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Too many sales teams treat AI like a light switch: you invest in a tool, flip it on, and expect results. But successful adoption doesn’t work that way. AI in sales is a maturity journey, not a one-time event.
We think the Gartner® report, 2025 Strategic Roadmap for an AI-First Sales Organization, provides a clear, phased model that helps Sales, RevOps, and GTM leaders build smarter—not faster. Whether you're just getting started or looking to scale, there’s a next step forward.
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Before chasing new AI features, evaluate your current tech ecosystem. Where is AI already embedded but underused? What’s duplicative or disconnected?
Gartner® urges sales operations leaders to “review their current tech stack and ensure it is delivering value — creating actionable next steps for sellers and improving how and the speed at which they get work done.”
This phase is about eliminating waste and surfacing existing value—often hiding in plain sight.
Start with AI capabilities that don’t require major change management. One of the best examples is conversation intelligence, now enhanced with GenAI for summarizing meetings, identifying buyer intent, and suggesting next steps.
Gartner® classifies this as a capability that can be “incorporated into your execution plan today with little need for risk mitigation and a greater likelihood to improve outcomes.”
Begin embedding agents or assistants into key seller workflows—your CRM, inbox, or call tools. Start small: one workflow, one role, one repeatable task. Focus on reducing context switching and aligning with how sellers already work.
Move from reactive tools to systems that drive action. Gartner® says “Revenue action orchestration applications, a new sales technology market, merges capabilities across sales engagement, revenue intelligence and SFA markets into a unified, AI-driven solution.”
RAO tools help sellers move deals forward and help managers coach more effectively.
Smart technology still fails without adoption. Sellers need enablement—structured training, in-app prompts, and contextual coaching—to understand when and how to use AI.
Gartner® notes, “Deploying new technology could reduce sellers’ productivity and add to their burdens if it doesn’t integrate well into their daily workflows.”
Make adoption easy with phased rollouts and clear messaging.
This phase isn’t about experimenting with chatbots—it’s about piloting AI agents capable of acting like expert sellers.
Rather than offering reactive suggestions or generating surface-level content, modern AI agents can synthesize seller activity, product knowledge, buyer signals, and intent data to execute strategic sales motions. These agents don’t just assist—they act.
They can identify risks, prioritize stakeholders, map solutions, and recommend deal strategy—all grounded in your internal data. By integrating across systems (CRM, enablement, buyer engagement platforms), they provide a unified, context-rich perspective sellers can trust and act on.
The long-term opportunity is building composite AI systems—integrating GenAI, ML, and RAG into agents that can work across teams. These agents pull insights from marketing, product, and customer success, and support the entire revenue engine.
This shift allows GTM functions to act as one coordinated system, not fragmented silos.
Gartner® comments on this evolution “AI agents represent one of the first AI-based systems that can provide insights and execute processes similarly to a human,” and notes that sellers “will increasingly depend on AI’s assistance with and full execution of mundane and revenue-driving workflows, including tasks such as scheduling, prospecting, qualification and personalized follow-ups.”
This is the turning point in AI maturity—when intelligence shifts from passive to proactive, and AI becomes a strategic teammate, not a support tool.
Evaluate AI agents vs. AI assistants the same way you would a rep—define its role, monitor its performance, and hold it accountable.
To drive value, you need to measure it. Set KPIs that reflect AI’s impact on:
Gartner® advises,
“Hold the AI you put in place accountable for results, much like human sellers are responsible for their outcomes.”
AI isn’t delivering value unless it’s driving outcomes that matter to the business.
There’s no shortcut to AI maturity—but there is a roadmap. Gartner® makes it clear that success requires more than new tools. It requires a strategy-first approach that evolves over time.
“Sales operations leaders must prepare for rapid technology and process changes by building a strategic roadmap with an AI-first approach.”
Use the Gartner roadmap (here) to structure your sales AI evolution—one phase at a time.
Source:
Gartner, 2025 Strategic Roadmap for an AI-First Sales Organization, Melissa Hilbert, Adnan Zijadic, 5 May 2025.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
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