I have spent enough time watching AI sales tools to have an opinion on what they will and will not do.
What AI is genuinely doing now
Drafting outreach emails that look custom but are templated. Faster than a human. Quality has caught up.
Recording, transcribing and tagging calls. Extracting action items. Summarising into a CRM note. The boring administrative work that took reps an hour a day is now seconds.
Scoring leads. Pattern-matching against historical data to predict which prospects are most likely to close. Reasonable, with caveats.
What AI is not going to do, even as the tools improve
Reading the room. The micro-cues on a video call where the prospect looked bored when you started talking about pricing. AI sees the words. It does not see the moment your champion glanced at their phone.
Earning trust over time. People buy from people they trust. Trust accumulates through small consistent actions over months. AI cannot do that for you. It can help you remember to follow up. It cannot replace the follow-up.
Telling someone they should not buy. The AI is incentivised to close. Sometimes the right move is “this is not the right time for you”. A rep with judgment can make that call. A rep doing what the AI suggests cannot.
Politely disagreeing in a way the buyer respects. Negotiation is mostly judgement. AI is bad at judgement and good at pretending to have it.
The skill for the next few years is using AI for the boring parts so you have time for the hard parts. Reps who try to do the hard parts faster will lose to reps who realise the hard parts are now what their job actually is.
If your sales team is figuring this out the hard way, I help with that.