Why AI will always be closing in on sales jobs
The question is no longer whether AI can sell – it is how many of its human peers will survive the takeover
ALEC Baldwin is the reason I have avoided sales-related careers like the plague. If you’ve watched him berate three sulky and underperforming real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, you’d understand.
“Put that coffee down! Coffee’s for closers only,” Baldwin’s character snaps at one of the trio during his verbal tirade in the 1992 movie’s iconic scene.
“A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!” he roars – unhelpfully circular advice for some poor saps struggling to meet their sales target.
Three decades later, Baldwin’s character might need to share his on-screen time. It isn’t just human salespeople who need to always be closing; artificial intelligence (AI) is muscling in on the action too.
Sales roles are looking surprisingly exposed to the ministrations of generative AI. In July, a Microsoft Research study named several sales positions, including advertising sales agents and sales representatives of services, on a list of 40 occupations that had the highest “AI applicability scores”. These scores were a function of AI usage frequency, task completion rate and share of work activity.
The researchers had cautioned against assuming that these positions would necessarily be automated or displaced. Fair enough, but only a salesperson of epic proportions could successfully sell the notion that his peers have absolutely nothing to worry about.
In any case, the appearance of sales jobs on the trajectory of automation, alongside the usual suspects of translators, proofreaders and web developers, marks a notable evolution.
For years, the conventional wisdom held that jobs in sales were reassuringly human-centric, dependent on the handshake, the golf course meeting and the expense-account dinner. But that assumption rests on an outdated, monolithic view of what sales has become.
The reality is that sales contains multitudes today, from enterprise account executives negotiating million-dollar software contracts, to anonymous vendors hawking impulse purchases through TikTok livestreams.
Within this vast universe of selling, entire constellations of tasks have become more transactional than relational, and these are precisely the areas where AI is now making its most aggressive inroads. Compounding matters, chatbots are making huge strides in sounding more relational, too.
Consequently, large swathes of a salesperson’s or marketer’s day are ripe for automation, through lead identification on a large scale, hyper-personalised follow-up messages and sales forecasting powered by predictive analytics.
On the bleeding and most experimental edges of the technology, some very compelling numbers and use cases are also emerging.
Singapore-based firm Topview, for instance, produces AI-generated livestreaming hosts among other things, and the company says that some of its AI avatars are already matching 80 per cent of the gross merchandise value of products sold by a human livestreamer in one session. Also, Topview, which launched last year, is making positive gross profit margins on every user, it says.
It is early days yet for this brave new world of selling, and not everyone will want to be marketed to by an avatar. But there is an inexorable quality to the nature and economics of this sort of automated peddling.
Chatbots will never have to be told to put their coffee down. Avatars will hold livestreams while their human counterparts sleep. And they will do it across multiple products, languages and devices tirelessly, responding in real time to users’ questions. They will, finally, as Baldwin’s character had dearly wanted, literally always be closing.
