Selling the Future of AI 

Bauer College Associate Professor Johannes Habel, with co-authors Gabriel Gonzalez (San Diego State University) and Gary Hunter (UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School), recently published the article “AI Agents, Agentic AI, and the Future of Sales” in the Journal of Business Research, examining the growing uses of AI in relation to personal selling and sales management.  

All industries are experiencing an AI revolution, Habel said. Things are shifting from using AI assistance on demand to building fully autonomous agents that can work alongside humans and take over mundane tasks such as answering inbound emails or making cold calls, he added.  

“By handing those processes over to AI, a salesperson can focus on areas that add value to the customers’ lives,” Habel said. “The fun part about sales is building relationships and understanding the customer’s problem in depth.” 

In his research, Habel studies the development of large language models (LLMs) and how they have tremendously changed the way business is conducted. In the article, he and his co-authors look at how AI tools have both enabled and replaced people who work in sales. 

Habel said that moving forward, managers and salespeople should be aware of what AI agents can do and where human-centered skills are still needed.  

Managers need to understand that AI, like anything else, is a trend and to make strategic decisions that will fit their company’s needs, he said. As for salespeople, they should be aware that things that don’t require human intelligence can expect to be outsourced to AI, he added.  

“I think soft skills are going to be important, but also hard skills that AI cannot implement, such as diving deep into customers’ pain points and cocreating solutions with them,” Habel said.  

AI use in sales is in its infancy, with the potential for exponential growth, Habel said. He is currently working on projects that study whether certain cutting-edge AI applications help increase chances of success.

In one of these projects, Habel together with Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute Research Director Michael Ahearne, Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship Seshadri Tirunilla and Senior Professor of Practice Amy Vandaveer Novak, put a lens on AI role play software.  

Second Nature is one such software that Bauer has been using since Spring 2024 to help students in the Program for Excellence in Selling (PES) practice their interview skills and get immediate, objective feedback on their performance.