Why the Best AI for Sales Still Leaves Room for the Human

Luke Wilson plays an average man who wakes up in the future to find that society has become so dumbed-down he’s now the smartest person alive.

Shortcuts are seductive—but sales still needs a brain, not just a bot. Most AI sales tools make bold claims. But if we’re not careful, we’re going to miss the point.

Let’s be clear: AI is not the enemy of sales. But mindless automation is.

The usual view of dystopian future has most of us becoming irrelevant replaced by robots looking and acting more and more “human.” The real danger pointed out by far fewer speculators is that humans start to behave more like robots (or AI). In fact, it’s the overly prescriptive, “just press send” kind of AI that is a sign of this. Tools that remove all friction, all thinking, and all responsibility from the seller’s process may feel like progress, but it’s the kind that gets us closer to the future portrayed in Idiocracy. A world where human thinking has gone the way of the dodo.

The Football Analogy: AI Gets You Up the Field, But You Still Have to Score

• Moving on from Hollywood (or maybe not) to pro football, here’s my favorite analogy - General-purpose AI tools? They’ll get you 50 yards. Purpose-built AI with domain knowledge? That’ll get you 80. But the last 20? That’s on you.

• Sales remains a field of nuance, judgment calls, reading defenses (aka buyers), and improvising under pressure. If your AI is trying to do all of that for you, you’re not selling—you’re outsourcing your brain. That’s why we believe in consciously designing gaps into AI tools—spaces where the human is meant to step in.

Why Humans Still Matter in AI-Driven Sales

• Take something like sales messaging. A lot of AI tools will auto-generate an email, add the recipient, and fire it off before the rep has even taken a breath. Efficiency? Sure. Effective? Probably not.

• The problem? It removes the moment of pause— where the seller says, “Does this actually make sense for this person, right now?” That pause is where better thinking happens. It’s where relevance and context reside. It’s where judgment kicks in. And if we automate that away, we don’t get better sellers. We become passengers.

That’s why AI in sales shouldn’t just be about speed. It should be about helping the seller think better, faster.

Beware the In-House Trap: Built by Technologists, Not Sellers

• Another trend we’re seeing is companies building their own in-house sales AI. On the surface, it sounds smart—more control, tailored to your data, customized workflows.

  
  

• But here’s the problem: most in-house AI projects are technology-driven, not sales-driven. They’re led by engineers, not sellers. They’re architected by people who think in  funnels and pipelines—but not politics, pressure, or the psychology of a skeptical buyer.

The result? Tools that are technically impressive but miss the subtle and messy realities of B2B sales—like knowing when to challenge a prospect versus when to listen, how to interpret buying signals, or how to detect a stalled deal.

Returning to the football analogy, AI without context and domain empathy is like running the same offensive plays paying no attention to how the defense lines up.

The Middle Path: Between General AI and Custom Rigid Systems

The sales AI landscape today looks like:

• general AI tools that offer useful, but generic shortcuts (a good place to start)

• Over simplified rigid tools with fixed, overly prescriptive outcomes

• Fully baked enterprise tools, that are expensive, complex, and confusing

We believe there’s a better path: It’s more about augmentation - assistance, not abdication.

That means building AI that knows what it’s doing—but also knows what it shouldn’t do.

The Bigger Picture: Human-in-the-Loop by Design

If you zoom out beyond sales, this is the larger philosophical challenge of AI in any domain: How do we keep humans meaningfully in the loop? You have to force them. Humans are hard-wired to extract as much utility for minimum inputs of energy and effort.

Because let’s face it: the danger of AI is not that it becomes super intelligent and takes over. The danger is that it becomes good enough that we stop trying, and then we wake up one day and we're living in an “Idiocracy.”

Final Thought: Progress Shouldn’t Be Passive

There’s nothing wrong with speed. Or shortcuts. Or efficiency. But when you outsource all the thinking, you also lose the learning. You lose the edge. AI should make sellers better. It should make mediocre ones more thoughtful. It should make great ones faster—but not passive.

Scoring that touchdown still takes a person, not just a playbook.