Will AI replace salespeople?

I spoke about this at the Salesforce Sales Summit in London. I told the room: "AI will not replace salespeople. It will replace bad salespeople. It will replace mediocre salespeople. It will replace order takers. This is why you must never stop investing in yourself. After all, if you stop investing in yourself, why would anyone invest in you?"

Silence. Nobody moved. For a second I genuinely thought I had overstepped the mark and said something people didn't want to hear in a room full of AI vendors and enterprise software buyers.

Then, afterwards, I was inundated with messages. People thanking me for saying what they had been thinking but hadn't heard anyone say out loud from a stage.

Why most AI events avoid this question

Most AI events focus on how to use AI, why you should use it and how it is going to reshape the world of work. Fair enough - that is useful information and I use AI myself for research and admin.

What most of these events skip over is the question that actually matters to the people in the room: will AI replace salespeople? It is the question sales directors are quietly asking themselves, and it is the question their teams are too nervous to ask out loud. Somebody needs to answer it properly instead of talking around it.

What happened when Salesforce made salespeople redundant

There are exceptions to what I said on that stage, and companies do get this wrong. Salesforce made thousands of people redundant when they first announced their AI agents. The bet was that automation could do the job. It couldn't, not fully, and Salesforce ended up going back to many of those same people to offer their jobs back.

Some accepted. Others rightfully refused - once you have made someone redundant and then changed your mind, you cannot expect them to simply pick up where they left off as if nothing happened. Redundancy is a deeply unpleasant and often traumatic experience, and no amount of AI efficiency makes that easier to swallow if you are the one who gets the call.

The soft skills AI cannot replace

If you work in sales, get working on your soft skills right away. This is the part AI genuinely cannot do.

AI can give you options. It can draft an email, summarise a call, suggest three ways to handle an objection. What it cannot do is tell you which of those options is right for the person sitting in front of you, in that moment, with everything else going on in their life that you will never see on a spreadsheet.

It lacks empathy when someone is having a bad day. A great salesperson notices the shift in tone on a call and adjusts. AI does not notice. It just keeps generating the next suggested response, regardless of whether the person on the other end needs a straight answer or a moment of patience.

Why enterprise and high-ticket deals still need a human

Understand the language, resilience and skills needed to get in touch with multiple decision-makers in high-ticket or enterprise deals. This is where AI falls furthest short.

A financial director, a CEO and a head of procurement do not respond to the same message, the same tone or the same follow-up cadence. Reaching all of them, building trust with each of them separately, and holding your nerve when one of them goes quiet for three weeks - that takes resilience AI simply does not have to offer. It can help you find the right names. It cannot get you through the door.

The Dublin deal - what actually won the business

I won an SME deal in Dublin recently. When I win a deal I always ask the same question afterwards: "Why did you choose me?"

In this case, they had been speaking with two bigger players than me. Both were using generic AI-driven outreach. Both had the budget to throw expensive software and automation at the problem. They thought that would be enough to win.

It wasn't. What they were missing was soft skills - the ability to actually listen to what this particular business needed, rather than run them through a templated process. That is what closed the deal, and it is the same thing that will keep closing deals long after this current wave of AI hype settles down.

What to do about it

None of this means ignore AI. Use it where it genuinely saves you time - research, admin, the parts of the job that were never where your value came from in the first place.

But do not mistake a tool for a strategy. If you want to be the salesperson who is still in a job in five years, here is where to put your energy:

• Sharpen the soft skills that make people trust you, not just find you
• Learn to read a room, a call and a bad day, because no software will do that for you
• Get comfortable with the discomfort of enterprise selling, where the deal takes months and multiple decision-makers, not one clean automated funnel

Investing in yourself was never optional. It just got a lot more obvious why.

If you want your team selling with the soft skills AI cannot touch, get in touch to talk about training them.