The tooling available to a commercial team has changed more in the past three years than in the decade before it, and most of the discussion has focused on efficiency. Less time on research, faster follow-up, cleaner forecasting. Those gains are real and they are measurable, but they describe what technology has done to the tasks rather than what it has done to the job.
The more consequential shift is that the work which used to make a salesperson valuable is not the work that makes them valuable now. Hiring profiles, training programmes and performance expectations have all been slower to move than the technology itself, and for anyone carrying a growth number that lag has a cost. You may be assessing candidates against competencies that software has largely absorbed while under-testing the ones that increasingly separate a strong performer from an average one.
Gartner’s most recent survey of B2B buyers, covering 646 respondents, found that 67% would rather complete a purchase without involving a salesperson at all, up from 61% the year before, and that 45% had used AI tools during a recent purchase. Taken on its own, that reads like an argument for smaller commercial teams and more self-service.
The same body of research points somewhere more interesting. Around 69% of buyers said they still want to test AI-generated insights with a salesperson at the points where the decision is actually made, and Gartner has forecast that by 2030 roughly three quarters of B2B buyers will prefer a sales experience that puts human interaction ahead of AI. Those findings sit together more comfortably than they first appear.
Buyers are not rejecting salespeople so much as rejecting being sold to while they are still gathering information, which they can now do faster and more thoroughly on their own. What they want at the point of commitment is a different thing entirely. They want someone who can tell them whether the conclusion they have already reached is sound, where it is likely to come apart, and how comparable businesses have handled the same decision. Gartner describes the thing buyers are looking for as value clarity, a clear understanding of how a solution changes outcomes in their specific role and context, and reports that buyers who reach it are around twice as likely to describe the purchase as a good one.
That is closer to advisory work than to the pitch-and-follow-up model much sales onboarding is still built around, and it is a harder thing to hire for.
Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report, drawing on responses from more than 4,000 sales professionals, found 87% of organisations using AI in some form and 54% already running AI agents somewhere in the sales cycle. Sellers in that research expected agents to cut time spent on prospect research by around a third once fully implemented, and time spent drafting emails by a little more.
Those happen to be the two activities that early-career sales roles were largely built on, and the two that a good deal of sales training has historically spent its time improving. Neither is now a durable source of advantage, because any competitor with a comparable budget can buy the same capability inside a quarter.
What has not been absorbed is harder to systematise. Working out which of the several information sources a buying group has consulted are steering them in the wrong direction. Holding a commercial conversation with a finance director who wants the business case stress-tested rather than presented.
Reading a buying group and recognising whose support is missing before it becomes a problem.
Negotiating without conceding margin because the pressure has started to feel personal.
Deciding honestly that a deal is not going to close this quarter and moving the time somewhere better.
These are judgement tasks, they are learned rather than installed, and they now carry a disproportionate share of the weight.
The instinctive response to all of this is to buy more tooling, and the available evidence suggests that on its own it tends not to work. Research from BCG, covering 1,250 senior executives across nine industries, found that only around 5% of companies had reached the level of AI maturity where they were consistently generating substantial value, while roughly 60% reported little or no benefit despite significant investment. Salesforce’s data makes a similar point from the other direction: the highest-performing teams in that study were about 1.7 times more likely to be using prospecting agents than the weakest, which tells you the tools travel with performance, but not that they create it.
The pattern we see in commercial diagnostics is reasonably consistent. Technology amplifies whatever capability already exists in the team. In the hands of someone with sound commercial instinct it strips out the administrative drag and gives more room to the part of the role that generates value. In the hands of someone who has not yet learned to run a proper discovery conversation, it produces a greater volume of well-written, badly targeted activity, and buyers notice. An earlier Gartner survey found that 73% of buyers actively avoid suppliers who send them irrelevant outreach, which is worth sitting with before any decision to increase volume.
If the job has moved, the assessment has to move with it, and this is usually where the lag proves most expensive. Three shifts are worth considering.
A candidate who can research a business quickly is demonstrating something software now does competently. A candidate who can look at that business and form a defensible view about where its commercial risk sits is demonstrating something software cannot. Structured exercises that put someone in front of an ambiguous commercial scenario and ask them to reason out loud will tell you considerably more than a competency interview about resilience, and they are harder to prepare for.
If the valuable parts of the role are the parts that have to be learned on the job, then the rate at which someone learns matters more than the polish they arrive with. That can be assessed reasonably well by giving feedback during an interview process and observing what a candidate does with it, which is a more useful signal than asking them to describe a time they took feedback well.
Familiarity with a particular stack is quick to teach and it dates quickly. Screening heavily for it narrows the pool for a benefit that expires, and it can filter out people whose commercial judgement is the thing you actually need. Hire for the judgement and teach the tooling.
There is a consequence here that the market has not resolved and that most vendors are not keen to raise. The tasks technology has absorbed are, to a large extent, the tasks people used to learn on. Salespeople developed judgement by making a great many low-stakes mistakes in research, outreach and qualification, and by finding out reasonably quickly which of their assumptions were wrong. If those repetitions disappear, the apprenticeship goes with them, and nothing as effective has yet replaced it.
This is not an argument against hiring early-career talent, which remains one of the more cost-effective ways to build commercial capability over a three to five year horizon, and the economics have not changed. It is an argument for being deliberate about where the learning now happens. In practice that means more structured coaching, exposure to live commercial conversations earlier than would once have felt comfortable, and sales managers who can genuinely teach rather than only inspect activity. The businesses that get this right will build the sellers everyone else is trying to hire in two years’ time.
Before changing anything, it is worth establishing what the current position actually is. Look at what your assessment process is really measuring and how much of it is now automatable. Look at whether your onboarding still assumes people will learn by doing volume, and what happens to ramp time if that assumption no longer holds. Look at whether your sales managers have been equipped to coach commercial judgement, or whether they were promoted for selling and left to work the rest out. Then set your tooling spend against the capability it was bought to improve, and be honest about the gap.
Most commercial teams do not have a technology problem. They have a capability problem that technology has made more visible and more urgent.
In most cases it changes the shape of the team rather than the size of it. Time released from research and administration tends to be reinvested in coverage or in more thorough work on complex opportunities. Where headcount does come down, it is usually in roles built purely on activity volume, and the capability required in the remaining roles goes up rather than down.
Yes, provided the development side is properly designed. The commercial case for building capability rather than buying it in has not weakened, but the informal learning that used to happen through repetition needs replacing with something deliberate.
That depends on deal complexity and on the quality of onboarding rather than on the tooling available. Technology can shorten the administrative part of ramp; it does not shorten the time it takes to develop commercial judgement, which is the part that governs when someone starts closing.
Furza works with fast-growth and PE-backed businesses to build commercial capability across hiring, training and advisory. If the questions above are live for your team, there are four places we typically start.
Furza Advisory runs commercial diagnostics that identify the structural issues slowing growth, including where capability, cadence and commercial model are out of step with the plan. Furza Talent runs focused searches for senior GTM and revenue leaders, assessed against what the role now requires rather than what it used to. Furza Training builds specific capability across sales development, account executive, account management and sales leadership populations, designed around the gap rather than bought off the shelf. Furza Academy sources, assesses and develops early-career commercial talent so that new hires contribute sooner, with the structured development that makes early-career hiring work.
If you would like to talk through how your commercial team is set up against where buyers have moved, get in touch via the form below.