Price each on cost per enriched record. Then consolidate to the fewest direct contracts and connect them by API key into whichever platform runs the workflow. The trap to avoid is paying a provider directly and again through another vendor's credits.

Then ask every point-agent vendor in the stack what it does that the data vendor now includes. If a standalone AI SDR tool's answer is a list of plays ZoomInfo's Agent Teams already runs on the same records, its renewal is a negotiating chip. Ask ZoomInfo the reverse question. What share of the renewal price the agents account for? A bundle nobody can price is one nobody can walk away from.

Rewrite open RevOps job requisitions around ownership. The owner decides the data model, the provider order in each waterfall and the permissions any agent gets to write to the CRM. Put Gartner’s advice into vendor contracts too. Workflows and agent logic should be exportable and documented, with an exit plan agreed before rollout.

My bet is that within the next annual planning cycle, most mid-market teams will buy enrichment and basic agents as lines inside a platform contract. Fewer will buy them from standalone vendors. The RevOps roles cut first will be specialist builders while director-level data owners keep getting hired. The first renewal quotes that bundle agents or partner credits will show whether that's right, along with the next few months of postings data.

Apollo, Gong and ZoomInfo all want to be the system a revenue team configures. The RevOps budget that survives that contest is the part that decides what the system is allowed to do.

A bundle nobody can price is one nobody can walk away from.

Before the next enrichment contract comes up, list every place the company buys contact data, price each on cost per enriched record, and stop paying a provider twice through another vendor's credits.

By Business of GTM