Written for my Oxford elective: Leading Digital Transformation
Why most firms are applying AI to the wrong problem in sales, and what the reinvention framing requires instead.
Enterprise AI adoption in sales has largely followed an automation playbook: identify repetitive tasks, replace them with AI, measure the efficiency gain. This paper argues that framing systematically undervalues the transformation available and creates path dependency that forecloses the larger structural advantage. Agentic AI in enterprise sales is better understood as a reinvention question. The paper distinguishes automation from reinvention across four sales functions, identifies the enabling conditions that separate firms that achieve structural change from those that achieve only efficiency gains, and argues that the bottleneck is not technology but organisational willingness to change the definition of the sales role itself.