REVENUE STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP

Illustration: Marcello Bevilacqua, Photos: Getty Images

Around a year and a half ago, Jeff Santelices, chief revenue officer at response management platform Responsive, didn’t think much of AI’s potential in sales.

Sure, it could whip up some automated outreach emails, but “sales is sales, and it’s all about engaging with people,” he said. That view changed as he started to see agents take on prep tasks like tiering and prioritizing accounts, researching org charts, and spitting out sales hypotheses.

“My sellers can produce their entire territory account plans really effectively in a matter of days,” Santelices said.

Santelices thinks agentic tools like these will ultimately free sales leaders from a strictly quarter-by-quarter mindset to think more about long-term strategies.

It’s one of many ways sales leaders tell us their jobs are changing in the agentic era. With AI automating more of the sales pipeline, it’s not just entry-level workers whose roles are in flux. We talked to five CROs and sales heads about how they use agents and how AI has shifted how they operate.

Becoming builders

“The old-school executive is just like, ‘I’m going to run the motion,’ and right now, in the field, it’s like redesigning the motion from the ground up,” Navid Zolfaghari, chief sales officer at workflow automation platform Zapier, told us.

One such process that he’s redesigned at Zapier is meeting prep. Before sales staff have a meeting, they get a Slack notification delivering a PDF of information about a given company pulled from the CRM platform, as well as internal strategy docs and even public earnings reports.

The company has also begun to discourage DMs within Slack, asking employees and execs alike to instead interact in shared channels so that the AI platform, Glean, can incorporate the contents of messages into an internal AI database, according to Zolfaghari. Zapier executives use a “war council” of fake AI personas—“ruthless CFO,” “contrarian board member”—to deliberate on decisions, and Zolfaghari has added to the mix a “digital twin” of CEO Wade Foster based on Foster’s real-life postings online (“It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close,” Zolfaghari said of AI-Foster’s accuracy.)

Read more on overcoming integration challenges.—PK

      

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SALES TECH

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Cold calling isn’t on its way out, according to a new report.

ValueSelling Associates and Selling Power released a report this month showing a survey of 153 sales leaders and reps believe that cold calling is six times more effective than an AI-written email. The report also shows it’s the second most effective method for reaching new prospects at 47%, following client referrals at 74%.

“Cold calling isn’t dead,” said Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, in a statement. “In the age of AI, a human voice on the phone remains one of the most effective ways to reach new prospects. In fact, our research found that salespeople rate every human-led tactic above every automated one.”

Hitting a wall: While cold calling proves to be effective, it’s not a preferred method for many sales reps. The report shows that 46% of leaders said their reps give up too easily on a cold call, 40% said handling objections is a barrier, and 39% said they are scared to pick up the phone.

The report compares these stats to data from 2018, showing that much hasn’t changed in regards to sales reps’ feelings toward cold calling. For comparison in 2018, 53% of sales leaders said their reps gave up too easily on cold calls and 48% were afraid of picking up the phone.

“Cold calling is under threat, although it remains one of the most effective ways to reach buyers,” Thomas continued. “Our research suggests the issue isn’t the method—it’s the skill. The solution is to instill seller confidence through sales training, rebuilding the capability to make cold calls and do it well.”

Bridging the gap: As cold calling proves to be effective, sales organizations should invest in the right kind of training to make sales reps better and more comfortable with picking up the phone.—LI

      

STRATEGY

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Companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue may have a leg up in the AI scaling race, according to a recent survey. But it isn’t just the big dogs that are benefiting from the technology.

McKinsey’s recent State of AI in 2026 report found that companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue are the ones deploying agentic tools the most. But it also found that 44% of all companies surveyed, up six percentage points year over year, reached the AI scaling phase this year.

The online survey conducted from May 4 to June 8, 2026, received responses from more than 1,700 people globally across company sizes, industries, and regions. More than a third of respondents (36%) indicated their organizations earned more than $1 billion.

CFOs are being tasked with scaling AI more and more, in large part to find the ROI from the technology.

For a smaller enterprise looking to move from piloting to scaling AI, McKinsey’s report found that chatbots have been widely scaled, and therefore can be an accessible starting point. But successful deployments look different across industries, according to the survey.

Who, and what for? “Organizations are scaling AI in the functions with the greatest potential value for their industries,” the McKinsey report noted. Technology companies, for example, “much more commonly report[ed] using AI agents in their software engineering than [did] respondents in other industries,” the report said.

Read more on scaling AI to discover ROI.—DL

      

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active pipeline

Stat: 120. That’s how many new stores Toys ‘R’ Us is opening as adult collectors boost sales. (NBC News)

Quote: “It’s a really concrete example of how powerful these systems are getting.”—Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on OpenAI’s disclosure of “concerning model behavior” (CNBC)

Read: Net-a-Porter’s CEO can’t get enough of customers complaining. (the Wall Street Journal)

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