A troubling reality in the AI sales surge is that many teams are attempting to automate processes they likely shouldn’t focus on initially.
Not because AI is flawed. Far from it. Agentic AI is already reshaping how selling gets done by orchestrating outreach, guiding opportunity strategy, providing insight in real time. The promise is enormous.
The problem is where most organisations are starting from.
The default question seems to be: “How do we automate what we already do?”
It sounds sensible. It feels efficient. It looks great on a roadmap. And it’s often completely the wrong question.
Bill Gates put it perfectly:
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
In sales, that effect is multiplied, because most “process” wasn’t designed for efficiency. It was designed for survival.
Think about the average sales environment. Over time, layers of process get added to manage risk, satisfy compliance, calm finance, feed forecasting, and align with yet another methodology. CRM fields then multiply and the inevitable approval steps expand.
None of that is bad, necessarily. Much of it is rational. But what you end up calling a “sales process” is usually a patchwork of historical decisions and political compromises, not a clean, intentional system.
And now we’re pointing AI at it.
We shouldn’t be thinking of Agentic AI as a faster human, but rather as a system that can navigate, interpret, and execute across workflows. It doesn’t get tired, confused (depending on who set it up), or bored. It will happily follow a bloated process all day long without ever asking whether the process itself makes sense.
So, if your process is clunky, AI won’t fix it.
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