Inside Gong's AI Stack w/ Chief R&D Officer Ohad Parush

Ohad Parush leads R&D at Gong - a tool that empowers revenue teams at 50% of Fortune 10 companies, as well as teams at Rippling, PitchBook, and Upwork.

Gong has been an early adopter of AI internally, and it has completely changed how their engineering team builds, reviews, and ships new products and features.

In our conversation, Ohad shared how AI has become a peer programmer, how engineers are learning faster than ever before, and why changing culture is often harder than changing technical capabilities.

Here are the highlights from our conversation.

Engineers aren’t being replaced

“It’s not going to replace engineers, but it’s definitely going to evolve engineers into a newer version of themselves.”

At Gong, AI is seen as a powerful tool that augments itself with the engineering team's existing stack and workflows. Developers now code alongside AI tools that generate drafts, suggest refactors, and handle repetitive tasks.

What becomes crucial here is judgment: engineers who know how to direct AI in a productive direction, as well as review and challenge it's output, instead of just "vibe coding."

The productivity curve isn’t flat

We asked Ohad to rate AI's impact on his engineering team's velocity on a scale of 1 to 5. His answer was nuanced:

“Some actions are a four - we’re saving huge amounts of time. Others are a two - there’s still hype, bugs, and control issues.”

AI yields massive time savings in structured workflows (like data summaries or report generation). But deep engineering still needs human rigor.

Ohad recommends leaders to start narrow - deploy AI where tasks are repetitive, measurable, and low risk.

Testing: where AI already works

AI dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor have become integral to testing at Gong. They generate unit tests, catch regressions, and increase coverage.

“The obvious answer today is testing… we are writing better code with our AI dev tools.”

It’s one of the few areas where AI consistently outperforms humans in both speed and accuracy.

AI compresses engineer onboarding time

Engineers can ramp up faster because copilots remove the friction of learning new frameworks or APIs.

“One of my engineers wanted to start using Iceberg on top of S3. In the past it would’ve taken two to four weeks. It was done in two days.”

Tasks that once took weeks are now completed in days - and engineers spend more time building, less time reading docs.

Scaling security with AI adoption

Gong works with half of all Fortune 10 companies, so safety is a huge priority. Gong runs all AI-assisted development inside secure sandboxes and layers in human code review.

“We’ve invested a lot in security… it’s not just ‘go out and start using it.’ We manage our code carefully and follow best practices from Anthropic and our internal pod security team.”

Security concerns are fundamentally baked into all product decisions at Gong.

Hiring hasn’t changed, but expectations have

Gong’s hiring playbook still values analytical ability and debugging over prompt-engineering wizardry.

“AI can make junior engineers much better, but we’re still looking for people who can analyze, debug, and design. So far that hasn’t changed.”

AI amplifies good engineers. Ohad thinks it's unrealistic to expect AI to spawn them - especially if their first-principles are weak. Their training focuses on how to think with AI, not how to prompt it.

Actionable takeaways for builders

• Use AI as a peer, not an autopilot.
• Start with structured, repetitive tasks where accuracy is easy to measure.
• Automate handoffs and summaries to cut internal coordination time.
• Focus AI effort on testing and onboarding - that's where the clearest ROI is.
• Layer security reviews and logging around every AI workflow.
• Keep hiring for analytical thinkers, then teach them how to leverage AI.

Gong’s experience clearly shows that the next wave of engineering productivity won’t come from replacing people. AI makes great engineers faster, new engineers sharper, and teams more connected.

We had a really great time jamming with Ohad! You can catch our full conversation on YouTube, alongside our previous conversations with product and engineering leaders at Intercom, Monday.com, Vercel, and more.