Salespeople selling AI software

This was announced a couple months ago, but I still see ongoing references to the story + ongoing discussions on social, newsletters, and podcasts.

Marc Benioff is hiring 2,000 salespeople to sell their AI sales agentic infrastructure, Agentforce:

Marc is a pretty sharp founder and Salesforce is a monster. Their acquisition of Slack is also one of the best moves in shaping a MOAT and converting millions of organizations from “no CRM” or “any CRM” into “Salesforce makes a lot of sense here.”

But why hire a ton of people selling their future replacements? 🤔

I’ve led technical and business courses for hundreds of teams over the past 19 years – and some were outright designed to “take jobs” (like automated QA or some manual automation courses making data entry obsolete). The reluctance in this case is pretty notable – and I can smell the same in SDRs approaching Benioff’s news.

However:

  1. SDRs had a pretty rough couple of years with all the B2B SaaS layoffs, budget cuts, and forecasting calibration exercises (many were let go)
  2. 2. It’s an actual job opportunity saving an entire industry right now – at least the first of many
  3. 3. One lesson we’ve learned firsthand is that AI isn’t selling itself. B2B sales, especially high ticket, requires humans doing demos, hopping on calls, occasionally flying out to sell a product
  4. 4. Most agentic stacks today are tied to an ecosystem. Agentforce lives in Salesforce, operates with Slack, probably pulls Pardot form behaviors, and that’s also human-driven and needs people to operate behind the scenes

It’s the classic scene of “Let’s get a CRM to automate some of the manual work”, ending up in hiring a CRM manager, 2 ops people, 1 data compliance/quality person, and basically empowering the machine with humans.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to go. CRMs have their rightful place out there even for small teams. I just had a sales call with a partner establishing a new organization, self-integrating HubSpot and asking for help here. They do a lot of the field work and a proper data warehouse without referencing Notion, contract folders, and 3rd party sources carries a lot of value when integrated properly. But we still need to do the work and help with some workflows overall, which is technically an added cost item to this exercise.

While we see some extreme cases of AI bots still selling and AI social accounts ranking millions of views today, it’s a short-window opportunity that won’t last forever. Once a handful of people get tricked and feel deceived into trusting a digital robot pretending to be a human, efficiency will rapidly go down dramatically.

So humans will be at the forefront of sales and account management; leadership teams will carry a lot of weight as humans will matter more in a faceless future, and the cost of running business with humans will actually go up because orgs won’t have the economy of scale as every human will matter so much more.

This transition is one of the reasons I’ve shifted my personal priorities and paradigms into a series of 1:1 meetings and conversations vs. trying to scale online. All the AI noise with agents, copywriting tools, follow up services, video avatars, cold outreach email demos have sucked the soul out of digital conversations like Dementors in Harry Potter’s movies. Human interactions are valued as much as they were after the pandemic, following two years of lockdowns and very limited travel.

Now, the AI layers have doubled down on the same problem, virtually leading to 4 out of the past 5 years being Zoom-heavy, with emails, automated sequences, now avatars, and a lot more. I seriously see a massive iceberg right where social media is heading unless they make it worthwhile. The whole agentic and AI space will lead to insane automation and agencies running thousands or even tens of thousands of profiles – each – polluting the space just as programmatic SEO did with content.

The ongoing agentic – and afterward, robotic – evolution is only amplifying the value of human to human interactions.


My name is Mario Peshev, a global SME Business Advisor running digital businesses for 20 the past years.

Born in Bulgaria, Europe, I gained diverse management experience through my training work across Europe, North America, and the Arab world. With 10,000+ hours in consulting and training for organizations like SAP, VMware, CERN, I’ve dedicated a huge amount of my time to helping hundreds of SMEs growing in different stages of the business lifecycle.

My martech agency DevriX grew past 50 people and ranks as a top 10 WordPress global agency and Growth Blueprint, my advisory firm, has served 400+ SME founders and executives with monthly ongoing strategy sessions.


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