Gartner: 60% of Sales to Be Carried Out by AI

By 2028, 60 percent of B2B seller work will be executed through conversational user interfaces via generative artificial intelligence, up from its current levels of less than 5 percent, according to Gartner.

"Sales operations leaders and their technology teams must prepare for the convergence of new forms of artificial intelligence, dynamic process automation, and reinvented deal-planning activities that will transform the sales function," said Adnan Zijadic, director analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice.

GenAI, Gartner predicts, stands to revolutionize how sales organizations capture, understand, and use more complex data signals.

Before generative AI, sellers would review disparate data sources to inform their tactics and messaging. Generative AI will enable sales leaders to streamline these processes, saving hours of seller time, the company maintains.

"By combining external and internal data sources and automating complex manual processes, generative AI will unlock a richer understanding of target audiences and usher in a new era of sales decision-making," Zijadic said. "This shift will see sales technology moving from being just a tool to truly becoming a teammate."

The combination of sales force automation (SFA) data and generative AI prompt engineering will facilitate the next generation of dynamic process automation, which enables leaders to make real-time adjustments to market strategies, according to Gartner, which noted that AI can combine compelling buyer data and creativity to automate value messaging, producing high-quality content.

Gartner further predicts that in the next two years, 30 percent of outbound messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.

Additionally, it expects AI will drive impactful process automation use cases through mobile and smart devices, desktops and bots, with conversational experiences used to execute up to 14 percent of sales planning, 15 percent of customer meeting prep, and 14 percent of deal negotiation.

"One of the most transformative use cases of generative AI will be process automation," Zijadic said. "CSOs should invest in AI readiness and data maturity to ensure they're ready to embrace this highly impactful use case."

Successful adoption of genAI adaptive sales and deal playbooks will provide new gains in sales productivity, presenting an opportunity to reanalyze how go-to-market resources are allocated.

Gartner expects genAI's most significant impacts will be seen in guided selling, forecast management, visualization and analytics, integration and platform composability, and collaboration.

And along with that, Gartner expects 35 percent of chief revenue officers to resource a centralized genAI operations team as part of their GTM organizations in the next few years.