AI Revolution in Sales: Companies Seek Genuine Innovation Amidst Marketing Hype

Worth hosted a panel at the HumanX conference in Las Vegas last week, where industry leaders gathered to discuss how automation transforms sales teams, CRM systems, and pricing models. The AI revolution in sales is no longer just hype—it’s happening in real-time, and companies are scrambling to separate genuine innovation from marketing spin. What emerged was a vision of the future where AI plays a central role, not in replacing salespeople but in making them dramatically more efficient.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, AI has become a buzzword for almost every company, regardless of whether their technology is genuinely AI-driven. “All of a sudden, and you all know it, everyone’s website has AI on it,” said Brian Peterson, co-founder and CTO of Dialpad. “We’re like, oh, awesome. Like now, like just now?!.… They do, you know, they try to use third parties because they don’t have it for themselves.”

The result? Many companies are selling AI solutions that can’t scale. “You got to try. You got to deploy. You got to see the outcome,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO and founder of People.ai. “And you got to distinguish, as we were joking backstage, white-coded AI solutions from real AI solutions by seeing if it scales to billions of transactions a day, an hour, whatever it is.”

Michelle Bacharach, CEO of FineMind, argued that AI is no longer a differentiator but a necessity. “If you’re not using AI, you are toast. That is the future. You have to. I think talking about it as a differentiator will sound so dumb, and it already does.”

The Broken CRM Model and AI’s Role in Fixing It

Traditional CRM systems are not designed for the AI era. Keith Peiris, CEO of Tome, described the fundamental problem: “Salesforce is, you know, and HubSpot are mostly like metadata that AEs use to track a deal, but it doesn’t explain, like, why did you win this? What is the customer interested in? What makes you successful? What makes them successful?”

AI-driven CRM systems need to move beyond tabular data to something more dynamic. “If you have thousands of pages of unstructured data on every account and opportunity, you probably don’t want to interface with it through a tabular view,” Peiris continued. “You probably want to interface with it through a chat interface.”

AI’s impact on sales is not just about automation—it’s also forcing a rethink of business models. SaaS companies have long relied on fixed, per-seat pricing, but that structure doesn’t align with AI’s usage-based nature. “On one hand, CIOs want to pay you $20 a seat a month, whatever it is,” said Rogynskyy. “But if you are successful, your margin is going to become smaller because people use up a lot of LLMs as a vendor, so your current pricing model…disincentivizes innovation.”

Brian Peterson agreed but saw a hybrid future. “I don’t know if I agree…it’s just going to be consumption. I think it’s going to be both,” he said. “When we come in and say, hey, we’ll charge you per deflection to your customer support, they don’t like it because they don’t know what their cost is going to be.”

Michelle Bacharach added that different audiences have different expectations. “We sell to two different audiences. We sell to the chief digital officer who manages the website and e-commerce experience. They love fixed costs. And then we sell to the CMO, who’s used to buying ads, and there’s variability in that cost.”

Breaking Down Organizational Silos with AI

One of the biggest challenges in sales automation is breaking down silos—not just between marketing and sales but even within the same department. “We have a customer, a large networking company, that has 14 CRM instances,” said Rogynskyy. “They have a set instance for every one of their product lines. And there could be separate teams that walk by each other in a customer’s lobby, having meetings with the same seller back to back, and not knowing that they were in the same building.”

Bacharach echoed this issue in retail. “Marketing picks 10% of the product catalog to make for and everything else, well, we couldn’t get to it. So there you go. And now we’re getting to it. So we’re helping sell that long tail of product.”

AI as a Sales Multiplier, Not a Job Killer

Despite fears that AI will replace sales jobs, most experts see it as an enabler rather than a disruptor. “We believe we’re enhancing the humans, not replacing them,” said Peterson. “Our account reps…they’re just going to be able to talk to more leads. They’re going to do better when they talk to the leads.”

Oleg Rogynskyy provided complex data on AI’s impact. “We are seeing enterprise salespeople being able to effectively manage twice as many accounts per salesperson with AI capabilities than without,” he said. “Another thing we’re seeing is about a 30% bump in win rate already.”

AI’s efficiency gains could mean rehiring previously cut staff for many companies. “Retail has slashed headcount in the last, I don’t know, ever,” Bacharach noted. “But it always seems to be happening. They’re always trying to do more with less. And so we’re just…helping sell more stuff and have a higher margin so that that can be reinvested into the business.”

As AI continues to integrate into sales, experts predict a shift in how companies structure their sales teams. “We are probably two, three years away from the world where we have kind of Navy SEAL sales teams with very small headcount, really high account focus, where they spend 80% of their time with the customer face to face,” Rogynskyy said.

The shift is already happening, according to Keith Peiris. “I think the companies that are going to survive are going to be the ones where marketing, product engineering, sales, customer service are all looking at the same data, talking to each other, and constantly inventing.”

One significant change is the growing power of CIOs. “A bunch of headcount budget is going to switch to CIOs,” said Rogynskyy. “As CIOs are deploying systems that do work instead of helping humans do work better, we will see CIO budgets growing at the expense of capacity model budget.”

One significant change is the growing power of CIOs. “A bunch of headcount budget is going to switch to CIOs,” said Rogynskyy. “As CIOs are deploying systems that do work instead of helping humans do work better, we will see CIO budgets growing at the expense of capacity model budget.”

Peterson sees a future that mirrors past technological shifts. “A lot of people think like engineers are going to get replaced. And that someone said, I think the Anthropic CEO said, there’s going to be no encoding on their own in a year. I was like, I don’t think so. I think it’s just going to mean more startups, more stuff, more money, everything.”