A founder I’m friends with runs a monthly roundtable for CROs, 80-100 of them on a single call. During a recent one, one of the CROs came off mute, threw up his hands and announced that he was done learning new tools and taking vendor pitches. He planned to wait until his peers figured out which platform was worth the money, and then he’d go buy it.
I’ve spent 20 years in enterprise sales technology, and I’ve never seen the market in a state like this one. Nearly every revenue leader I talk to is convinced the competition has AI figured out. Put two CROs who’ve never met on the same call and each privately assumes the other is 10 steps ahead, when almost nobody has moved. That misplaced anxiety is causing its own damage. It shows up as fragmented pilots, redundant tools bought in a panic, and reps left to improvise without training or guardrails.
The tools are already in place, but that doesn’t mean sales teams are getting the value they expected. Gartner finds AI can save sellers an average of 4.8 hours per week, yet many sales organizations are struggling to translate those gains into better outcomes. The reason is that much of today’s sales AI was built to automate tasks, not to help sellers sell. Adoption isn’t the same as impact, and sellers know the difference.
The AI in most sales organizations was never built to sell
Ask sellers what they reach for during the workday and the answers are chat assistants, top to bottom. Those tools were built for general-purpose use, but now they’re being asked to handle specialized work like selling. When my company studied sellers’ day-to-day AI use, 86% of what they rely on wasn’t built for sales, and only 22% said their AI is grounded in their company’s own products, pricing and deals. Nearly half simply assume whatever it tells them is current.
The pattern usually starts with a directive from the top: “You have AI now; go be better.” So teams improvise. The most technical people on the floor get pulled off quota to wire up integrations, and every rep ends up running a slightly different homemade process. Great B2B sales organizations have always run on discipline, with everyone executing the same motion well. The do-it-yourself approach to AI produces exactly the opposite. Leaders can feel the chaos even when they can’t pinpoint the source.
Time saved isn’t the same as deals won
To be fair to the technology, sellers are getting something: 67% of sellers said AI gives them time back each week, but only 22% said it has helped them win more deals, close bigger ones or close them faster. That difference should stop every revenue leader cold. If a rep gets five hours back each week and nothing changes in the pipeline, what did the organization buy?
The reason comes down to where AI shows up in the seller’s day. It helps before the conversation, with account research and meeting prep, and it helps after, with notes and follow-up. During the conversation, when a buyer raises the objection that will decide the deal, the AI goes silent. Just 4% of the sellers we heard from get AI help live on a call, and those who try are typing questions into a chatbot while the customer waits. The problem is that sales happens during the live conversation, not in the prep document or the follow-up email. The conversation is exactly where today’s tools fall short.
For most of my career, helping a rep in that moment wasn’t technically possible. It is now, and that change matters more than anything else happening in sales technology.
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Buy AI for the moment that decides the deal
Sellers have already described what they want. When we surveyed 500 quota-carrying B2B sellers in a broader study, 63% prioritized AI support in the core moments of the sales cycle (qualification, deal strategy and solution design) over administrative cleanup.
When asked about the ideal working relationship, 46% wanted an assistant handling repetitive tasks and 35% wanted a partner working side by side to close deals, while only 6% wanted a manager providing oversight. None of that reads as resistance to AI. Sellers are describing a teammate, and that word should shape how leaders evaluate every tool they consider next year.
The evaluation itself comes down to three questions:
- Was this built for selling, or built for everything?
- Is it grounded in our deals, pricing and customers, or guessing from the open internet?
- Will it be there in the live moment, or only before and after?
Most of what sales teams run today fails all three, which explains why sellers are busier than ever while win rates are stagnant.
The revenue leader in the call who swore off vendor pitches had the right instinct and the wrong conclusion. Sales organizations don’t need to master AI, rebuild their stacks or win an arms race their competitors haven’t entered, either. They need to measure the next pilot on whether cycles compress and win rates move rather than on hours saved, and they need to put AI where sales happens: on the live call with the customer.
About the Author of this Article
Matt Darrow is CEO at Vivun and Hero by Vivun
About Vivun and Hero by Vivun
Vivun is an enterprise software company providing AI-powered buyer experience and sales efficiency platforms, Hero is their flagship AI sales teammate product.
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