Sales is one of the oldest known professions. The fundamental expectations of a seller’s role—building trust-based relationships, finding opportunities to create value for customers, and creating experiences that minimize friction—have remained constant over time. What’s new are the tools available to help sellers become more productive, especially with the rapid emergence of generative AI (gen AI) in recent years.
Because of gen AI’s great promise, companies at all stages of technological development have been exploring its implications for their businesses. Those in B2B sales are reporting strong business outcomes and real impact from their initial gen AI builds, and they have told us that they’re eager to do more. At this point, it appears that the widescale adoption of gen AI isn’t just probable but inevitable.
Experimentation and development with gen AI is still playing out. In this article, we look at how technological changes are currently impacting B2B sellers. Then we explore three pathways for how B2B sales could evolve over the next decade: fundamental reimagination of sales efficiency, meaningful sales growth, and reframing of the sales operating model. On each pathway, gen AI’s role progressively deepens. Finally, we describe how companies can take steps now to prepare for a gen-AI-enabled future of sales—one with a journey powered by gen AI so ubiquitous that it’s nearly undetectable.
How new technology is rewriting the rules of sales
In the past decade, automation, data analytics, and machine learning solutions have helped B2B sellers become more effective. Companies that have empowered their sales teams through technology, including automation, now report consistent efficiency upticks of 10 to 15 percent.1 They also report an increase in the amount of time that sellers spend in front of customers and a decrease in the time spent performing back-office activities, such as pipeline management and invoicing (see sidebar “In the field: A customer experience success story”).
Gen AI offers the promise of even greater productivity and growth. In previous research, McKinsey estimated that gen AI could open up an incremental $0.8 trillion to $1.2 trillion in productivity across sales and marketing, on top of the productivity increases already realized from traditional analytics and AI applications.2 It’s not surprising that the function that saw the greatest jump in adoption of gen AI applications from 2023 to 2024 is sales and marketing.3
According to the most recent McKinsey B2B Pulse Survey, B2B sellers are in the early stages of using gen AI.4 Just 21 percent of surveyed commercial leaders (defined as top management, sales leaders, and marketing leaders) report that their companies have fully enabled enterprise-wide adoption of gen AI in B2B buying and selling, and 22 percent have only piloted specific use cases (Exhibit 1).
The optimism is palpable, however. More than 85 percent of surveyed commercial leaders who have deployed gen AI in their organizations report that they’re “very excited” about the technology.5 They point to improved efficiency, top-line growth, and customer experience as among the most important benefits that gen AI could have for B2B selling (Exhibit 2).
As seen with the adoption curve of other innovative technologies, such as the internet and smartphones, the impact from a disruptive technology is multidimensional and far reaching. We believe that the question of widespread adoption of gen AI isn’t a matter of “if” but rather “when” and “how.”
The next frontier for gen AI in B2B sales
As companies step up their investments in gen AI, we wanted to explore what the next decade might look like for B2B sales. We asked dozens of cross-functional design thinkers, sales executives, and frontline sellers across multiple industries how they envisioned a gen- AI-enabled future. We also discussed the foundational ways in which gen AI could change the way that sellers sell.
Based on these discussions, we mapped out the three previously mentioned possible pathways in which gen AI could transform the future of B2B sales. On the first pathway, gen AI improves productivity by assisting in task automation, taking friction out of today’s sales process. On the second one, gen AI helps identify new pockets of growth. And on the third, embedded gen AI is at the core of B2B sales that have changed fundamentally. These tracks are neither parallel nor discrete: the future of gen-AI-enabled B2B sales could be a combination of all three.
Pathway one: Shifting the efficiency frontier
In the first forward-looking pathway, gen AI increasingly augments sales capabilities across a breadth of activities, freeing salespeople’s bandwidth so that they can spend higher-quality time with customers (see sidebar “Imagine this: How generative AI can help sellers be more productive”). Gen AI is poised to transform productivity in several key ways:
- Resources will be allocated more effectively. Powered by analytics and forecasting, the integration of gen AI with advanced machine learning techniques can increase the precision with which companies anticipate future customer demand. Sellers can better allocate resources to the opportunities with the highest ROI. The integration can also have downstream impact on operational capabilities (such as inventory management, product development, and supply chain).
- The contextual expertise required of sellers will be reduced. Today, sellers need to invest extensive time in developing deep industry knowledge and product expertise. Gen AI can boost research efforts and provide critical insights in mere moments, helping sellers serve customers quickly across diverse industries, geographies, and cultures. Knowledge that used to require hours of research or even years of experience to acquire can be obtained and at sellers’ fingertips in real time freeing them to become agile generalists.
- Emotional intelligence skills will become central. With gen AI automating most procedural or routine tasks, sellers will have more time to center on what they tell us is most important: building trust-based relationships with customers. They can focus on functions that require empathy, deep critical thinking, and complex problem-solving skills, such as serving as customer advocates, supporting clients through complex decisions, and helping customers realize value from the products or services that they’re selling.
Pathway two: Releasing a new growth paradigm
In the second pathway, gen AI supercharges go-to-market teams, driving growth across existing and new customers and enabling sellers to pursue more high-potential opportunities with higher win rates (see sidebar “Imagine this: Reaching new customers through generative AI”). Gen AI can accelerate growth and reimagine the sales process in meaningful ways:
- Sellers can engage with customers at the right moments. Gen AI can monitor organizational attributes (such as product launch timing and top-management changes) and predict individual customer needs. With scripts, nudges, and cues, gen AI can feed the ideal pitch to a seller at the right time, with limited prompting, and even get better over time.
- Sellers can unlock new segments, markets, and products. Gen AI can monitor internal and external customer reactions, including online reviews and social media, to inform product development and new solutions. This can open up entirely new revenue streams. Moreover, gen AI can help sellers form a holistic view of an entire industry, from supply-and-demand insights to the competitive landscape, to help shape the way a company offers, prices, and sells products. As a shipping and logistics executive told us, “Growth will come to those who leverage the emergence of AI platforms to know their and their competitors’ capacity and truly go to market and monetize with that insight.”
- Sellers can operate at peak performance. Gen AI can continually analyze seller activity, recognizing strengths and synthesizing best practices to provide constant coaching tailored to individuals’ selling styles and help them perform at their best for every sale. Gen AI can also identify the critical skills needed for sellers to excel and flag any new candidates with matching capabilities, regardless of background, helping companies hire the greatest talent.
Pathway three: Radically reframing the modern sales organization
In the third future pathway for B2B sales, gen AI becomes a central part of day-to-day sales operations and ultimately a “table stakes” technology, much like the internet and smartphones are today (see sidebar “Imagine this: When generative AI becomes a seller’s indispensable assistant”). In this world, gen AI is simply accepted as a given in how sellers operate, and those that haven’t adopted it are left behind. The role of the seller can change in a few fundamental ways:
- Human touch in sales will be reserved for priority interactions. Gen AI can be equipped to handle nearly everything across the entire sales journey, from prospecting to negotiation, with minimal human intervention. Human engagement can become a premium-only offering reserved for particularly complex, solution-based deals.
- Sellers will prioritize long-term customer success. With gen AI making transactional sales by a human seller obsolete, sellers can shift how they think about sales and focus on customer outcomes: they can solve for what’s best for the customer, not the seller or provider. Gen AI can help calculate customer lifetime value so that sellers are better positioned to wait and invest for longer-term gains.
- Gen AI could take on the role of a sales agent on a team. A recent McKinsey article predicted that gen AI agents could eventually act as skilled virtual coworkers, planning and booking complex logistics and handling routine customer inquiries.6 Imagine a future regional sales manager who has a team composed of human and AI sellers collaborating and complementing one another, effectively making human sellers more successful. For example, a gen AI agent may provide subjective assessments, tailored coaching to representatives, and prompted problem solving. As a sales leader from a large chemical company told us, “Eventually, when we and our customers both have gen AI, our respective bots will be able talk among themselves, sharing facts back and forth about the product details and customer needs.”
How companies can prepare for a brave, new world
Only time will tell what combination of these three gen-AI-enabled pathways may come to pass. In any pathway, we should assume that gen AI would become ubiquitous—and sometimes undetectable—in the life of a seller. Companies will need to adapt, no matter what scenario plays out:
- It will be critical to adapt to higher expectations. Productivity gains from gen AI mean that sellers can do more and do it faster. They will therefore need to adapt to compete by reanchoring on core competitive advantages: building trusted relationships, understanding clients as true thought partners, and focusing on problem solving. Sales organizations must adapt too. They will need to depart from a traditional approach in which they motivate sellers with short-term quotas or targets. Instead, they may increasingly want to reward and compensate for team collaboration and long-term customer impact. In such a collaborative environment, lines between sales, marketing, and customer service could be further blurred.
- Power will continue to shift further from sellers to customers. As customers get accustomed to the benefits that come from gen AI—such as instant responses, 24/7 availability, and self-serve features—they may gradually come to prefer gen-AI-equipped suppliers. Gen AI may also help sellers access the same customers at a lower cost, which would substantially increase customers’ bargaining power.
- Companies will need to be agile. Considering the pace at which gen AI has been evolving, companies need to stay nimble and future-proof their organizations, operating models, and tech infrastructures. For example, in the face of considerable new developments in sales tech, it will be critical for organizations to quickly adjust talent expectations and go-to-market strategies, revise the ways of working among sales and cross-functional teams, and build data and technical architecture so that gen AI can be deployed and scaled in an agile way for new use cases.
Sales stands on the brink of a profound transformation. The fundamental role of the seller may not change, but the power of gen AI ensures that the art of selling will look very different in the future.
