By Robert G. Jordan
The first time I saw a chatbot close a deal, it was unsettling. The prospect had asked a technical question, something obscure buried halfway down a product sheet. The rep froze. The bot didn’t. With a cheerless efficiency, it fetched the data, cross-referenced it against two knowledge bases, then returned with a plainspoken answer.
The customer nodded. The sale moved forward. And just like that, one more slice of the sales job was carved away.
This is the new landscape. Ai isn’t a tool anymore. It’s a participant. It listens. It speaks. It learns. And increasingly, it sells. If you're picturing sleek robots in suits shaking hands across glass conference tables, you're aiming too high. The real shift is quieter. It's the chatbot that books a meeting before the human wakes up. It's the LLM that rewrites a pitch on the fly to match the tone of a skeptical CFO. It’s the digital ghost in the CRM machine, tagging patterns, surfacing trends, and suggesting next steps before a rep knows they’re behind.
Let’s be clear. Ai didn’t arrive to improve selling. It arrived to remake it. And it’s already well underway.
What we used to call “sales enablement” now looks more like augmented cognition. Platforms like Lavender aren’t just giving reps email templates. They’re watching in real time, flagging weak language, suggesting stronger verbs, even warning when a tone feels off. It’s coaching at the keystroke level. And it never needs coffee.
Others, like Gong or Chorus, are transcribing calls, scoring them, extracting competitive intelligence, and feeding that back into strategy decks while the rep is still saying their thank-yous. It’s not just that Ai remembers more than we do. It sees differently. It doesn’t get distracted by the sales engineer tapping his pen. It doesn’t miss the shift in pitch when the client says, “I’m not sure this fits.” Ai catches everything, always.
Which begs a more uncomfortable question: what does the rep do now?
The simple answer is “less.” But the better answer is “different.” Ai is pulling the transactional gravity out of selling. It’s absorbing the scripts, the follow-ups, the rebuttals, and the scheduling. What remains is the art. The part that still needs sweat, instinct, and the ability to read a room that smells faintly of old carpet and pressure. The human rep becomes less of a closer, more of a conductor—directing signals, shaping the conversation, adding emotional intelligence where Ai can’t quite reach.
For now.
At the edge of this transformation sits the large language model. The LLM isn’t a hammer. It’s a Swiss Army knife with tools reps didn’t know they needed. Need to write a product comparison against a competitor? Done. Want to segment your prospect list based on psychographics? Sure. Curious about which talking points land best with biotech CFOs in the Midwest? The LLM can tell you, and show you the transcripts to prove it.
But perhaps most importantly, the LLM changes time itself. Not in the science fiction sense. In the daily grind sense. What used to take hours—researching a lead, crafting a custom deck, building an objection map—now takes minutes. Some sellers use that time to double down. More calls. More outreach. More deals. Others use it to think. That’s the split right now: volume versus velocity, hustle versus strategy.
And underneath all of this, a deeper shift is brewing.
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