"AI will 100% replace all sales reps"

Welcome to the second TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™. Read more.

I’m tired of this debate.

But it is also fascinating (because first principles thinking is always fascinating).

If you’re not sick of hearing about AI replacing or not replacing, you haven’t been listening.

Reddit has been blowing up with this for years.

LinkedIn’s got Jason Lemkin on one side, and almost everybody else on the other.

Wait: What makes humans, human?

There are a lot of ways to take that question. But since B2B sales requires a dialogue between buyer and seller, let’s talk about dialogue.

In Sherry Turkle’s excellent book Reclaiming Conversation, she documents how asynchronous communication (text, email, social media) have failed to provide real community and real relationships. These formats do not replace the value of live conversation, which Turkle calls “the most human - and humanizing - thing that we do.”

Sadly, we’ve treated these asynchronous mediums as alternatives to real-time interaction. But all we got in exchange was a sense of community, and a sense of connection.

The impact on human development and relationships is devastating.

“But AI Can Have Conversations…”

Yes, it can. Quite adeptly (go to 3:30). 

But if it isn’t a human, it cannot actually relate to you.

To mimic Turkle’s phrasing, AI can only give a sense of relationship, trust, and connection - but it will forever be counterfeit.

AI founders and product leaders have to decide: fool the humans into thinking it’s not AI, or be transparent?

And if people know it’s a machine, what will that change in their interactions?

When I was building an AI inbound sales rep…

(AKA a B2B web chat tool unlike anything you’ve seen)

We had a problem. People were actually abusive to it. Pretty frequently too.

Something about “oh it’s just a machine” combined with “look it has an avatar, a face, a voice, a name” makes it seem like a prime target for rudeness. (It’s not like the internet has brought out the best in humanity, and insofar as AI is just a more scalable/interactive way to engage with the non-Dark Web, we may be unimpressed).

The other problem was that people would not share as much information as they would when they were talking to a human rep. 

And lastly, the hard part itself was not back-and-forth information transfer between bot and human. That’s been around for a while with chatbots.

The hard part was the revops side of it. The data.

Getting the right data collection from website prospects and landing that accurately in CRM was a HUGE pain and a HUGE opportunity. What marketer wouldn’t want to gather more intel from simple web-based, async interactions?

All this to say: 

AI can have the admin stuff - good riddance.

All those stage changes and deal notes and next steps and follow-up details and enrichment and forecasting and admin…

The 30-60% of sales rep time spent on grunt work…

The stuff I was told in another recent gig “it’s just part of the job, they’ve got to keep Salesforce up-to-date…” (hard pass)

This is what we should shovel off to AI. 

But as long as a human holds the bank account…

Think about it this way: if you’re selling 5- or 6-figure deals to a business, and the CFO is another person who has to make hard decisions about how to spend money, why would AI be better to interact with that person?

We already know how emotional sales is, how much it is a matter of trust and respect. The larger the deal, the more trust is required.

Not to mention how big business transformation requires big investments. What we’re really saying then is that enterprise sales will always need humans with hearts and minds to interact with other humans with hearts and minds.

(Now if you’d say the human brain is just a machine, we’d have a really good debate - where is memory stored? What is consciousness? What is ‘mind’? What is id or ego or identity? Where does any of this come from, or go to, or reside? What is ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ and can you demonstrably say we have no such thing? What makes a human truly human is a question no science can answer).

Lastly: The Phone is for Humans.

At least, so says the FCC.

Between both Operation Robocall Roundup and Monday’s crackdown on 1200 VOIP/telco providers, the FCC is working hard to clear AI/bot calling from networks.

Other G20 nations are following suit, building legislation around AI calling. The US is (weirdly) the first country to lay down the law this way, probably because we have so many scammable people with money. (Comes with the we-invented-the-telephone territory?)

But cold calling will live in the hands of a human rep for a long, long time.

The lesson from all this is straightforward, even if arrived at by roundabout means:

If you want to AI-proof your business, optimize for conversation. 

Left this in here ICYMI…

Featuring Vanta, Hypercard, Docebo, and more. Past phone-skeptics and phone-natives alike.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)