On the one hand, you’re worried about AI replacing sales reps. On the other hand, you’re wondering how AI might take your sales team to the next level. 

Here’s a hot take: there’s no such thing as an AI sales rep.

At least, there won’t be for a while. As of right now, AI is not replacing sales reps. 

What does exist today are human sales reps with AI-augmented abilities. A real person who uses Large Language Models (LLMs) like a set of tools to work smarter. They’re still customer-facing, building trust, reading tone, handling objections, and pushing deals across the finish line. But now they’ve got AI doing the tedious activities for them.

In our recent AI Sales Report, we learned that a whopping 60% of sales pro’s are planning, actively integrating, or already integrated with AI tools.

With 60% of people planning, actively integrating, or integrated to AI tools = it’s clear that adoption is imminent. Which group are you in?

AI is empowering sales reps to sell better, close faster, and handle more deal volume.

BUT, HOW? 

When sales teams learn to use LLMs, they gain an immediate advantage. Whether that be through fast answers to tough customer questions, competitive analysis, and better automation throughout the deals cycle – let’s take a look at the 9 ways teams are using AI to win deals.

1. Better Prospecting

That means improving sales interactions with leads and fewer high-volume follow-ups from marketing. 

Tools like Perplexity and Clay are great examples of how sales reps are automating mundane, tedious tasks of prospecting. Perplexity pulls in info from all over the internet. Think news articles, websites, and even social media. This info gives you a well-rounded view of your prospects. It’s like having a research assistant that helps you quickly understand who you’re talking to, so those cold leads don’t feel so cold anymore.

Clay is also changing things up in the sales automation with its fresh take on outbound. One thing users keep raving about? The templates. These ready-to-go workflows help take care of repetitive tasks, like updating Hubspot. That way, your sales reps can focus on the parts of sales that actually need your attention, like building relationships.

2. Automated Meeting Notes 

Sales reps are using transcripts of their meetings to gain a memory advantage.

Automation tools like Otter will take meeting notes for you, give you insights into what was said, and set action items for you. 

That way, your sales reps can know exactly what kind of follow-ups to make, when to follow up, and what matters most to your customers. 

If you’ve ever worked in a sales role, you know the high volume of customer interactions make it tricky to figure out what’s important in a meeting. Tools like Otter, TLDV, and Fireflies, makes it significantly easier to followup. 

3. Speeding Up Onboarding with Self-Service Sales Training

It can take weeks to get a new sales rep fully trained. In many cases, it can take months before they’re fully prepared to make sales calls and close deals. 

That’s a lot of time to invest in a single employee, only to have them struggle with “dial anxiety” when they go to make their calls. 

But that’s the old way of doing things. 

With AI, you can now automate sales training and coaching and have your sales reps ready to win in days. They don’t need to learn everything all at once, only to forget it a minute after they read it. 

Now, reps can learn on the job. 

Tools like 1up or Guru can compile all of your training materials and then place the necessary information at your new reps’ fingertips when they need it. 

Tools like Hyperbound are a great example of using Artificial Intelligence to train sales teams. You can have your sales reps engage in role play that helps them alleviate their dial anxiety. So they go into each call calm, confident, and cool as a cucumber. 

4. Automating Tedious Work like RFPs and Questionnaires

Sitting for hours to complete boring, tedious questionnaires is a part of the sales experience.

RFPs, DDQs, and security questionnaires can take hours or days to complete. You’ve got your sales reps interrupting engineers and other coworkers for help with responses. They’re sending emails and waiting for answers. The first draft can involve multiple people and many moving parts.

THIS is what it takes to close a deal in 2025.

And by the time the questionnaire is complete, you may have lost the deal just because it took forever. 

Using AI for RFP and questionnaire automation can cut that time down to minutes. By generating the first draft, your sales reps just have to review for accuracy and make the completed document sound human. 

The process is simple.

Sales reps start by centralizing the relevant company documents into a knowledge base. Then, when it’s time to respond to an RFP, the answers are automatically pulled in from the Knowledge Base and exported into your questionnaire.

5. Continuous Learning from Call Transcripts

Another awesome way sales reps are learning on the job is from the calls they make and take. They can also learn from their successful peers. 

No more scrambling to take accurate notes during a sales call. Now, you can rely on call transcripts that will accurately transcribe every word spoken on a sales call. 

Even better, a tool like Gong will provide you with insights into those transcripts, so your sales reps can discover new approaches to talking to their customers and meeting their needs. 

Every single team has a directive to evaluate and trial AI tools to reduce team burden. For example, we’re evaluating point solutions to help with call/meeting summaries, tech spec creation by non-engineers, meeting context-awareness to help document product gaps, and reducing our time to demo (and time to close) significantly.

Christian Eberle, Head of Solutions Consulting at Gladly

6. Getting Access to a “Virtual Sales Engineer”

Many of the questions your sales reps have when talking to a prospect or customer will require help from a teammate. That’s when you go to a sales engineer. After all, Presales and Solutions teams are the ones with the deep knowledge so essential to the products and services you offer. 

Picking their brains is an invaluable opportunity for sales reps. 

The only problem is that the Presales folks are BUSY. 

Whether it’s a Slack message, an email or just the virtual tap on the shoulder – distraction is all too common among sales and presalse teams.

We’re seeing a rise in the use of AI Sales Engineers to automate answers to technical questions you can’t get anywhere else. Much like a knowledge base, but with a clear slant towards technical documentation. You’re able to connect API docs, product data sheets, and even thousands of website pages into a single Knowledge Base like this:

What about preventing hallucinations? This is critical when it comes to answering customer questions. The trick is to lock down the model’s knowledge to your internal product documentation.

The result is a powerful unified database that give your your sales and service reps instant answers to even the most technical questions. Rather than DMing a teammate, all they need to do is message the LLM, and they’ll get the deep knowledge they need. 

7. Seamless CRM automation

CRMs aren’t going anywhere, even if we’d like them to. We all know Salesforce can be a huge pain in the a$$. But in the sales world, it’s a necessary evil. 

You need to track your sales and service processes. 

It’s just all the updating and entering that’s annoying. 

CRM automation tools like Scratchpad will help you with your CRM hygiene. 

If you’re in sales, you’ve probably already heard about Scratchpad. Revenue teams love how easy it is to manage notes, tasks, and pipelines without jumping through hoops. 

Scratchpad calls itself the “AI-powered workplace for sales teams,” and they’re definitely making good on that promise. It’s everywhere in GTM circles. 

One feature folks keep calling out? The ability to bulk-update tons of records in just a few clicks. If keeping your CRM clean feels like a full-time job, Scratchpad is worth checking out.

8. Automating Competitive Intelligence

You’ve launched a new product on the market, and your sales reps kinda sorta maybe know what’s great about it. They PROBABLY understand what it does… right? Well, maybe.

But… they definitely don’t have the competitive intelligence they need to sell a new product on day 1. 

Competitive intelligence helps your team understand what’s great about your competition and why your product is better. 

It can take them weeks or months to gain that intelligence. That is, without automation. 

And it’s no surprise, only 7% of sales professionals in our recent report said AI sales reps are “the future.” Most believe AI is best suited for repetitive tasks, not the kind of deep, nuanced questions that come up in competitive selling.

With automated competitive intelligence, they can get answers to questions in seconds. All you have to do is connect your company’s sales docs like battlecards, market landscape overviews, and product differentiators to an LLM like 1up and let it do its work from there. 

You’ll have a centralized knowledge base, and your sales reps will get accurate answers 10x faster. 

9. Getting Fast Answers to Customer Objections

So many sales reps still struggle with customer objections. They don’t know what to say in response. They can’t think quickly. They lose the customer. 

When you centralize your database and use an automated question answering tool, that problem goes away. 

The right automation tool will deliver a response to your sales rep in seconds, and it will only pull responses from your internal company files, so you know they’ll be accurate. 

Your reps will have the entire company’s knowledge base at their fingertips. 

All they have to do is message the LLM, and they’ll get a winning response to a customer objection in seconds. They could literally respond to the customer on the phone in real time.  

That’s true automated sales enablement.

Read the Full Report on AI in Sales

No. The AI sales rep is not a thing. But the sales rep who uses AI can become much stronger, much better, and much quicker with the help of the right AI-driven automation tools. 

They can get knowledge, gain insight, and save tons of time. So they’ll win more deals and build stronger relationships with your customers. 

Automation is here to stay. Use it to your (sales) advantage. 

Because here’s the truth: AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human connection. It amplifies it. It frees reps from manual busywork, so they can spend more time building trust, understanding pain points, and delivering personalized solutions. 

That’s the kind of work that drives real revenue. The best sales teams in the world won’t just adopt AI tools. They’ll operationalize them into their daily workflows. The sooner you build that foundation, the faster you’ll see results.

AI isn’t replacing sales. It’s redefining what’s possible.

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