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.”
