Will there always be salespeople? 4 principles for AI in financial services sales

By Emily Alexander and Jason Brown

We asked financial services leaders if this is what the future of sales looks like. (Created with ChatGPT, OpenAI, July 6, 2026.)

Over the past six months my colleagues and I have been pulling back the curtain of hype to see how financial service and insurance sales roles will evolve with AI enablement. We’ve spoken with several dozen leaders in asset and wealth management, commercial banking, and insurance whose organizations have undertaken initiatives to elevate sales outcomes through agentic AI, and whose roadmaps include greater ambition.

We’ve studied our own work and summarized outcomes from our clients’ initiatives. While this research is ongoing (perhaps never-ending!) we’ve arrived at four early findings:

· Leaders believe in the value of a salesperson — but are uncertain about where value will be created

· Many interviewees expressed disappointment from prior waves of transformation (digital and then AI-assisted sales)

· Organizations are overwhelmingly focused on driving incremental improvements to unlock sales growth

· Leaders are hesitant to transform sales roles in ways needed to capture value from AI

There will always be salespeople

We opened our research with a simple question: Will there always be salespeople?

What we heard in response was a qualified “yes”: 92% of interviewees affirmed that a human creates unique, irreplaceable value in the selling and buying process. The source of that value, though, may be narrower in the future for many sales roles. As a head of strategy for an insurer put it: “There are moments in the buying process where the broker has a bunch of unknowns — Will we make the broker look good at finals? How will implementation go? Brokers trust our best sellers to be accountable for those unknowns — and I don’t think that goes away.” There will always be a need for people, but not strictly in their current roles.

This enduring faith in the unique skills of salespeople also raised questions about the profile of a successful agentic-enabled seller: How do the skills that make salespeople successful translate? Perhaps the Hard Worker and Problem Solver profiles — to borrow from the Challenger™ framework, as an example — will see their advantages diminished.

“A bunch of my sellers stand out because they outwork their peers, and they excel at the process. I’m not sure that’s a distinction going forward. My personable, disorganized sellers just got an equalizer.” — Head of distribution, U.S. asset manager

And what about the 8% of respondents who aren’t confident in the future of the sales role? This group included leaders of mass-market sales teams that skewed toward transactional relationships. As one put it: “The failure of robo-advisors was on EQ. They do the IQ part of the job really well, and the interface and tools are user-friendly. What I’m seeing from AI now… I won’t say that it’s definite… I’ll just say I think it can do the EQ part surprisingly well.”

Clients and colleagues must benefit

All the leaders we spoke to have lived through recent — often ongoing — technology waves that aimed to improve sales productivity. The digital wave of the past decade promised to transform the buying process to a digital-plus-sales motion; more recently, the AI enablement wave promised next-best-actions that would optimize sales impact. To many, these prior waves have yet to materialize in real gains, while a new agentic AI wave is already crashing on the shore.

Part of the credibility problem is in translating proofs of concept to scaled enablement; but, more so, it comes down to an inability to transform the customer and seller experience for the better. In one case example — which I’ll detail in a separate article — a commercial bank used automation and AI to free capacity for its outbound sales team. With this deployment, the company asked its sellers to increase their client outreach by 20% and raised goals, locking in the efficiency improvement. What ultimately happened was this: A tough job became an intolerable one; the early productivity gains were eventually erased by turnover on the team, low morale and low tenure in the role.

Something about the sales role needs to improve if AI enablement will have a lasting impact on sales productivity, just as something about the experience must improve for customers to continue engaging with AI-enabled buying processes.

Think incremental and transformative

To bring these scenarios to life, we presented leaders with sales archetypes in two stages of enhancement: Incremental and transformative. We developed a dozen sales archetypes, specific to a common customer and seller motion in financial services or insurance. For each, we detailed a set of incremental ways that agentic AI can yield improvement; we also detailed a transformation that radically improved the role, or, in some cases, replaced it with something else.

We then asked leaders what AI implementations were already in motion, what was planned, and what was desirable as a destination. The overwhelming consensus was that everything in flight today is pursuing incremental improvement: Of all the hundreds of initiatives discussed, 85% were focused on making the current sales process better. The most common examples of this included precall planning and briefs (83%), note-taking and CRM automation (67%), targeting, scoring and territory optimization (58%), and proposal/RFP automation (58%). Far fewer respondents had begun to consider transformative initiatives, such as wholly agentic SDR/BDR roles, even though such approaches are increasingly being pursued in other industries.

Most common incremental activities underway in respondents’ sales organizations

When pressed on how these incremental improvements would drive sustained results, one leader summarized the dilemma: “We have this belief that we can do things better — the improvement opportunity is obvious. But if we can get better through AI, so can our competitors. My AI will be competing with everyone else’s AI to win shelf space, and the client’s own AI will probably be trying to prioritize among us. I’m not sure that’s a game I can win, but there’s tremendous pressure from my leadership to show results now.”

The sentiment across leaders was that pursuing incremental improvement was becoming table-stakes, and that transformation was likely needed in the long run. But few seemed willing to be first to transform — perhaps discouraged by outcomes from prior technology waves.

Organization change must accompany AI change

Finally, we explored the impact agentic AI would have on sales results. Nearly all respondents (92%) expected revenue to grow through agentic AI implementations; far fewer sought reduced cost of sales (42%) or reduced sales risk (25%).

How will revenue grow? Here leaders focused on sales activity: 83% believed growth would come from delivering more or higher-value activities; only 42% said they would expect sellers to engage with more customers than today; and only 25% said they would be able to sell more or higher value products and services.

This focus on efficiency raised important organizational design questions. For example, if sellers are 30% more efficient — a goal frequently cited — then would customer coverage expand by 30%, requiring growth of books or reduction in headcount? Would goals or quotas rise by that amount? Can the sales workflow support that expansion?

As a regional sales manager put it: “My executive leadership is absolutely expecting efficiency… I can almost guarantee the goal will be more sales meetings — whether that’s the right way to go about it, I’m not sure.”

With the impact from AI improvements still in the works, it appeared most leaders had not yet addressed the difficult organizational changes that were likely to follow. But, if past sales transformations are a guide, it’s the companies with a clear view of the destination that will most successfully navigate the change.

Summing it up in four principles

Although still a work in progress, our research has already revealed common threads across insurers, asset managers and financial institutions as they seek to transform sales through agentic AI. All have already started the agentic AI journey for sales, most are seeking incremental improvement to current processes to drive growth, and few have tackled the organization and coverage changes needed to capture the benefit of these improvements. Finally, there is an enduring belief that salespeople create value, and that while the sales process must change, there is nearly always a role for people in that process.

Four principles to guide AI transformation of sales in financial services:

1. There will always be salespeople
2. Clients and colleagues must benefit
3. Think incremental and transformative
4. Organization change must accompany AI change

How ZS can help

ZS partners with sales, digital and commercial leaders on AI-led transformation. We help shape the go-to-market strategy, reimagine buying process and selling roles, redesign KPIs and incentives, develop the AI-ready data infrastructure, cocreate and manage AI products and enablers, and navigate the organizational changes needed to drive outcomes.

With more than 40 years of experience bringing science to the art of sales, we know how to keep the transformation relevant to its most important stakeholders: The customers who will benefit from the journey, and the sellers and colleagues who will get them there.

Read more insights from ZS.

This article reflects personal views. They do not necessarily represent any official position of ZS.