Report: Less than 40% of sellers say AI agents are improving their productivity

Sales organizations are heavily inundated with AI tools claiming to supercharge their workflows. Platforms for prospecting, waterfall enrichment, and conversational intelligence have all become legitimate parts of their arsenal. While AI has been shown to have its benefits, many sellers are still navigating this relatively new territory and finding inefficiencies along the way.

In a new report from AI enterprise software and research organization Vivun, less than 40% of sellers say that AI agents have improved their productivity. The survey finds that this statistic doesn’t reflect a rejection of AI tools, rather it shows discrepancies of how it’s used across the sales funnel.

Going deep

Vivun’s report shows sellers prefer that AI lives inside their deals, not around it, with 63% saying they want AI to support core moments in the sales cycle instead of focusing on administrative tasks. These core moments are broken up as follows:

• Prospect research and lead generation (37%)
• Proposal and solution creation (22%)
• Qualification and discovery (18%)
• Deal management and forecasting (13%)
• Post-sale follow-up and renewal (10%)

The results show that sellers want AI to help improve outcomes more than save them time. In terms of their relationship with AI, 46% say they want it to work as an assistant, while 35% say they want it to be a partner.

Trust issues

The report shows that trust issues come into play with seller satisfaction around AI. However, sellers aren’t fearful that AI will take some part of their jobs—only 6% of those surveyed think so—but rather they’re wary of AI’s reliability. The biggest issue sellers have with AI tools is creating long personal relationships with buyers (36%). Other concerns include accuracy or reliability of information (30%) and security or data privacy (22%).

There’s tasks that sellers feel aren’t suited for AI tools, and the report highlighted several they think need to stay strictly on the human side:

• Building trust and relationships (34%)
• Understanding complex customer needs (24%)
• Negotiating and handling objections (23%)
• Coaching or mentoring peers (17%)

Several improvements to these AI tools would help improve seller trust, with the most important being accuracy and consistency (37%).

Looking forward

While there are many ways AI tools need to improve to increase seller satisfaction, sellers are optimistic about their relationship with the technology. Going forward, 36% of sellers say AI will make top sellers better and 32% say it will raise the middle of the pack.