r/sales • u/RobbieFowler9 • 20h ago
Sales Topic General Discussion AI burnout in tech sales
Does anyone else in tech sales feel completely burnt out with AI. Every conversation with leadership, every suggestion from your manager, every training session, every webinar and LinkedIn post is just AI nonsense.
My company has bi-weekly training sessions, every single one this year has been on AI to some extent. AI objection handling, AI buying dynamics, AI priorities at the C-Level, AI risks... It's all the same shit. Now they've signed up for this AI role play tool we need to use. They're list managing all these training sessions and role plays to make sure everyone does them.
Leadership has always been pretty shit in sales but lately it feels like they don't even pretend to care. Just direct you to use more AI tools, or get AI to write scripts for you, or use an AI tool to role play a call.
I've been in the industry for 15 years and my current company for 7 years, this is the first time I've really hated it. None of it is relevant to what we do or helps us sell, it's just a bombardment of time wasting activities. Feeling really burnt out because of it.
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u/Substantial_Bus840 20h ago
Yep, I have no respect for anyone whose emails are AI. Now imagine my position since my manager has adopted AI-only replies. It feels like an insult to our intelligence to think we can’t tell.
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u/Late-Command3491 19h ago edited 17h ago
My manager writes emails to the team with AI.
Tone varies: Authoritarian. Robotic. Over enthusiastic. Never sounds like a human trying to communicate with humans.
ETA: I don't think anyone should use AI to communicate with other humans. It is always obvious and disrespectful.
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u/Rebombastro 5h ago
I set an appointment with an AI email with a customer segment, that my director of sales pays extra commission on if we close them and a big bonus at the end of the year if we manage to close a certain amount of them until the end of the year.
They work but you have to make them look less AI-y. They save a lot of time and it doesn't matter if they aren't 100% human-based as long as they convey all the necessary information. Your pride doesn't matter.
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u/junkcardera Technology 20h ago
Prospects are getting burnt out on it. I don’t even say AI in meetings anymore. It checks people out real fast.
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u/jonathanclaire 19h ago
ChatGPT work has been the first useful tool I’ve really encountered, aside from call note takers.
Plugs into emails / hubspot - if I’m waking up feeling burnt out or CBA I just ask it for 15 people I should email today - and why…
Has genuinely resurfaced some great opportunities missed. Or made me reach out to people I had genuinely forgotten about.
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u/ArmoFun 18h ago
My work won’t let me do anything like that with salesforce. would be right
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u/Alarming-Mix3809 17h ago
They want us to use AI for everything but won’t give us permission to actually use it. It’s madness.
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u/puff_of_fluff 5h ago
It’s great for all of the parts of the job that don’t actually involve communicating with other human beings lol. But as soon as some VP from corporate starts talking about using it to write emails I just immediately write them off as an idiot and their advice as worthless
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u/cosankov Marketing 18h ago
As of writing this now, this new model they pushed is kind of sloppy (I'm referring to Codex business) so I'm always switched between it and Claude.
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u/Tennouheika 19h ago
Good post. People who hate AI just use it occasionally to draft emails and then wonder why they don’t think AI is helpful.
I use AI all the time for work. Customer research, product research, post-sales reports etc
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u/jonathanclaire 19h ago
I am working on letting it help me with things I just don’t like doing.
All follow ups and comms are still me, don’t care if AI can do it in 2 mins, it can’t replicate the chaos of my follow ups 🤣
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u/Difficult_Scallion_1 15h ago
My company has all of our accounts locked down so tight I can’t integrate AI with anything! It’s truly frustrating - they’re telling us to use AI, but won’t let us actually use AI!
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u/Ambitious-Sky-9577 19h ago
this hits close. got Copilot rolled out to my team last quarter with zero framework, just "use it, be more strategic." biweekly trainings on generic AI stuff that has nothing to do with how i actually manage my book.
the tools aren't the problem, it's that nobody bothers to make them relevant to the actual job. feels like compliance theater more than enablement.
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u/RobbieFowler9 19h ago
the tools aren't the problem, it's that nobody bothers to make them relevant to the actual job.
Spot on. There are some genuinely really helpful things that AI can do for our job. Unfortunately leadership have no idea what those things are.
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u/vikrantrrao 18h ago
AI can’t be used as a silver bullet to cover up foundational issues.
If the sales process is broken, offer is weak, product is commoditised, ICP is too broad, etc. AI can’t fix it.
It’s a super smart intern (and that’s all).
Totally understand that it might be overwhelming, but just look into AI basics, and you’ll be good.
Unfortunately my personal opinion is that there’s no going back. It’s like the internet, can’t go back now.
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u/Klutzy_Departure4914 19h ago
I just quit my job and will be moving
To Argentina. I worked in FAANG. Just cannot do it anymore
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u/Jaded_Tangerine855 15h ago
Wait I’m super envious of this. How were you able to up and leave? What are you going to do for work?
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u/Mysterious-Angle3564 14h ago
I think the part that would burn me out isn't even the AI itself, it's having AI turned into another thing I'm expected to do.
If it quietly takes work off my plate after a call, writes the admin stuff, remembers context I would've had to dig up, great. If I need to attend AI training, do mandatory AI roleplays, prompt it for scripts and then prove I'm using it, you've somehow used automation to give me more work lol
Feels like a lot of companies are measuring AI adoption rather than whether anyone actually got their time back.
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u/2nd_Sun 9h ago
Bingo. All of these absolute geniuses, even in this thread, touting how fucking awesome their little chat bot is like they just invented the theory of relativity. Where are the results? Where are the checks? Why aren’t you lapping your colleagues???
Tell me with a straight face the difference between you missing and making your number is your note taker bot and some research “”agent”” you slapped together in an afternoon. Tell me honestly you will outperform yourself by even 10%, let alone your colleagues, because of these tools. If you couldn’t sell five years ago because your computer didn’t crap out emails and call notes for you, you shouldn’t have been in this field in the first place. The “I don’t wanna get left behind” line gets funnier and loses luster every day that passes that nobody is leaving anybody, everyone is just scratching their heads.
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u/Pipes32 18h ago
I just got back from my sales conference and if I'd taken a shot for every time they said AI, I'd be dead.
There is a lot of useless stuff out there. That being said, some of it is pretty good. As others have mentioned, call note takers are pretty nice. For me, the main thing I sell is support services, so reviewing partner-created quotes with literally thousands of assets is a regular part of my job. Now instead of having to create big pivot tables and manually review I just pop the quotes into my agent and tell me to give me a table of the differences between the quotes. If there's one thing AI is good at, it's looking at massive amounts of data very quickly.
That being said, one thing I am noticing is that AI is taking all the simple, brainless stuff I used to have to do off my plate. Which seems great until I realize my entire day is now spent doing mentally taxing work and I'm way more exhausted after my day than I ever have been. I've gotten faster and more efficient, but it comes at a cost.
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u/melch_18 17h ago
I run my own sales agency and I'm sick of every conversation topic being AI.
I can't imagine how redundant and annoying it is at a big tech company.
IMO, the conversation should be about how reps are using AI to improve their work then back to sales targets/outcomes.
No doubt AI is the biggest shift in how our world works but at the end of the day, use it and talk about the sales.
Will you ride out the annoying phase?
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u/Icognitpro 20h ago
Part of me thinks it’s a mirror of my own personal use of AI.
I don’t think AI is as black and white as a lot of people frame it - that either it’s complete shit or a savior of sorts. It’s probably somewhere in between.
So in my personal use, I’ve found myself navigating when AI is actually useful and when it’s not, and even that keeps developing / changing as AI improves.
What I’ve noticed it’s created is me either finding new useful ways to apply AI, or going down rabbit holes trying to figure out how to make it work when it won’t.
I think business leaders are doing the same thing. They see that AI can be powerful in some applications, but they’re also stuck with the same risk that it’s this giant, useless rabbit hole that you waste time going down.
The bigger issue overall is it does feel like you can’t sit around waiting while others are figuring it out and putting it to use.
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u/BlondeSeductive 19h ago
In my experience, AI has been absolutely dreadful at gathering data. If you ask it to tell you who competed in F1 seasons it will start hallucinating, then tell you that someone like Mazepin competed in 3 seasons. (He didn't)
For teaching you things and being a source of information, it works rather well when it can back up what it talks about with sources. You can certainly use it to research companies and what it is they do.
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u/Beachdaddybravo 18h ago
Even then, you need to double check every single source because hallucinations are impossible to weed out completely. Even the absolute best AI tools are about as accurate as a bad intern and you need to babysit it like an intern.
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u/Icognitpro 14h ago
I’ve had mixed experiences on data gathering, but it’s never been consistent. It’ll do a stellar job 3 times in a row then produce crap results. I think there are just a ton of things to factor - specific ai tool, what mode it’s set to, which module within it you’re using, how you’re prompting it, what resources it’s told and/or actually does check, etc. not to mention accounting for auto-updates to the ai impacting whatever you have set up. I have a couple of projects set up that work pretty well, but I give it data sets to search and outside of that, you’re right, it’s super hit or miss on what it’s actually pulling and not pulling, then how it relays it.
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u/SaveMeSomeBleach Enterprise Software 17h ago
I swear since the AI boom, half my company spends a majority of their day using Claude for these side projects that no one asked for and usually aren’t even relevant to their actual role/department.
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u/Successful-Pomelo-51 Aerospace & Defense sales 16h ago
Is that AI roleplay tool called Hyperbound?
You can cheat your way through it.
It's one of those things that's not going to get looked at more than once a year for annual training.
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u/ItsAJackal21 13h ago
Absolutely.
I work at a big tech company that develops and sells a lot of the AI tools.
We now have all this internal training that every new product requires us to do a role play “pitch” to an AI sales coach. It grades us based on a rubric.
They have massively increased the outbound prospecting metrics we are supposed to hit, as well as the amount of account and opportunity data we are supposed to track for each deal.
And then to top it off, they took away several hours of overtime we were previously allowed to claim (I easily work 50-60 hours a week but we could only claim 43 hours. They took it down to 41) due to “the plethora of AI tools you have at your disposal. If you claim overtime then you will have a session with your regional vice president to see where you are being inefficient”.
It’s a disaster, I’m thinking about moving back into manufacturing and getting the hell away from tech.
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u/InternationalAsk9845 12h ago
My customers are clearly using it to try and negotiate better. Terms, pricing, etc. one even sent me questions in the same font that Claude outputs in.
The problem with this is AI is trying to be the hero and get them the best deal but obviously doesn’t have access to the correct data so is giving customer unrealistic expectations on what they can get and is making my life extremely difficult
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u/SarGhoul24 20h ago
AI itself is helpful. The stuff leadership pushes around AI seems to be a risk mitigation tactic , so they can say they trained folks on the proper use of AI.
I use a few agents and also A/B test post call follow up with AI and leadership seems to love that and it checks the box.
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u/HornPleaseOK Technology 18h ago
I used to have better response rate for my cold emails because I’m a half decent communicator. AI has completely wiped out the ability to stand out tor articulating an idea well since everyone uses them to write, although mostly poorly. A lot of people assume I use ChatGPT when I write an article on LinkedIn which is another problem. I’m going to start posting videos to get over this hurdle but AI has made selling to leadership at enterprise really hard. I’m trying to get in front of as people as I can and such (to speak, I’m a senior management selling to Enterprise) but those are not easy. I’m willing to beg my network to help at some point if the numbers don’t start to move, it is that bad. I’m grateful my company gives me a long runway since our sales cycles are stupidly long. But fuck AI for making sales harder than it should be. Haha
On the flip side, I vibe coded an app for just my spouse and I over the weekend with a ChatGPT Pro subscription (two week’s worth 5x Pro token limit burned) that I can practically release as an app for long distance dating if there ever is a market for it. I just need to add End to End encryption and I should be able to publish it to the App Store, it is that good. Something like this was impossible a couple of years ago. That’s at least 6 weeks of dev and QA.
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u/Opposite-Peak5020 19h ago
Now they've signed up for this AI role play tool we need to use. They're list managing all these training sessions and role plays to make sure everyone does them
One way to reframe this part might be looking at it as getting extra at-bats that AREN'T in front of the customer. Lots of us like to practice real-world scenarios that aren't necessarily in front of our buyers, peers or managers. (Hell, most of us don't have managers with the bandwidth to role play consistently anyway, lol) As long as the role play is tailored to your industry, org, and real-world buyers, it might help sharpen your convos?
*YOU* might not need the extra practice, but I bet at least some of your colleagues do, and it seems like your leadership team has ID'd it as a skills gap. THey can't just single those folks out, hence the team training :)
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u/RobbieFowler9 19h ago
All anyone does with this tool is put the criteria into an AI tool to generate a script and then read it word for word to get a passing grade. It's not even close to a real world call.
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u/Opposite-Peak5020 19h ago
Big yikes. Yeah, the one I'm familiar with is actually custom-created for individual orgs and sounds bang-on like a real world convo. Of course, nothing is going to work if the individual cares more about checking a training box than in improving their game.
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u/RobbieFowler9 18h ago
So the one we use can function fairly well. The problem is the criteria that is set for the passing grade is solely based on recognising certain phrases and check boxes you need to tick. So if you try to have a realistic conversation with it you will fail because you didn't say the right wording. And of course the criteria is decided by sales or anyone who has ever worked in sales.
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u/ashen_dove Enterprise Software 19h ago
I tune most of it out. I lean heavily into AI for all the worst parts of my role, and it’s been amazing for research, outbounding, meeting prep, etc.
That said, they’ve watched me use it well and asked me a million times to help with org wide implementation. I’ve tried so many times to get them to de-hype the messaging and focus on stuff that will actually help people.
For example, I’ve told them to stop just handing out licenses to AI tools and actually teach people how to use them correctly, when to use them and what they’re actually good for.
Of course, they didn’t listen. So they keep preaching about new AI tools and Claude skills to a Zoom wall of cam off tiles and glazed over expressions, then wondering why they’re not seeing major gains and wasting money.
Edit: also when pitching our product, I’ve stopped pitching how they want where I focus on AI. Instead I gauge at the top how comfy they are with AI and either we talk about how to use the platform sans AI, 100% with AI and hybrid. Lo and behold prospects appreciate the nuance meanwhile leadership would likely tear me a new one for it.
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u/KalistArcs AI/Cybersec 19h ago
I hear you, it started with a couple of really useful AI complements to our sales cycles, then it rapidly crept into "you must use these 8 agents before sending a proposal" which is fair for a decent size deal, not so much for our lowest plan option.
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u/Diligent-Parsley-439 17h ago
Yes burnt out AF from AI talks but selling it is making me life changing money. The plan is to push for 3 more years and then get the fuck away from this shit forever
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u/northernlightup 17h ago
Dude I don’t know how to tell marketing that the AI slop that they are putting on LinkedIn with our company name is god awful.
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u/Alarming-Mix3809 17h ago
It’s something that leadership can point at instead of taking any responsibility themselves for good ideas or performance.
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u/Resident-You-2690 16h ago
Why i quit to become a nanny. Realized I don’t need to make that much money and it wasn’t values aligned. Just not fun to sell anymore when everyone is getting AI outreach or listen to crap about AI
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u/steveo242 11h ago edited 10h ago
Sorry man, that sounds awful. Nothing worse than having to do shit that doesn't add to the paycheck.
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u/mikeydoc96 5h ago
It depends what you're selling. Im selling to engineers where the AI stack we're selling/bringing in will genuinely change how they work and mean a lot less missed deadlines and rework in products.
This is a combination of generative AI and machine learning - no LLMs
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u/dominomedley 5h ago
Yep - and the amount of slop people produce. Same with the endless Claude presentations (and even Claude pricing slides to customers). People taking stuff from AI without any editing and thought, and then other people take that and do the same. It’s shocking.
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u/CityDependent8254 5h ago
Yep, I spend more time deciphering AI hallucinations than actually working
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u/semthews1 18h ago
It sucks but its mandatory.
Revolutionary a.i. tech release every 6 months.....and its real.
Chat gpt 6 is scary just like claude 5 was. There will be another new one in 6 months.......
I miss the old days.
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u/SESender SaaS 20h ago
just build an agent to handle this shit for you lol.
i love selling. i hate AI. i have like 6 ai agents that make my life easier. i talk about them publicly, often. then people stop talking to me about ai. and when they do, i forward them an agent and say 'figure it out'
don't be the ai guy, but sell the buzz
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u/No-Author-2358 15h ago
Yeah, it's just like when companies started forcing people to write emails and texts. Carnage, just carnage.
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u/Tkamer01 13h ago
Truth is real! AI has gone from a tool to a saving grace, and most leaders/companies have missed the mark. People to people connection (value) has been skipped right over - and customers know it. The right companies know this and it shows.
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u/scarzncigarz 20h ago
100%