AI Is Still Misunderstood In Sales

The promise was made at the top.

Boards and execs have been sold on AI because the promise is productivity. Leverage, output, doing more with less. They approved the budget and shipped the mandate across the organisation. By the time it reaches you and me, the promise thinned into something smaller: performative productivity. Work at the bottom of the ladder dressed up as progress.

The board thinks ROI. We think grunt work.

Take email. Outreach, follow-ups, replies to a prospect or customer. It feels productive. It’s fast, visible, and an obvious task to offload. So we offload it. We call ourselves AI natives.

But writing emails was never the high-value work. It just looked like it.

Last week I ran a major bank’s half-year results through a chatbot. Hundreds of pages of segment tables and forward guidance, back in seconds: profit up, retail flat, costs coming down.

That’s the summary. All true. None of it the why-now.

So I went through the notes. They’d cut most of a delivery workforce to hit a hard savings target, then re-committed to their most ambitious platform overhaul yet - with a public deadline they were barely into. They’d slashed the hands and kept the date.

That wasn’t in the summary: a funded bet nobody had the capacity to deliver. That’s not a vacancy. That’s an opening.

Karpathy passed on a line he’d heard: you can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding.

We’re delivering on the promise - just at the bottom of the ladder.