Will AI Replace Salespeople?

I was at a McDonald’s the other day and when I walked in, there was no one to take your order.

The only place you could order was on the iPad, the giant kiosk. There was an older guy standing there trying to figure it out, and he was struggling. I felt kind of bad for him. The only place you could actually talk to a human was the drive-through, and you had to talk through the speaker box, because they haven’t put an iPad out there yet. But it’s coming.

The order taker has been replaced.

Then I thought about the waiter. If we’re running with the restaurant comparison, why haven’t we replaced the waiter yet? Maybe in some places we should. But generally, waiters are still good compared to the cashier.

The waiter does something a little different, and they get compensated for it. They get tipped well when they give good service, and it’s more of a human-connection sales job. They know the menu. They can make recommendations. They can read a room. There’s more emotion involved in it.

Maybe it’s a bad example, but there are sales roles like the order taker that are full-time jobs right now. Prospecting. Appointment setting. The junior SDR. The support roles that are more tedious tasks. Those are the ones at risk from AI.

I see it happening already. The tools are getting better around the conversation, around gathering and giving information. But the conversation itself is still valuable.

You go to McDonald’s and you already know what you want. Big Mac, large fry, a drink. There’s no guidance needed for that decision. You’ve been conditioned to already know what you want. In a B2B sense, it’s similar. If you strip out the friction and just let AI build the information and help make the decision without a human involved, that works fine, right up until it doesn’t.

Because if it gets to a certain point of risk, you’re the one taking that on. You have no other judgment to lean on besides your own. If you make a bad decision, you’re the one to blame for it. Nobody really wants that responsibility. And if they do end up taking it on, the first thing most people want is another human involved. An AI can’t build that relationship with you. It can hand you the information. It can’t share the decision with you.

For my own research, I looked at a company like SpaceX, specifically their Starlink division, who’d arguably be one of the leaders in actually using AI at scale. Still plenty of open roles in 2026 for enterprise sales, partnership managers, technical salespeople, account managers. None of it is the appointment setter or the order taker. It’s all built around human connection and dealing with people. Nobody really wants to make a big technical decision based on a conversation with a robot.

The salesperson who actually uses AI well becomes a super salesperson. But that’s not copying an email into ChatGPT, pasting whatever comes back, and hitting reply. That’s not the proper use of it.

If it’s something technical, sure, use it to help you break down what something means if you’re not all the way there yourself. Just don’t reply to a real person with the raw ChatGPT response. It drives me nuts. I don’t like talking to people who sound like robots, even though I kind of do. I don’t want a copy-pasted response landing in my inbox.

It’s annoying.

The better way to think about AI versus a salesperson becoming a super salesperson is efficiency. Take the tedious tasks off your plate so you can focus on the high-value stuff. Actually talking to the customer. Talking to the prospect. Building the relationship. That’s what matters most.

I never really thought I’d end up in sales. In college, growing up, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I ended up in a sales role, and I like it. I like meeting companies. I like solving problems for customers. It’s fun.

What I’m focused on now is leveraging AI as much as I can. There’s a lot of noise in this space right now, a new tool every five seconds. It reminds me of the old line about CRMs: the best CRM is the one you actually use. I think AI agents are the same way. If it solves a bottleneck or makes a process smoother, it doesn’t really matter how. If it’s helping, it’s the one to use. That’s what I’m focused on now.

I don’t think salespeople are going anywhere. The closer you can get to the human connection, the decision-making process, and building the relationship, the more you’re going to be all right.

– Croy