Most people misunderstand what AI will actually replace in sales.
We talked about this in a recent conversation about where go-to-market is heading.
Matteo made a simple point that many people will disagree with at first.
SDRs will still have jobs.
And honestly, I agree.
Not because AI is slowing down. In fact, it is improving faster than most people expected. New tools, agents, and automation systems are appearing every few months.
But the mistake people make is misunderstanding where AI actually fits inside a sales system.
AI is not replacing sales.
AI is replacing the work around sales.
If you look closely at what most sales teams actually spend time on, a huge portion of the day is not real selling. It is operational work that sits around the sales process.
Things like:
- Research
- Data enrichment
- Prospect identification
- Reply classification
- CRM updates
- Campaign optimisation
- Analytics
All the mechanical parts of the system.
These tasks are essential, but they are not what actually drives revenue. They are the infrastructure that supports the revenue engine.
And infrastructure is exactly where AI performs best.
AI systems are extremely good at handling structured, repetitive, and data-heavy tasks. They can analyse thousands of prospects, enrich accounts, monitor signals, classify replies, and update systems far faster than a human ever could.
What they cannot replace is the part of the process that is fundamentally human.
The parts that actually move deals forward.
- Strategy.
- Real conversations.
- Trust building.
- Negotiation.
- Closing.
People buy from people. That has not changed.
The future GTM team will look different
What is changing is the structure of the GTM team itself.
In the past, companies built large teams to handle the manual work around selling. Research teams, SDR teams, operations teams, analysts. Much of that work existed because the technology simply did not exist to automate it.
Now it does.
Which means the future GTM team will likely look very different.
Instead of large teams doing manual operational work, we will probably see smaller teams focused on the highest value parts of the system.
Something closer to this:
- A few strong closers who handle real conversations and deals
- A strategist who designs the revenue engine
- Someone who operates and troubleshoots the system
Everything else increasingly becomes infrastructure powered by AI.
Automation handles the data.
Agents handle the workflows.
Systems handle the analysis.
Humans focus on strategy and relationships.
This shift is already happening. We are just early in the transition.
Many companies are still experimenting with tools and trying to understand how AI fits into their GTM systems. But over the next few years the structure will become much clearer.
Not fewer salespeople.
Just different roles around them.
If you're thinking about what this shift means for your GTM team, it’s worth looking at how your current system is actually structured.
And if you want to build a system where signals, outbound, CRM, and reactivation actually work together, that’s exactly what we help teams design.
Happy to walk you through what this could look like for your team.
Book a call and we can map it out together.
Software, accelerator and startup background. Runs the GTM architecture side: how the system is designed, what it is built on, and where AI actually earns its place.
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