Salesforce has ranked AI adoption as a critical tool for sales organizations, with a majority now using some form of AI for tasks such as prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, and drafting emails to reduce routine work and improve performance.
The Salesforce State of Sales Report 2026 revealed that sales teams are now seeing AI and AI agents as the most important growth tactic, with 89% of sales reps agreeing that AI is improving customer understanding.
By introducing AI and AI agents into sales workflows, this will improve relevance, scale, and responsiveness in sales interactions, giving human sellers more capacity to engage customers more meaningfully.
Adam Alfano, EVP of Sales at Salesforce, explains that sales teams must now remove routine tasks from sellers so they can focus on relationship-building and revenue-driving activities:
“We want to kill the busywork so our teams can focus on what actually moves deals forward: building relationships and driving success. AI agents make that possible.”
Rise of AI in Sales Teams
Compared to other departments, sales teams typically face higher volumes of data, longer buying cycles, and more complex customer journeys.
The complexity required has now outgrown manual execution, requiring sales teams to focus on non-selling work to keep up with administrative demands.
By introducing AI agents into workflows, they can research accounts, prioritize leads, draft outreach, update CRM records, and follow up with limited human input.
And with generative AI becoming more reliable rather than experimental, they can handle unstructured tasks such as writing, summarizing, and reasoning across datasets.
As customer expectations increase, buyers are expecting faster responses, relevant messaging, and consistent follow ups across channels.
By introducing AI agents into the customer sector, they can maintain this level of engagement at scale, ensuring leads do not go unmissed and interactions remain timely.
Furthermore, sales teams are now requiring AI agents to handle data complexity, by unifying and acting on CRM, marketing, service, and external data in real time, this enables agents to support informed conversations with customers.
Whilst AI isn’t expected to replace sales teams altogether, this will shift role responsibilities toward relationship building, problem-solving, and advisory work to focus on judgement and trust.
According to the surveyed report, sellers are now deploying AI agents across the entire sales cycle, as 87% of sales organizations using AI across cycle tasks.
With AI now becoming embedded in daily sales workflow, this represents a shift away from individual AI features, with AI agents now advising teams on lead identification, deal management, and onboarding.
This is only expected to increase, with nearly 90% of respondents planning to adopt AI agents by 2027, enabling more sales teams to focus more on complex tasks.
Alfano further highlights that “94% of sales leaders who adopt them agree that AI agents are essential to their growth.”
Salesforce findings also revealed that sellers are now expecting AI agents to significantly reduce their time spent on research and content creation, with many sales respondents reporting a 33% reduction time, enabling teams to improve seller effectiveness as customer demands change rapidly.
Furthermore, sales teams are using AI to tackle unclean data in disconnected systems, with 51% of sales leaders who use AI agreeing that disconnected systems are slowing down their AI initiatives.
By prioritizing data cleansing, this rids systems of duplicates, errors, omissions, and standardizes formats across silos to ensure organizations achieve high AI returns.
Agentic AI is expected to drive impact across other departments too, with Salesforce sales teams already seeing the benefits.
“(AI Agents) help us onboard reps and quote complex deals faster and personalize outreach with better intel,” Alfano said.
“Plus, they’re prospecting 24/7. It’s not just efficiency gains in one department – agents are reshaping our entire sales engine.”
Impact on Customer Engagement
For customer engagement, AI and AI agents now have the potential to make customer engagement more efficient, relevant, and personalized.
This allows sales teams to allocate more time and attention to strategic relationship work, while AI handles repetitive tasks and insight generation.
Sellers are now using AI to deepen their understanding of buyer context and needs, allowing teams to tailor conversations and add additional context and relevance to strengthen engagement.
With a significant reduction in research and routine tasks times, sales reps can use this time to engage directly with customers, leading to stronger individual relationships and improved responsiveness.
As sales teams engage more with AI, this builds up industry potential for other tools that can provide predictive engagement capabilities, anticipating customer needs before they’re expressed, increasing customer connection and satisfaction.
The Future of Sales Roles
The role of AI and AI agents in sales is shifting from optional to a fundamental operational capability, with the technology expected to eventually take on more routine work for less administration.
Professionals are therefore positioning themselves to spend more time on strategic work, such as customer engagement, relationship building, and closing deals, rather than manual, operational tasks.
The report also highlights that newer sales professionals in Gen Z currently spend disproportionate time on administrative work, meaning future roles may offer clearer paths to skill development and performance feedback.
Teams that are adopting AI agents are seeing stronger results year-over-year, meaning future success in sales may depend on how willing teams are to embrace AI-supported workflows.
Over the next few years, success in sales is likely to depend on how well professionals use judgment, relationship skills, and AI-assisted workflows to meet evolving customer expectations.
