AI Won’t Fix a Broken Sales Process
Originally reported by McKinsey & Company
AI is showing up everywhere in sales. But a recent McKinsey study raises an important question: Are organizations actually changing their sales processes, or are they simply adding AI to the way they already work?
McKinsey's 2026 B2B Pulse Survey, based on nearly 4,000 buyers and sellers across 13 countries, found that while AI adoption is growing rapidly, many organizations are struggling to turn that adoption into meaningful business value. The research points to familiar challenges including fragmented data, disconnected teams, manual processes and change-management issues.
What This Means for Sales Leaders
Here's the part that caught my attention.
AI doesn't automatically fix a broken sales process.
If opportunity stages aren't clearly defined, AI doesn't know what a healthy opportunity looks like. If CRM data is incomplete, AI is working with incomplete information. And if managers aren't using CRM data to coach their teams, better AI insights may simply create more information that nobody acts on.
We've written about this before in Why Salesforce Adoption Fails and How to Fix It. Technology isn't the whole adoption problem. The technology has to fit the way the sales organization actually works.
McKinsey's research points toward the next step: rewiring sales workflows around AI, rather than simply adding AI tools to existing processes.
That means looking at the entire sales process—prospecting, account planning, pipeline management, forecasting and customer engagement—and asking where AI can genuinely improve how the work gets done.
The Bigger Point
This is why we look at Salesforce adoption through Process, Platform and People.
The process needs to be clear.
The platform needs to support it.
And people need to adopt the new way of working.
AI doesn't eliminate those requirements.
It makes them more important.
The question for sales leaders isn't simply “What AI tool should we buy?”
It's “Which part of our sales process should work differently because of AI?”
That's where the real opportunity is.
Source: McKinsey — The Future of B2B Sales: How Growth Champions Rewire Their Playbooks with AI
