The Increasing Role of AI in Sales and Marketing

By now, you’re well aware that AI is taking over enterprise tech stacks — but exactly how fast is this happening?

According to McKinsey,  22% of employees reported using AI regularly in early 2023, with marketing and sales departments leading the charge. Some prominent industry voices note this shift as well:

• Gail Moody-Byrd, VP of Marketing for LinkedIn, points out that “59% of sales skills can be augmented by generative AI.” 
• Sam Altman recently made headlines, saying that “95% of tasks currently handled by marketing agencies and professionals” will soon be AI-driven. 

Exactly when this complete AI takeover will happen is unclear. But what is clear is professionals in both fields need to become more comfortable with these tools.

We’ll review the current state of AI in sales and marketing to get you up to speed. We’ll also examine usage trends, future predictions, and specific AI use cases you should keep an eye on as a sales or marketing pro. 

AI in Sales and Marketing: Concerns and Opportunities 

A recent Bain & Company report of nearly 600 businesses highlights the benefits generative AI brings to sales and marketing departments. Specifically, it helps: 

• Streamline customer communication
• Increase access to stored customer data
• Develop personalized marketing assets 

According to Bain & Co, the majority of businesses are currently evaluating the benefits of generative AI or are planning to do so in the near future.

Most people in the industry see the writing on the wall: tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Gemini are becoming a key part of enterprise tech stacks.

That said, professionals aren’t on board for a full AI takeover, particularly when it comes to mission-critical tasks. According to our 2024 AI in marketing survey, a significant number of respondents are skeptical about using AI to engage sales prospects over calls (45%) or devise strategic plans (40%).

We’re still in the early days of generative AI, so it’s understandable that people don’t trust the technology to succeed in the lead generation and conversion process. Closing deals is still very much a human-only moment.

It’s important to contextualize the role of generative AI in sales and marketing: the goal isn’t for AI to replace us completely. 

The goal is to automate manual and low-priority tasks so we can get back to the human element. Things like understanding customer needs, strategizing, and building relationships.

The challenge (and opportunity) lies in striking the right balance. As Foundation CEO Ross Simmonds constantly points out, you need to adopt the mentality of augmentation:

AI certainly can’t do everything — and you don’t need it to. Just focus on those areas where it provides the most benefit. 

So, as we turn our attention to some of the key uses of AI in sales and marketing, keep in mind that these are tools to complement, not replace, people.

Let’s dive in. 

How Power Users Apply AI in Sales and Marketing Environments

AI booms are nothing new to sales and marketing departments. 

Predictive AIs like IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein, powered by big data and machine learning, have been around for years. When these systems launched, there were similar levels of skepticism, alarm, and hype (not to mention a steep learning curve). But, ultimately, we learned how to use them to our advantage.

Generative AI is changing the game in a similar way: experts estimate it will bring trillions in annual productivity gains to the global economy. This potential comes from the fact that natural language drives the digital economy, and we all have access to generative tools that can process and create text faster than any human.  

Let’s look at a few examples of how to unlock the power of generative AI in sales and marketing. 

Meeting Summaries and Analysis

Meetings are a huge part of day-to-day life for digital professionals — especially executives and managers. Team meetings, client meetings, and one-on-one meetings with people leaders make up a significant part of the modern workweek. But that’s just the start. 

After the meeting itself, there’s all the critical thinking that goes into recapping and actioning what you discussed. 

Platforms like Zoom and Avoma use generative AI to increase the amount of value we get from meetings while decreasing the amount of time it takes to do it. These platforms take call recordings and use AI to do everything from transcriptions and summaries to action plans and sentiment analysis. 

It’s a simple use case, but it makes a huge difference for time-strapped sales reps and marketing strategists. Zoom’s AI Companion surpassed one million meeting summaries in October 2023, so it’s safe to say this feature isn’t going anywhere. 

By offloading hours of sifting through meeting recordings or notes to AI, sales and marketing teams can be present during calls and shift gears to strategic decision-making when they’re done. It’s a win-win. 

Sales support assets

Generative AI emerges as an indispensable tool for crafting content tailored to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), directly aiding sales conversions. Think of key marketing assets like: 

• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Customer success stories
• Product landing pages
• Email templates
• Sales scripts 
• Pitch decks

These assets are more time-consuming and costly than your typical blog post or listicle, requiring higher-level customer research, SEO analysis, and copywriting skills. Generative AI gives you more time to focus on applying these skills. 

Whether you use a CRM with built-in AI tools, create a custom GPT, or use integrations, you can feed important context to generative AI that speeds up the initial stages of creation. Going forward, companies will increasingly adopt an AI-driven content creation workflow to speed up the creative process. 

Creating high-quality sales materials at a faster rate will be a massive competitive edge for marketers going forward, as it frees up strategists and creatives to refine messaging that more effectively addresses specific customer pain points.

Conversational chatbots

Chatbots have existed since the days of Microsoft’s notorious assistant, Clippy. But instead of offering semi-useful, canned responses to common questions, generative AI chatbots give your leads and customers a more engaging online experience.  

This new breed of AI chatbots, also known as conversational AI, instantly responds to webchat questions with the quality of a live sales or support agent. They are trained on massive amounts of customer interaction data, which helps them generate the best response based on the success of previous interactions. Now your sales team can pass off low-priority questions to the AI while human agents focus on more complex issues. 

The new generation of chatbots is especially helpful for industries with a high volume of customer service requests, like eCommerce, travel, and SaaS. 

For example, Shopify Magic is a generative tool designed to “turn live chats into checkouts” by providing personalized responses to customer questions. It gives every Shopify site a greeter and sales assistant that keeps visitors engaged and on the path to conversion with personalized, responsive interaction. 

Magic also has features for completing common eCommerce marketing tasks like: 

• Writing SEO-friendly product descriptions
• Suggesting FAQs based on real customer interactions
• Generating more compelling email headlines

It has all the makings of a full eCommerce copilot. Speaking of… 

Copilots

Copilots are a one-stop shop for an AI-integrated digital workspace. The Bain & Co. report discussed earlier defines copilots as a suite of generative AI tools that “automate a given role within the organization.”They include all of the capabilities I mentioned above and then some: 

• Meeting summaries, analysis, and reminders
• Customer-specific sales strategies and support
• Creation of marketing assets and sales collateral
• Managing and sharing information on products
• Responding to customer queries in real-time

Basically, copilots are like an Ironman suit for digital marketing and sales professionals. 

These generative AI suites are mainly offered by the big players in Saas — the Microsofts, Googles, and Shopifys — because they require lots of data and connection with other platforms. The rebranding of Microsoft Bing into Copilot, alongside the integration of this AI into the 365 suite, shows how language learning models (LLMs) will become an integral component of the sales and MarTech stacks. 

Of course, Microsoft isn’t alone in this strategy. Google offers a similar AI copilot concept by letting users access Gemini through Workspace applications like Docs, Gmail, and Slides.  

AI copilots can assist with basically any sales and marketing task in some capacity. They provide real-time analytics, strategic insights, and personalized content creation based on customer data.

While these platforms aren’t as widely used as individual tools like ChatGPT or Gemini (at least, not yet), copilots provide the best example of what a fully integrated AI future looks like in sales, marketing, and beyond. 

Learn How to Transform Your Marketing and Sales Engine with AI

As generative AI continues to gain popularity among sales and marketing departments, the ability to integrate and leverage these tools effectively will become a hallmark of successful businesses. 

The key to navigating this shift lies in viewing AI as any other tool you might use for creative, strategic, and communicative purposes. It’s not your replacement; it’s your ticket to a new level of performance. 

Want to keep learning about the role AI can play in your business? Check out the 130+ prompts designed for specific sales and marketing situations in our AI Marketing Console.