AI vs Salespeople: Will AI Replace Human Sales?

Name: AI vs Salespeople: Will AI Replace Human Sales?
Uploaded: 2025-05-27T02:07:39+00:00
Duration: 34 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: AI will replace salespeople in simple, transactional deals but not in complex, high-stakes sales like defense contracts. Trust is the critical asset for…

27 May 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:34

AI will replace salespeople in simple, transactional deals but not in complex, high-stakes sales like defense contracts. Trust is the critical asset for AI products: users need to believe the system won't sell them unnecessary solutions, and building that foundation matters more than short-term manipulation.

Chapters

Of course, they like wanna maximize the amount of revenue that the company generates and ultimately their commission. So I think like, you know, that is maybe some proof of models and AI replacing salespeople, especially at the sort of like transactional or almost commodity-style sales. You know, other end of the spectrum, you have the, I don't know, Andurils of the world that are selling weapons to the government, probably need a human for that for the foreseeable future, and then everything in between. The second thing that comes to mind is—
Just building on that, I think the most essential quality for AI products and AI-first products, as you project out, is what you were referring to, which I call trust, right? And, you know, you really have to trust a salesperson to, you know, have confidence they're not selling you something you don't need. But the trust threshold for an AI is even greater. And, you know, that, that informs everything we do at Perplexity. How do we create and preserve trust with our users? And trust will be the scarce asset of the agentic internet. And a lot of the products are built on top of it. So, you know, it's easy to create AIs that manipulate people, but that's a very short-term strategy. And for folks that want to build for the long term, you have to build trust in at the, at the foundation level of your product and how you prompt these different AIs.
Yeah.