How can we start the year without reflecting on AI? While we very much pick and choose where we apply it, the team at Sales Force Europe loves technology, so we are experimenting with AI in our work every day. And we are thinking about how it affects the overall go-to-market strategy.
So today we aren’t talking about how we do and do not use AI — we’ve already shared our company AI policy with you, the only thing that might change is the tools we choose to use. Today we are thinking about how AI-in-everything is going to disrupt the sales cycle and the entire customer experience.
While a few of the big AI players have been around for decades, most AI companies are fledgling startups. Pre-seed and seed-round startups rely on founder-led sales to build proofs of concepts, alphas and betas to get rapid feedback and to make sure they are building what those first customers want.
Right now, just about every SaaS and hardware company is scrambling to add AI into their products. The traditional sales cycle won’t work because these dramatically new features lack social proof and referrals, even for existing customers. These new AI products have you back to your sales origins. Your AI feature team has to behave like a startup and pivot based on rapid feedback from early users. These users may be brand new, coming to you for this AI functionality, or they can be long-term trusted brand ambassadors. And depending on your setup, you may not know who they are.
Thankfully, AI makes it easy to quickly spin up a prototype to demo. And, with the right prompts and user knowledge, AI is helpful in finding the right people, in the right companies, in the right locations. But truly connecting with those prospects and early AI testers is a whole lot harder.
Even tougher in a new vertical or country.
Replacing sales reps, customer success and support teams with AI is deeply short-sighted. Ironically, AI is demanding a return to a hands-on customer experience.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz refers to this as a shift from services-led growth over product-led growth. Yes, you help build a tech company, but if it’s got AI in it, it’s got to focus on services to be successful.
The hottest job in tech right now is the forward-deployed engineer. Like a forward-deployed soldier stationed abroad, the FDE is embedded with the customer early on to help them prepare for and respond to the massive complexity of AI.
Joe Schmidt, also of Andreessen Horowitz, argues that the forward-deployed engineer becomes the manager of fleets of AI agents, at least at the onboarding and fine-tuning stage.
Even OpenAI and Anthropic, some of the frontrunners of this next stage of AI, are hiring this FDE role in droves — because AI is not as simple and doesn’t follow the same adoption pattern as software as a service. Where SaaS often came out of the box, AI still remains a locked box of unknowns — even at the companies creating leading AI products.
While there’s early interest in seemingly all AI products, Schmidt warned that AI product retention is fleeting without a bit of hand-holding — and often a lot of customization.
We are arguing that you need a forward-deployed team, bravely going out to test the market before you plant your flag and set up a business entity and HQ. And if you don’t deploy your first sales teams to sell early and often, the saturated AI market will see your competitors stake their claim first.
You may not have wanted to be a services company but now you are. Our partner Robb Miller says you should look at it as a feature not a bug. AI all-but-requires that you distinguish your company by offering hyper-specific workflows rather than trying to be an AI all-in-one platform. That demands getting real close to your target audience.
Add to this, Miller continues, the democratization of SaaS purchasing has made the process more complex, requiring input from diverse stakeholders across departments. And each department has divergent datasets. Your sales process needs to consider these different stakeholders, but it also has to consider the data of it all.
Anyone in the sales or customer experience cycle for an AI-led product needs experience with and understanding of the enterprise technology stack — and the ability to understand this specific data problem to then collaborate with data engineers. No AI feature will bring value out of the box — enterprise data is still that value driver.
Our team will continue to drive home that human experience still outperforms AI.
You will still be a part of what Miller calls Service-as-a-Software. The next set of winners in the software market, he argues, will be firms that take human-intensive services — like sales — and infuse them with AI. The focus is on reducing the tedious back-office work, while increasing the time you spend building relationships with clients.
Because now, more than ever, us at Sales Force Europe is betting that human relationships in sales matter more than ever.
As Miller says, those that will win in this competitive AI marketing are “optimistic about AI and what it means for their future, and their agency gives them the confidence to navigate change.”
Show a deep understanding of the compliance, security and privacy risks of poorly implemented AI, but also make it clear that you, like us, are actively experimenting with AI tools and how.
And as sales and customer success leadership, be aware that sales folks with less experience are also less able to discern if the content generator is saying what a customer wants to hear. When and how to use AI has to be discussed in every sales training. Because 2026 is the year when AI everything becomes a reality.
As chief AI officer Philipp Heltewig points out, this year, AI is likely to break out of first-line chatbots, as AI agents orchestrate the whole customer experience, especially applying AI to the mid- and back-office, “connecting systems, orchestrating workflows and driving proactive engagement across every department.”
It’s not just for customer support either. AI and agentic AI, he predicts, will finally move the customer experience out of its silo. “Agentic AI will align the whole enterprise around faster, smarter, more consistent customer outcomes.”
Trust becomes your new competitive advantage with AI, through the entire prospect and customer lifecycle. “Trust becomes the new currency of customer experience,” Heltewig said. “Enterprises that offer transparent, secure, explainable AI will set the standard — and the rest will fall behind.”
Just don’t let AI steal your voice. At least for now, AI is not good at writing, which means it should not have a final say in any communication to prospects, customers or clients. And bot-driven outreach is the fastest way to burn your brand and get blocked.
How you apply AI will be the difference between customer loyalty and customer loss.
ICYMI: AI in sales: How machines vs humans will look in 2026
