AI-Enabled Sellers 2.6 Times More Likely to Achieve Growth

Sales organizations that provide sellers with artificial intelligence-enabled next-best-action guidance are 2.6 times more likely to achieve commercial growth, according to a survey by Gartner.

And organizations that prioritize upskilling sellers on AI are 2.4 times more likely to achieve strong revenue growth. However, the finding also highlights a growing divide between the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI and sellers’ ability to apply those capabilities effectively in day-to-day work.

“The most effective sales organizations are not simply layering AI onto existing ways of working,” says Greg Hessong, senior director analyst in the Gartner Sales practice. “They are redesigning seller workflows so AI can support execution, recommendations, and orchestration, while sellers focus their time on the moments where human judgment and customer value matter most.”

AI-enabled growth depends not only on technology adoption but also redesigning sales roles around how work gets done, Gartner says. Sales leaders should redesign roles for an AI-driven environment, aligning those roles to AI-augmented workflows and preparing future roles for the task of orchestrating AI agents, the firm adds. The need for that shift is becoming more urgent: Gartner predicts that by 2027, 95 percent of sellers’ research workflows will begin with AI, up from less than 20 percent in 2024.

But at the same time, additional Gartner buyer data also showed that human sellers still outperform generative AI in the following ways:

• Buyers were 28 percentage points more likely to say sales reps, not genAI, helped them advance to the next step in the purchase process.
• Buyers were 32 percentage points more likely to say a rep made them feel confident in the purchase decision.
• Buyers were 39 percentage points more likely to say a rep understood their needs.
• Buyers were 21 percentage points more likely to say a rep helped quantify the benefits for their organization.
• Buyers who spent more time with supplier reps reported the lowest levels of dysfunction, and buying groups with low dysfunction were 13 times more likely to report high-quality deals.

AI is well suited to activities like account research, personalized messaging, signal monitoring, and next best actions, while sellers stand out in empathy, judgment, contextual understanding, and value framing,

“Sales leaders who win with AI will not ask sellers to do everything they did before, just faster,” Hessong advises. “They will build AI-augmented roles that give sellers more capacity to help customers realize value, advance decisions, and achieve better outcomes.”

To derive the most benefit from these changes, Gartner recommends that firms assign new sales roles to deploy human sellers where they will provide the most value. To determine that, companies should audit current workflows to determine where humans and AI are best suited. The low-value, high-effort tasks should be automated so that human sellers can focus on buyer engagements with the most impact.

Gartner also urges CSOs to shift from using AI for small incremental gains, focusing instead on raising the overall performance ceiling.

Gartner’s specific recommendations for CSOs include the following:

• Partner with sales or revenue operations to systematically audit current sales processes to identify low-value, high-effort administrative tasks ready for AI automation.
• Mandate that human resources and sales enablement formally rewrite seller role descriptions to explicitly evaluate and provide compensation for AI fluency and output discernment, rather than simply for sales experience.
• Establish an AI agent sandbox, a controlled testing environment where top-performing sellers can pilot commercial, off-the-shelf AI agents on specific deal stages before rolling them out to the full sales team.
• Ask sales operations to review current sales process stages and sources of administrative bottlenecks.
• Identify tasks for “agentification,” distinguishing them from those best left with human sellers.
• Decide how and where to deploy AI, identifying opportunities to embed the technology in workflows.
• Upskill sellers for AI so they can oversee the quality of AI-enabled workflows and ensure the quality of AI-generated outputs.
• Ensure that new roles emphasize the right mix of skills: Transform sales roles to reflect new seller responsibilities and enable sellers to focus more time where their specialized skills are needed most, such as building consensus and delivering insight-driven customer engagements.