If you’ve sat through even one SaaS demo in the last year, you’ve heard the pitch.
AI sales assistants will automate outreach, personalize every interaction, prioritize your best leads, and unlock 30%+ productivity gains. And to be fair, that promise isn’t entirely invented.
McKinsey estimates that AI could automate up to a fifth of sales activities and significantly reshape how revenue teams operate. The subtext is even bolder: less grunt work, more pipeline, and maybe quietly fewer people needed to do it.
It’s a compelling story. And for a while, it sounded almost too good to question. But as a market research analyst, you learn quickly that the truth of any category doesn’t live in the pitch; it lives in the patterns. In what hundreds or thousands of buyers say when no one is selling to them. So I went there.
