Sales Doesn't Seem Ripe for Automation, but It Is

Modern sales is more about long-term customer relationships than big, one-and-done deals. This has always been true -- lower customer churn decreases marketing costs -- but it's especially true today, as everything from designer clothing to SaaS products moves toward a subscription model. "The best way to be successful in sales is to know yourself, know your customer and know how you create strong relationships with other people," Samantha Harrington opined in Forbes. "Once you've built that relationship, shown you care, and earned their trust, you are on the road to making [a prospect] a customer," Lee Ann Obringe wrote in HowStuffWorks. Machine-learning algorithms can master repetitive, predictable, and, in a word, mechanical tasks -- but despite the future foretold by Her, artificial intelligence hasn't yet learned to empathize or make jokes.