Buyer Perspective · October 2026 · 3 min read

Faster at the wrong thing

Most sales AI speeds up what sellers already do. The teams getting results changed what sellers do.

Ask a sales leader what their team uses AI for, and the answers are usually the same. Faster prospecting. More email. Call summaries. Quicker proposals. All useful. None of it changes the result, because it makes the old motion faster rather than better.

Gartner's latest research on sales organisations suggests the teams that win with AI are doing something else.

What the research says

Gartner surveyed 227 chief sales officers in late 2025 and published the findings in May 2026. Two results stand out.

Changing what reps do pays. Sales organisations that give sellers AI-enabled next best actions are 2.6 times more likely to achieve commercial growth. The AI isn't doing the rep's work faster. It's pointing the rep at the right work.

Investing in the rep pays too. Organisations that prioritise upskilling sellers on AI are 2.4 times more likely to achieve strong revenue growth. The tool alone doesn't do it. The rep has to know how to use it to sell better.

Gartner's own conclusion, from analyst Greg Hessong: "Sales leaders who win with AI will not ask sellers to do everything they did before, just faster."

Why faster isn't working

There's a reason speed alone falls flat. In the same research programme, Gartner asked buyers what they want from sellers. 67% would rather buy without a rep at all. What they're avoiding is the pitch: the discovery questions, the feature demo, the proposal shaped to a spreadsheet.

AI that produces more prospecting, more email and more pitches produces more of what buyers are trying to escape. It makes teams faster at the wrong thing.

What buyers do value, by a wide margin over AI, is a rep who understands their situation and helps them feel confident about the decision. That takes time and skill. Which is where AI can help, if it's pointed there.

Our take

Handing reps Copilot or Claude doesn't improve sales on its own. Results come when reps use the right AI, in the right way, on the work that helps buyers decide.

AI's payoff in sales isn't speed. It's capacity and direction: free up the rep's time, then spend it on the work buyers actually want done, which is helping them decide.

That means three things for a sales leader:

1. Point AI at the next right action, not the next task. Which deal needs attention, which stakeholder is missing, what the buyer still needs to feel sure. That's what the 2.6× teams are doing.
2. Train the rep, not just the tool. The 2.4× teams invested in sellers' skills alongside the software. A rep who can't help a buyer decide won't be rescued by a faster inbox.
3. Spend the freed time on buyers. Research estimates AI can free up around a tenth of a seller's week. That time is only worth something if it goes into conversations that help buyers decide, not into more outreach.