Report in the world of sales: AI agents are becoming the norm that helps at work

The year 2026 opened with ambitious sales goals, and the world’s sales teams rely more and more on artificial intelligence to meet them – according to Salesforce’s seventh State of Sales report, based on a survey of approximately 4,000 sales professionals.

The report states that the main difficulty of the salespeople is not a lack of professionalism, but an excess of bureaucratic tasks that burdens them and slows down the work. Much of their time is spent prospecting, which means proactively searching for people or companies who might want to buy, including cold calling. Almost half of salespeople say they still don’t have enough time to make such inquiries effectively.

The report also shows that there is a clear gap between strong and weak salespeople. Those who managed to increase their revenue year over year use AI agents to find new customers about 1.7 times more than salespeople whose performance stagnated or weakened.

Salesforce describes how they themselves use smart agents. According to them, in the past many leads, i.e. initial inquiries from potential customers, were simply not handled. Today the agents locate these leads, make initial contact and filter them. Within four months, they created 3,200 business opportunities out of about 130,000 leads, and the company estimates that the numbers will increase tenfold next year.

In addition, many of them feel that they do not receive enough professional support. 46% rarely get feedback on their sales calls, and 47% say they don’t have enough opportunities to practice sales calls in advance. When asked what holds them back the most, they point to a lack of time from managers who can mentor them. The result is a higher willingness to leave work compared to other generations.

Another key issue in the report is the quality of the data. In order for the artificial intelligence to work well, the information in the systems must be organized, uniform and reliable. More than half of sales managers who use AI say that disconnected and out-of-sync systems slow adoption. That’s why 74% of sales people currently invest in cleaning data, deleting duplicates and correcting mistakes.