As sales teams kick off 2026 with ambitious new quotas, they’re turning to AI — especially agents — to hit their numbers. A new survey of more than 4,000 sales professionals reveals AI as their top tactic to drive company growth this year.

The data also reveals why: Sales teams are increasingly stretched between changing customer demands and limited bandwidth to meet them. The real drag on productivity, the research suggests, isn’t effort or skill; it’s administrative bottlenecks, a challenge hitting Gen Z sellers hardest. This year, they’re turning to AI and agents to do more with what they have: 94% of sales leaders with agents say they ’re critical for meeting business demands.

We want to kill the busywork so our teams can focus on what actually moves deals forward: building relationships and driving success.

Adam Alfano, EVP of Sales at Salesforce

By improving productivity, these agents are freeing sellers to do what they do best. “We want to kill the busywork so our teams can focus on what actually moves deals forward: building relationships and driving success,” said Adam Alfano, EVP of Sales at Salesforce. “AI agents make that possible.”

Detailed Findings: 

Sellers are doubling down on AI agents and deploying them across the entire sales cycle.

• AI adoption in sales is already mainstream: 87% of sales organizations currently use some form of AI for tasks like prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, or drafting emails. 
• Sellers using AI report meaningful value: 89% say AI deepens customer understanding, and 87% say it makes their job less stressful.
• AI agent adoption is accelerating quickly: 54% of sellers say they’ve used agents, and nearly 9 in 10 plan to by 2027. Once fully implemented, sellers expect agents to cut prospect research time by 34% and email drafting by 36%, giving sales teams meaningful time back in their day.

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Alfano revealed how his own teams use AI agents to drive impact. “AI agents have changed how we operate,” he said. “They help us onboard reps and quote complex deals faster and personalize outreach with better intel. Plus, they’re prospecting 24/7. It’s not just efficiency gains in one department — agents are reshaping our entire sales engine.”

Top-performing sellers are 1.7 times more likely to use prospecting AI agents for outreach than underperformers.

• Nearly half of sales reps point to cold calling as the worst part of their job, yet a strong pipeline requires more contacts and more engagement than teams can deliver on their own.
  • Despite devoting nearly one full day of their workweek to prospecting efforts, 48% say they lack bandwidth to do adequate cold outreach. 
• To close the capacity gap, 55% of sales professionals are using AI for prospecting, with another 38% planning to do so in the future.
  • 92% of sellers with AI agents say it benefits their prospecting efforts.
• High performers — sellers who have substantially increased year-over-year revenue — are 1.7 times more likely to use agents to help with prospecting than underperformers who merely maintained or decreased YOY revenue.

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“At Salesforce, we use agents to work all our untouched leads,” said Alfano. “We used to let these leads fall to the floor like sawdust. Now, agents sweep them up and sift for gold. In four months, agents contacted 130,000 leads and created 3,200 opportunities. Next year, we believe these numbers will be 10 times higher.”

Administrative friction is hitting the lower rungs of the career ladder hardest.

• The grunt work tax is real: While the average seller spends 40% of their time selling, Gen Z reps are trapped at just 35% — losing approximately two full hours each week to manual data entry that senior reps spend researching prospects and building relationships.
• They’re also navigating a mentorship drought:
  • 46% rarely get feedback on their sales conversations.
  • 47% don’t get enough roleplay opportunities before customer calls.
• When asked what prevents effective enablement, Gen Z points to lack of manager time as the #1 obstacle, while millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers cite lack of access to data and insights.
• The result? Gen Z is eyeing the exits. More open to leaving their job than any other generation, they cite lack of advancement opportunities as the primary driver. 

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Sales teams — particularly high-performing ones — are tackling messy data to better support AI initiatives.

• To get the most from AI, sales professionals are focusing on trusted, connected data — with high performers leading the charge.
• Over half of sales leaders with AI (51%) say disconnected systems are slowing down their AI initiatives.
  • To help, 74% of sales professionals are focusing on data cleansing — doing the unglamorous but essential work of removing duplicates, correcting errors or omissions, and standardizing formats across siloed systems to maximize their AI returns.
  • High performers take it further:
    • 79% prioritize data hygiene compared with only 54% of underperformers. 

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“The secret sauce for sales AI agents is unified data,” Alfano noted. “Stand-alone agents without comprehensive customer context  tend to fail. To get accurate results, agents need the full picture. Otherwise, you get garbage outputs.”

Explore Further:

• Read the full State of Sales report
• See Salesforce sales leaders break down the research
• Learn how to build and activate your own sales agent
• Discover how customers like Asymbl scale their sales team with Agentforce Sales
• See how Siemens uses AI agents to personalize follow-up on 100% of leads
• Join the Salesblazer Community to grow your selling career 

Methodology:

Data is sourced from a double-anonymous survey of 4,050 sales professionals, including sales leaders, sales reps, partner reps, sales and business development representatives, and sales operations. The survey was conducted in August through September 2025. Respondents represented Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States.