AI in Sales: How AI-Powered Automation Transforms Sales Teams and Revenue

For sales leaders staring down longer sales cycles, more demanding customers, shrinking budgets, and rising revenue targets, the question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s how fast.

This is the reality that Dan Gottlieb, VP Analyst at Gartner, laid out during the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference taking place in Las Vegas this May 20-21. In his opening keynote titled “Seizing the Moment: Transform Sales Organization DNA with Big Bets on AI and Talent”, Gottlieb didn’t sugarcoat the message: the sales execution crisis is here, and only AI-powered sales organizations will thrive on the other side of it.

The signs are everywhere. Sales teams are under pressure to increase quotas without increasing headcount. Sales managers are being asked to double their span of control, going from managing 6 reps to 12. Buyers are harder to reach. Decision-making has ballooned from simple, single-threaded deals to complex buying committees.

But it’s not just external pressure. The real bottleneck is internal. Sales processes are bloated with manual, time-consuming tasks like data entry, CRM updates, repetitive outreach, clunky pipeline reviews, and disjointed customer interactions.

This is the execution gap that AI in sales is designed to solve.

Gottlieb’s thesis is clear: just as the steam engine powered the industrial revolution, agentic AI now powers the future of sales. It’s not automation as we’ve known it. It’s not simple workflows like “if this, then that.” This new wave of AI-powered sales tools can reason, prioritize, and autonomously execute actions within the rules sales leaders set.

In other words, the AI is set to make decisions instead of just taking orders.

The DNA of AI-Driven Sales Organizations

Adding a few AI tools to an old sales process is not going to do anything for your team or your company. The action needed looks more like a reengineering of the entire sales operating model. Gottlieb framed it as breaking sales down into its atomic tasks, then rebuilding those tasks with AI at the core.

The traditional sales process (prospecting, qualifying, running demos, negotiating, closing) is riddled with inefficiencies. Sellers spend less than 30% of their time selling. The rest is devoured by CRM maintenance, manual data entry, pipeline updates, administrative tasks, and chasing internal approvals.

With AI-powered automation, this flips entirely.

More than removing repetitive tasks, AI supercharges the core revenue motions:

• AI-driven lead scoring surfaces the right prospects based on real-time customer data, buyer intent signals, and historical win patterns.
• Predictive sales forecasting moves from spreadsheet guesswork to real-time, data-driven accuracy. AI models analyze sales activities, customer interactions, and CRM signals to predict deal outcomes with greater precision.
• Conversational AI and conversation intelligence mine customer calls, emails, and messages for actionable insights, surfacing next steps, risk signals, competitor mentions, and buying intent.
• Workflow automation removes the lag between actions. A call with a customer triggers automated CRM updates, follow-ups, opportunity stage changes, and pipeline alerts without the rep lifting a finger.

AI-driven workflows make reps smarter rather than just faster. And AI-powered sales organizations move from reactive to proactive. 

They don’t wait for pipeline risks to surface. AI flags them. They don’t let follow-ups slip through the cracks. AI automates them. They don’t rely on gut-driven forecasting. AI delivers predictive analytics based on data, not guesswork.

The Talent Shift (or Why AI-Powered Salespeople Win)

The keynote delivered a blunt truth: the qualities that made someone a great seller five years ago won’t be enough tomorrow.

For decades, sales hiring prioritized experience. Why? Because experience was a proxy for knowing how to navigate the messy, manual complexity of the sales process. But if AI can automate the repetitive scaffolding of sales like CRM hygiene, data entry, and outreach cadences then experience is no longer the moat it once was.

The future of sales talent is built on three traits:

1. Growth mindset. Sellers who adapt, learn AI tools quickly, and partner with AI-driven workflows outperform.
2. Flexibility. In a landscape where pricing, process, and outreach are automated, sellers must pivot fast to what buyers need now, not what the old playbook said.
3. AI fluency. The top sales professionals will be the ones who know how to work with AI agents, not compete against them.

As Gottlieb noted, high-upside sellers no longer need years of pipeline-wrangling experience. AI takes care of the scaffolding. The sellers win by bringing creativity, problem-solving, and relationship-building to the table, while AI handles the time-consuming parts of the job.

How AI Powers Revenue Workflows

Here’s how a modern, AI-powered sales motion looks:

• A lead fills out a form. AI cross-references CRM data, buyer intent signals, and historical patterns, instantly assigning a lead score.
• AI triggers outreach. personalized based on customer behavior, social media activity, and prior interactions.
• After the first sales call, conversational AI automatically logs key insights, updates the CRM, and schedules a follow-up without the rep lifting a finger.
• The pipeline dashboard updates in real-time. AI flags that the deal is stuck based on missed next steps or lack of stakeholder engagement.
• Forecasting models adjust based on live deal data, not last week’s notes.
• If the deal progresses, AI generates pricing recommendations and configures quotes based on customer behavior and historical conversion rates.

For leading sales organizations, this is now the standard operating model: powered by AI, driven by data, and built for speed.

How Momentum Fits the AI Sales Revolution

This is where Momentum fits the narrative perfectly.

While AI changes what’s possible, most sales teams face a different bottleneck: disconnected systems. CRMs, conversation intelligence platforms, sales enablement tools, and communication channels don’t talk to each other. As a result, even the best AI-powered insights often die in silos.

Momentum is the connective tissue.

It orchestrates revenue workflows by connecting CRM activity, sales calls, customer interactions, and team communication into a unified, AI-powered operating system.

Here’s how Momentum enables the exact transformation Gartner described:

• Workflow Automation: When a customer call happens, Momentum automatically generates follow-ups, updates the CRM, and notifies stakeholders. Nothing falls through the cracks.
• Pipeline Risk Detection: If a deal goes cold (no follow-up, missed meetings, stalled next steps) Momentum flags it before the quarter ends.
• Revenue Milestone Automation: Handoff from sales to implementation? Automated. Pricing approval workflows? Automated. Renewals? Triggered automatically from CRM and call data.
• Forecasting Augmentation: Momentum feeds real-time conversation intelligence into your CRM’s forecasting models, making pipeline updates accurate and live, not a guessing game.

With Momentum, AI becomes the engine behind sales execution: automating workflows, surfacing risks, and accelerating revenue.

This is what Gottlieb means when he says, “Deconstruct the work and rebuild it with AI.”

Momentum is the platform that rebuilds sales execution for the AI era.

The Sales Awakening Should Start Now

The takeaway from the Gartner keynote couldn’t be clearer. 

The window for AI-driven competitive advantage in sales is shrinking fast. Within three years, AI-powered workflows will be the norm, not the differentiator.

Sales teams who move now are adopting AI-powered automation, streamlining workflows, optimizing their sales process with predictive analytics, conversation intelligence, and CRM automation. 

This means they will be the ones to accelerate revenue, improve conversion rates, and create better customer experiences.

Those who wait? They’ll be playing catch-up in a market that has already moved on.

AI is NOT replacing salespeople. It’s replacing the manual, repetitive, time-consuming tasks that were never the job in the first place. What’s left? Closing deals. Building trust. Managing relationships. Driving revenue. What sales reps were supposed to focus on since day 1.

This is the future of sales. And this is what Momentum enables as an AI-powered orchestration system for revenue execution. Turning data into action, workflows into automation, and pipeline into predictable growth.

The Sales Awakening has started. The only question is: are you ready?