Top Sales Trends for 2026: Meet Your AI Teammate

Every year, we clock the latest trends in sales. The one that’s top of mind for 2026? AI (yep, again).

Sure, AI is a “known known,” but it’s taken on a new form and function in 2025 with AI sales agents — promising to revolutionize the sales process in 2026. That’s why we curated the best minds in sales from across industries and asked this critical question: How will sellers use AI in the year ahead?

Here are the use cases they shared:

The transition to AI agents is set to accelerate exponentially in 2026, fundamentally reshaping the role of the sales professional. They will take ownership of time-intensive tasks, including:

• Rapidly preparing for meetings with summarized account and contact data
• Performing deep-dive research into specific industries and companies to help qualify opportunities
• Managing ad hoc operational needs like composing first-draft emails, coordinating meeting scheduling, and automating lead follow-up
• Generating comprehensive reports on historical opportunities and forecasts
• Drafting preliminary business plans anchored in corporate strategy and historical performance metrics

This shift will allow our teams to dedicate their time to what they do best: building relationships and closing deals. (Naveen Gabrani | CEO, Astrea)

Leveraging Slackbot — as part of the Slack sales workspace — will be a game-changer. I already use it multiple times a day, asking for enablement for partners, product details, the latest promos for sellers, and guidance on how to tackle customer objections.

Most recently, we had a customer who was looking to divest their org and wanted to understand how to “future proof” that with Salesforce. Slackbot surfaced not only what typically contract language would be for the customer but a multi-step strategic process on what the customer should consider when looking to divest. It grounded the sales team on what the customer cares about and educated us on the path forward. (Vanessa Carranza | Regional VP of Sales, Salesforce)

Companies need to onboard agents to help reps practice the harder parts of the sales cycle: how to handle objections the right way, how to negotiate, how to deliver pricing information. These are the parts of the sales cycle where there are fewer "at bats" — parts where AI agents are most helpful. (Richard Harris | Founder, Harris Consulting Group)

In 2025, I treated AI as my chief of staff. Before walking into a C-level meeting, I used agents to synthesize earnings calls, reports, and press releases. This helped me map the client's strategic pillars directly to our Salesforce Customer 360 value proposition.

Looking ahead to 2026: I believe this application will get an upgrade. We will see agents that don't just analyze data but proactively suggest the next best strategic move for our clients. (Guilherme Campellon | Enterprise Account Executive, Salesforce)

I see sellers doubling down on using AI to prep faster, understand accounts better, and sharpen storylines for customer calls before ever jumping on a call. I did this a lot in 2025, and the ability of AI to assist in these areas is only going to get better.

The ones who will win in the coming year are going to walk into meetings already knowing the customer’s world, stay more present in conversations, and personalize without losing the human element — all with the help of AI.

TL;DR: AI will handle the busy work. We’ll get to handle the relationships.

(Joshua Turner | Senior Solution Sales Executive, Trifecta Technologies)

In 2026, I envision our solution engineers becoming AI-empowered consultants who can instantly synthesize complex technical requirements and generate tailored proof of concepts on the fly. Imagine an solution engineer who walks into a discovery call and, within minutes of understanding a prospect's vision, can leverage AI to automatically configure a demo presentation that reflects their exact use case - complete with their industry data, personalized workflows, and even integration scenarios. Complex demo builds will take minutes, not weeks. We'll be able to run discovery and demonstrate the art of the possible on the exact same call. That's real demo magic! (Dustin Bui | Solution Engineer, Salesforce)

AI will expand deeper into several key areas:

• Strategy and prioritization: AI-generated insights will give sellers the details they need to focus on the highest impact actions.
• Customer connection: With AI handling manual tasks, sellers can spend time building trust, navigating deal complexity thoughtfully, and applying strategic judgment in critical customer interactions.
• Collaboration: AI will make it much easier to work quickly across teams, giving stakeholders auto-generated proposals, emails, and other assets that they can fine-tune with the help of experts across the team.

(Gabie Caballero | Senior CRM Strategy & Enablement Advisor, JM Family Enterprises)

AI will continue to have key applications across the sales process — qualifying inbound accounts, coaching sales preps, building proposals. But the one that not as many people mention is redlining. For smaller teams without a large legal department, you can build an AI bot that can read redline requests from prospects and summarize the ask, breaking down the risk to your business and proposing redlines back. This focuses your legal team on the right areas when reviewing, saving a tremendous amount of time and reducing friction at the end of the sales process. (Jim Gilkey | Account Executive, Scrappy ABM)

AI has changed — and will continue to change — how I work in two ways:

• Research: If I'm meeting with a customer and doing initial research, I use AI to help me get an understanding of the company and how they make money. If something in particular sparks some interest in how they might sell a specific product B2B, I can ask more pointed questions and get more info about their sales process. That allows me to go into customer meetings with more than just surface level discovery questions.
• Note-taking: After I meet with a customer, I can take my notes and any transcripts/summaries and analyze them using AI. I can get insights, highlights, and cuts so the next time I’m on a call with them, I'm speaking their language and making sure that I cover what they’re most interested in.

(Rich Czupowski | Senior Account Solution Engineer, Salesforce)

I see a renewed focus and intentionality around top sellers leveraging AI as a relationship multiplier. 2026 brings an opportunity to not just do more, but allows for better prioritization of doing more of what matters — and doing it even better. Top sellers will be able to devote more time to the nuance of genuine relationship building with true and sincere heart and soul. (Larry Long Jr. | CEO, LLJR Enterprises)

In 2026, the sellers who win won’t be the ones who use AI the most, but the ones who use it most effectively and intentionally.

The biggest shift will be trust. Sellers will increasingly rely on AI not just to suggest the next action, but to manage entire micro-workflows — nurturing accounts, adjusting messaging based on real-time signals, and flagging when a deal’s momentum quietly starts to slip. That frees sellers to focus on what AI can’t replicate: judgment, empathy, creativity, and building credibility with the customer.

We’ll also see sellers move from reacting to dashboards to collaborating with AI in real time to get key insights. Instead of sifting through reports, they’ll ask better questions: Which accounts are showing buying intent but haven’t raised their hand? Where is this deal emotionally, not just financially? What story will resonate with this stakeholder right now? AI becomes the lens, not the driver.

And perhaps most importantly, AI will help sellers reclaim something that’s been missing for years: time to think. Time to prepare, to listen, to personalize, and to actually sell — not just manage the process of selling. (Janeen Marquardt | Chief Technical Strategist, Maple Digital Transformation)

The most successful sellers I’ve observed are those who’ve embraced AI as a collaborative partner rather than just a productivity hack. AEs who integrate this into their daily workflow are already seeing 20-30% time savings — and those numbers are likely to grow in the new year.

One of my biggest wins has been using AI for cross-team collaboration. When covering multiple territories, I’ve used it to synthesize market insights, competitive intelligence, and customer feedback across regions. I’ve been able to share these insights with the extended account teams to help us speak the same language and understand our customers better. These motions will get more and more efficient as AI evolves.

But AI is also good for handling prep work: tapping AI for daily “check-ins” to review pipeline and prep for meetings, to gather the latest territory insights for strategic planning, and to optimize schedules for increased productivity. (Adrienne Lynch | Regional Sales Manager, Salesforce)

In 2026, AI will no longer be a tool — it will be a true co-seller. Before a call even happens, AI will simulate the conversation, flag likely objections, recommend proof points, and suggest the best narrative for that specific buyer.

Come call time, it will have already analyzed the prospect’s industry trends, earnings calls, hiring patterns, tech stack, and recent news to brief the AE in minutes.

During the deal, AI will act like a real-time strategist coaching sellers on tone, timing, and next-best actions, automatically generating follow-ups that reference what mattered most in the conversation.

After the meeting, it will update the CRM, surfacing expansion signals and even alerting the seller when something changes in the account that creates a reason to re-engage.

The result? Sellers walk into every interaction informed and confident, spending less time preparing and more time building trust. (Sofilena Katopis | Senior Solution Engineer, Salesforce)

Here’s how AI is going to become a sales rep’s best friend in 2026:

• For the account executive: With the help of AI, their CRM will become a proactive command center, alerting them of recent happenings at their accounts, while also drafting hyper personalized outreach. This combo will turn manual research and engagement into instant action.
• For the account manager: AI will provide holistic account health scoring by analyzing usage, engagement, and support tickets. AI agents will proactively flag risks and even coordinate meetings to secure revenue retention and expansion revenue.

(Caroline Corcoran | Senior Solution Engineer, Salesforce)

The murmur around AI sales trends is growing, and for good reason. Its application across the sales experience — from core selling functions like prospecting to workflow streamlining and career advancement — is so sweeping that it’s poised to be one of the biggest drivers of growth and productivity in the year ahead.

If you’re not already invested, start now. Take time in 2026 to learn about what AI can do, and how the human and AI partnership can elevate your career. Your future self will thank you.

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