Salesforce sellers are using AI to improve their face-to-face client meetings and calls

Yahoo

07-05-2025

Getty Images; Karan Singh for BI
Corporate sales work often requires face-to-face meetings and client calls.
At Salesforce, sellers use AI-powered tech to help them prepare for these conversations.
This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.
After a long day of meeting with clients, Haley Gault, a Salesforce seller, received a last-minute ping from a customer saying they wanted to meet with her face-to-face within the hour.
Gault started to sweat: The customer's business, electric vehicle charging stations, was not a topic she knew well. To get up to speed, she pulled up Salesforce's Agentforce AI tool in Slack, typed in "EV contractors," and received a dossier of previous sales, call recordings, and industry trends.
"I don't have a vertical, so I'm no industry expert in regards to electric vehicle contracting," Gault said. "That's a way for me to really quickly get up to speed on who this customer is. What were the previous conversations with Salesforce? Who are the key stakeholders?"
Gault isn't alone in harnessing AI tools for her sales role. When McKinsey asked about 1,500 companies about how they used generative AI, sales and marketing were the most common responses.
Dan Gottlieb, Gartner's vice president analyst for sales, told Business Insider that sales professionals are an industrious group of self-starters who are actively searching for new AI use cases. They use artificial intelligence to compile research, develop leads, and even hone their pitching skills, Gottlieb said.
But the increasing implementation of AI in sales raises the question: Could this integration diminish the power of human connection? Corporate selling is, after all, a fundamentally human process that relies on relationship building, typically via phone calls and client dinners.
At Salesforce, its 25,000 sellers use AI tools to improve their human approach to sales, not erase it, Connor Marsden, the company's North America president of industrial, consumer, and energy, told BI.
How AI can bolster seller goals
The Columbia Business School professor Michael Brown said he'd noticed some sales professionals worrying about whether AI is dehumanizing the selling process.
"I don't know any buyer who wants to be sold to by a copilot," Brown told BI.
He added that there would always be client-buyers who want to have in-person conversations with sellers about pricing, discounts, and legal agreements. At the same time, Brown said he had a positive outlook on AI's expansion to sales processes, so long as it continues to enhance worker performance.