• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, September 7, 2018

Artificial intelligence will replace humans and kill jobs by automating the things that we do, suggests an hypothysis by author Steve Woods,Co-founder and CTO at Nudge.ai. It is effective click-bait because it seems like pitting robots against humans. But, is it reality, asks a paper from the Weekly Resource for Sales and Marketing Management.

Quite simply, Ai is very good at repetitive tasks that involve recognizing patterns in data, says the report. Whether that is applied to facial recognition, natural language processing, recommendation systems, or topic detection, the concepts are similar; understand a pattern, then detect that pattern quickly, accurately, and at high scale.

It’s a powerful toolkit, but much of what we do, especially in sales, is much more than that, says the report. To understand the future of sales, we need to break down the role, and see where Ai will have an effect.

The role of sales is quite simple, says the report; find potential buyers, and guide them on a journey towards the point that they decide to purchase the products or services you offer. In reality, however, things get a lot more complex. 

This understanding of buyers, visualizing their emotions, and building trust is a quintessentially human endeavor. Artificial intelligence, in its current state, is nowhere close to being able to do this, says the report. Trust, relationships, postulating about another person’s emotions, and finding creative ways to help, are all things that are limited to the sphere of human effort. 

Artificial intelligence in sales does not replace sales reps, it makes them more human. Smartly deployed, Ai can do the work of research and awareness, and leave the relationship-building and trust creation to the humans on the team. Ultimately, it’s a combination of skills that gets the most out of man and machine, drives more results, and is more satisfying to the salesperson and buyer

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