I have noticed something interesting in my conversations with salespeople over the past while. Mention artificial intelligence and the room tends to split in two. One group leans in, full of stories about the hours they have clawed back and the admin they no longer dread. The other sits back a little, quietly wondering whether the part of the job they love is about to be handed over to a machine.
Both reactions are worth taking seriously, and both tell us something about where selling is heading.
The numbers explain the enthusiasm. In Salesforce’s most recent State of Sales research, 87 per cent of sales organisations now use AI in some form, whether for prospecting, forecasting or drafting that first email. Separate research from Sopro found that sales professionals are saving more than two hours a day on average by letting AI take the repetitive load. That is two hours handed back to the part of the job that actually moves a deal forward, the human part.
So where does the caution come from? A Voice of the Sales Manager survey published this year put it plainly. Many managers worry about losing the human element, and only around a third feel they fully understand what AI brings to their team. That is not stubbornness. It is a fair instinct from people who have built careers on trust, timing and reading a room, and they are right to protect it.
Here is where I land after more than thirty-five years of selling face to face and over the phone. AI is genuinely good at the work that sits around the conversation. It can tidy your notes, suggest a sensible follow-up, pull your research together before a meeting and stop good leads slipping through the cracks. What it cannot do is be you in the room, hear the hesitation in a buyer’s voice and know to slow down, or sense that today is the day to stop pitching and simply listen.
That distinction matters, because the salespeople pulling ahead are not the ones using AI the most. They are the ones using it on the right things. They let it carry the admin so they can spend their best energy where it counts, sitting across from a customer, asking better questions and earning the right to the next conversation.
The people who feel cautious are often protecting exactly the right instinct. The answer is not to hold AI at arm’s length, and it is not to hand everything over to it either. It is to be deliberate. Let the technology do the heavy lifting on the tasks that drain you, and guard the human moments, because those are still where business is won.
If anything, the rise of AI has sharpened my own view rather than changed it. Selling is having a conversation with a purpose. The tools around that conversation will keep evolving, and we should welcome the good ones. The conversation itself is still ours to lead.
If you are weighing up where AI fits in your own selling, start with one honest question. Which parts of your week are stealing time from your customers? Begin there, hand that load to AI, and pour the time you save back into the conversations only you can have.
