A few weeks ago, Tomas Tunguz from Theory Ventures gave an insightful talk on the state of SaaS Go-to-Market. One key takeaway was the explosive growth of AI use among sales teams. This isn’t surprising. Sales teams, by nature, are quick to adopt new tools because they’re profit centers. Anything that works will be adopted quickly because it impacts the top line. AI is helping sales teams in several areas—lead scoring, customer research, training, follow-up automation, competitive intelligence, and price optimization, to name a few.

Sales leaders are reporting lots of efficiency gains thanks to AI, but despite the boost in productivity, AI hasn’t moved the needle when it comes to deal conversions or bookings growth.

The reality today is that AI in sales — as it is in many functions — is really like having a bunch of productive interns. They can handle lots of grunt work, but their output needs to be checked, they’re tough to train, they lack company and situational context, and they’re not equipped to make important decisions. AI can’t yet do what great salespeople do. It can’t build emotional connections, navigate complex negotiations, leverage intuition, adapt in real-time to low-information situations, or respond to subtle cues or nuanced human emotions surrounded in layers of context. In short, AI is really good when it has lots of great training data to work with, which is the polar opposite of what a good salesperson does: they shine and show their real value when they lack data, and the next step is unclear, and they have to jump over hurdles to acquire more information or rely on their emotional intelligence, intuition, instincts, and human connection to make a good decision without it.

That said, I do believe the efficiency gains AI provides will eventually translate into better conversions and growth. But I’m skeptical how high up the chain it can go in terms of high value sales activity.

AI in sales will be a fun one to watch. Sales results are pretty measurable, and teams will quickly adopt what works. We’ll see.