What role should AI play in a sales organization's day-to-day work?

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

The human aspect of complex multi-product solution selling is very difficult to remove, so AI's role is to reduce drag and friction rather than replace sellers

Complicated multi-product solution sales is a necessary human process; making it more effective serves both sides of the table

Scope: scoped to complicated multi-product solution sales

46:07 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex

Ashley Kelly · Jun 7, 2024

AI's main value to SDRs is eliminating busywork like data hygiene, contact and phone number accuracy, and email deliverability, freeing time for personalization and human channels

The hardest part of the SDR job is the constant small details; automating them frees reps for work that requires a human

Scope: she is among the more hesitant sales leaders on AI adoption

7:31 20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team

Ashley Kelly · Jun 7, 2024 · hedged

AI may be able to help her SDR team be more efficient

Scope: framed as a recent change of mind

45:43 20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team

Aidan Gomez · Aug 19, 2024

AI will augment rather than replace humans in the workplace; humanity becomes more productive and does more rather than there being fewer humans doing the work

Buyers won't purchase from a bot — for purchases that matter you want a human accountable on the other side of the deal who has authority to intervene when something goes wrong

Scope: simple purchases may be an exception

45:39 20VC: Chips, Models or Applications; Where is the Value in AI | Is Compute the Answer to All Model Performance Questions | Why Open AI Shelved AGI & Is There Any Value in Models with OpenAI Price Dumping with Aidan, Gomez, Co-Founder @ Cohere

Dan Fougere · Nov 22, 2024

AI's impact on sales today is to make reps more efficient and effective at existing tasks — better company research, more compelling prospecting emails, faster proposals — analogous to the productivity jump from the Microsoft Office Suite

The tooling compresses the time for research, writing and proposal generation the same way integrated office software once did

Scope: as of right now; separate from efforts to have AI do the selling itself, whose outcome is unknown

65:47 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Fully automated AI SDR outbound is not viable today; the human should evolve into an orchestrator or quarterback who reviews and sends

Looking closely at this year's data, letting a CEO or CRO fire in the hole and fill pipe with automated outbound dilutes your brand

Scope: 'not at a point' — framed as a present-state judgment; based on Rox's own outbound data

32:13 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Ron Gabrisko · Aug 4, 2025

As long as humans are the buyers, you will always need humans to sell

Buying is an emotional, non-binary process — when technologies are comparable the decision comes down to who the buyer trusts and which vendor they think can get them there fastest; only when bots sell to bots do you not need salespeople

Scope: AI should still make early-stage playbook work much better

29:37 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

The biggest BS belief about sales and AI is that AI will replace salespeople; it will not replace field sales teams

People buy from people — good salespeople have a sixth sense for reading rooms and reading people, which is human emotion work

Scope: telemarketers, upsell calls and call centers will be replaced or heavily AI-driven; AI will augment some elements of field sales

55:20 20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan

Alexander Embiricos · Feb 21, 2026

Sales and marketing will not be replaced by inference spend; having a good relationship with the customer and knowing what they need is as hard as ever, if not harder

As building gets easier, markets get more crowded and there is more software for buyers to choose from, making distribution and customer understanding harder

18:17 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI

Shaunt Voskanian · Mar 21, 2026

Using agentic tooling to remove friction like duplicate data entry is an easy change that would make a meaningful impact on rep productivity and happiness

Rep frustration comes mostly from having too much on their plates, and removing that friction makes their job easier

41:56 20Sales: Inside Figma's $1BN ARR Revenue Machine | Why We Do Not Have Customer Success or SDRs | Why I Do Not Believe in Sales Quotas with Shaunt Voskanian, CRO @ Figma

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

No business today can fully replace the SDR process with AI and hand straight off to an AE.

Asked how many businesses could actually do it, the answer right now is none — so every company will still carry some number of SDRs.

Scope: stated about the present moment

55:55 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Chad Peets · May 23, 2026

The role of the human sales rep is not going away for business-critical products, and reps should be required to call rather than send written outreach

Inboxes are inundated so notes don't land; and when a failed purchase costs people their jobs, buyers need a human relationship to make the decision

Scope: scoped to products critical to the business where failure costs jobs

61:21 20Sales: The $100M CRO Bubble: Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis | Why You Should Never Hire From Salesforce or Service Now | How to Hire, Train and Forecase in a World of AI with Chad Peets and Chris Degnan

Chris Degnan · May 23, 2026

The claim that salespeople and SDRs will be dead is wrong

Scope: admits being a year out of Snowflake makes him paranoid he is missing changes

64:10 20Sales: The $100M CRO Bubble: Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis | Why You Should Never Hire From Salesforce or Service Now | How to Hire, Train and Forecase in a World of AI with Chad Peets and Chris Degnan

David Frankel · Aug 8, 2026 · hedged

For bigger-ticket purchases like life insurance, a human interface who understands the product will still have a place

Scope: big-ticket items only; admits direct life insurance sales already exist

63:56 20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

AI can write personalized copy and research prospects better than humans, but it cannot generate the contrarian, unconventional campaign ideas that differentiate outbound — that still comes from humans

Creativity in designing a campaign that differs from what everyone else is doing is the part AI does not accomplish today

Scope: 'at least today'

52:19 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

AI will automate much of the research and prep work that sales reps do today.

55:57 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

The underlying game of sales hasn't changed in a long time — AI only compresses the time to do research and form an opinion

Reps used to print out 10-Ks, 10-Qs and CEO transcripts; now the same research happens on a phone in days, but the work of understanding pain and framing your solution is identical

24:17 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2025

Customer and prospect research is another sales task already largely automated — what took an hour is now mostly done by ChatGPT deep research

50:34 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Ron Gabrisko · Aug 4, 2025

AI dramatically accelerates upfront account research, and better research makes reps ask more interesting questions and find value areas

Tools like Perplexity plus an internal sales assistant can combine public information, press signals and internal account spend data into a picture no rep could assemble as fast manually

53:38 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko

Jason James · Aug 29, 2025

Dictation via Whisper Flow is now good enough to replace typing for most written communication

Editing used to be slow and clunky, but the transcription quality now works well enough to ship output directly, returning significant time

Scope: based on personal use

45:53 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Harry Stebbings · May 2, 2026

Voice dictation tools are most useful for difficult emails, because it is easier to know what to say than what to type

With hard messages the blank page is the obstacle; speaking unblocks it

Scope: specifically for hard/difficult emails

58:18 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

Talking to your tools rather than typing is genuinely the right way to work now, despite sounding futuristic

She initially found the framing odd but observes she barely types anymore herself

58:37 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026 · hedged

Talking to your computer via voice tools will become a standard way of working, with headsets and AirPods becoming office norms

His team has already bought headsets to make voice dictation workable in an office

70:02 20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Andrew Macdonald · Aug 17, 2026

Voice is by far the highest-value AI interface in practice — roughly 50x his usage of anything else — and OpenAI's voice engine is the best implementation.

He constantly records notes, emails, thoughts and lists by voice and finds OpenAI's voice engine incredible.

Scope: personal usage; he uses both OpenAI and Anthropic

58:41 20VC: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

AI in sales will eliminate drudgery rather than quality work

There is an enormous amount of drudgery in sales for these tools to remove

63:50 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

RevOps' biggest lever is automating and obfuscating low-value rep admin — e.g. using AI call transcripts to auto-fill Salesforce records — and simplifying the business process for reps

Manually filling out opportunity, account and person records takes reps a lot of time that can be eliminated

47:15 20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025 · hedged

Manual data entry and poor CRM data enrichment is the thing sellers hate most and the practice most likely to disappear from sales within five years

Bad data — wrong employee counts, inequitable territories — stops reps from prioritizing accounts correctly

Scope: framed as what she hopes gets fixed

50:00 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

Within one to two years nobody will be filling in CRM forms or running manual reports — agents will do it automatically, better, faster and cheaper than people

Nobody wants to fill in forms or flip through web pages; it's the equivalent of punching cards in the seventies

Scope: he previously would have said ten years, now says one to two

6:48 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

Sellers spend about 75% of their time on non-selling administrative activities, and that work will be decimated by AI

Three of every four dollars paid to a seller buys uninteresting work — updating forms, forecast calls, list-sifting, research, meeting prep — that salespeople hate enough to pay out of pocket to remove

17:17 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Kevin Egan · Jul 12, 2023

Sales should adopt more AI to help every rep understand the best next step for their customers and show up with better ideas

32:50 20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

AI's main effect on sales will be to make people smarter by surfacing insights that enable better customer conversations

40:09 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

The future of sales is feeding reps real-time, complete customer context so the human in the conversation is supercharged rather than working from a partial CRM view

Competing against public companies at New Relic, he saw reps were not proactive enough and had only a partial view — usage, support tickets, buying intent and growth were never in the CRM

30:49 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024

AI will massively increase the volume of outbound sent, so buyers will soon receive roughly 100 emails, 100 texts and 50 WhatsApps a day

There is a proliferation of AI-enabled outbound tooling, including WhatsApp sales tools

Scope: numbers are illustrative

51:54 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Harry Stebbings · Jun 7, 2024 · hedged

AI tooling enabling infinite-scale outbound will erode appreciation for outbound as a craft, as recipients drown in noise and block senders

Supply of outbound messages becomes effectively infinite, so recipients tune out

Scope: framed as a worry

7:09 20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team

Ron Gabrisko · Aug 4, 2025 · speculative

In a world of infinite AI-generated outbound the value of any given outbound touch likely falls, so cut-through will depend on brand, message and how much you know about the recipient's company

Buyers already receive thousands of emails and LinkedIn messages; what makes something reach the front of the inbox is relevance and brand, and AI can supply the content while a human adds the final touch

Scope: "I haven't thought about it"; "still early days"

55:33 20Sales: $0-$3.7BN: The Databricks CRO's Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History | How Databricks Beat Snowflake | How To Build a Sales Org of 5,000 and Close $190M Deals with Ron Gabrisko

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

A large part of selling is going to get automated by AI engines, though it will not fully replace salespeople — it will raise the bar on how well reps advise prospects

What he has seen in the last six to twelve months changed his prior doubts

Scope: he previously doubted this; won't completely replace salespeople

50:59 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

Sales reps and leaders need both deeper technical aptitude and stronger relationship skills, because AI will absorb transactional, down-market selling and leave humans the complex multi-stakeholder deals

AI can handle point solutions and small deals, so sellers must focus on complex strategic sales requiring consensus across stakeholders plus the technical ability to map the solution to the buyer

49:16 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

Sales productivity will trend upwards and rep attrition rates will come down as AI supplements onboarding and improves company-candidate matching.

AI can supplement onboarding and better match candidates to companies so fit improves, while automating prep frees reps to cover more accounts.

56:09 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

Gong's reps performing at ~130% of quota capacity, versus a typical company's 66-70%, demonstrates AI's ability to make salespeople more productive and effective

Most companies build buffer into quota capacity and still land around 70% attainment; Gong is running well above 100%

Scope: exact figure uncertain — 'I don't know if it's exactly 120, 130'

34:18 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2025

None of the many AI sales rep products they have seen as investors actually work

52:58 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

AI SDRs doing outbound were a bad idea that was never going to work

His framework ranks AI opportunities by task difficulty for humans and by risk if it goes wrong; outbound calling is among the hardest human tasks (like riding a bull, people want to shake you off) and carries massive brand risk if the AI says something wrong or unethical while pursuing a goal — so it scores poorly on both dimensions

Scope: Wouldn't write the direction off entirely; Inbound cases can be handled pretty well with AI; Frames it as well ahead of its time rather than permanently impossible

24:38 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

AI sellers can probably work for highly transactional, fixed-price products, but we are a long way from AI taking over solution sales like Notion or Slack

Complex selling requires identifying stakeholders and building relationships around a complex product, which AI can't do

Scope: transactional example: selling conference booths at a set price

53:11 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025 · hedged

Transactional, low-ACV selling will be the first sales work replaced by AI

Selling something like cell phone plans is simple enough for AI, provided guardrails exist

Scope: Requires guardrails, potentially an AI layer supervising or coaching the AI agents; Liability is real — the Canadian airline case where an AI agent offered a deal the company had to honour

26:35 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

She has reversed her position on AI: rather than resisting it as something that makes people dumber, the right use is to offload work and train a model to think like you as a thought partner

She had seen people ask Claude for answers instead of reasoning themselves, but found the offloading and self-dialogue use cases valuable

Scope: acknowledges she now works at an AI company

62:44 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

Gemini is the single most indispensable tool for him because it has agentic access to his full working context

It connects to Gmail, Calendar and Google Drive so it has all his context, making it strong at transcript analysis, meeting prep and calendar management

68:54 20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

ElevenLabs built internal AI revenue agents — an inbound AI SDR with very good results, an AI proposals manager that scans the web for RFPs/RFIs and scores them, and an AI customer success manager that drafts emails

The agents draft per-customer messages using all contract and pricing data, humans edit and send them, and the sent-versus-drafted delta is stored to fine-tune, so each customer gets a different tone and language — it feels human

6:15 In house ai agents draft humans edit and send

Fred Turner · Jul 18, 2026

Relentless follow-up is what actually converts in sales, and its main value in agents is that machines can scale a persistence humans won't sustain.

Many providers only respond on the ninth email; a person needs to have no shame to reach out that many times, so human teams typically give up after three attempts.

58:11 Agents scale persistence humans abandon

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Conversation intelligence AI like Gong's makes the sales-to-CS handoff seamless

An inheriting CS person can go into Gong and pull the key highlights and moments from the sales process to learn the customer quickly

27:44 Conversation intelligence ai makes sales to cs handoffs seamless

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Discovery will be the first sales responsibility automated, with customers self-discovering their challenges and being pointed toward a direction via AI

Much of a two-hour discovery can be handled by an AI engine, but a human is still needed to dig further and validate the choice

51:32 Ai takes over discovery humans validate

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024 · hedged

Amazon's digital-led, human-in-the-loop support escalation is the model for how selling and customer experience will evolve

His own experience escalated from self-serve resources to chatbot to a human callback, and AI makes that layered experience possible and faster

53:36 Digital self serve first with human escalation

Ron Gabrisko · Aug 4, 2025

AI can replace parts of sales such as building the playbook, but not in the early days when the assets have to be created from scratch

AI has to learn from something, and early on there's nothing for it to learn from

29:09 Ai cannot help build playbooks until enough data and assets exist

Ron Gabrisko · Aug 4, 2025

AI is already better than humans at outbound, though it will not completely replace humans there

A bot iterating on outreach learns what works and what doesn't faster than a team of humans running prospecting days can

54:50 Ai outperforms humans at outbound iteration though wont fully replace them

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

Manual account and lead research by BDRs will disappear from sales teams within five years

It's work a data ops team should be doing; 30-50% of BDR time today is wasted on it

62:11 Manual bdr account research will be fully automated within five years

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2025 · hedged

AI is a promising vehicle for sales coaching — an AI coach for mock calls that reps can run on their phone or in chat

It makes practice scenarios cheap and accessible

33:33 Ai mock call coaching lowers practice cost

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

AI notetakers like Granola strip the emotional signal out of a conversation, so their notes can misrepresent something like a glowing reference call as neutral

She took Granola notes on a reference call that was glowing, but the written notes read as flat and objective, prompting her partner to ask whether the reference was even positive

57:08 Ai notetakers strip emotional signal from calls

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023 · hedged

AI will replace parts of the market — transactional and inbound sales — but that is still some way off and companies are currently over-rotating

Comparable to early IVR phone systems, which were over-adopted and delivered a poor experience before the technology matured

40:20 Ai will take transactional inbound but not yet

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

Go-to-market teams under-use AI: the bigger opportunity is turning customer data into differentiated insights for the buyer, not just automating internal tasks like note-taking and email drafting.

Pilot data segmented by practice area lets you show consumption, usage, quality gains, reduced non-billable work and talent attraction, which helps firms make adoption and ROI decisions and shows where change management is needed.

19:02 Ai should turn customer data into buyer facing insight not just internal automation

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

Sales is the function that will change most in how it operates over the next three to five years as people find creative ways to apply AI to it

There is no fundamental reason AI can transform CX but not sales; current usage is limited to shallow cases like ChatGPT research

49:21 Sales will see the largest ai driven change of any function in the next few years