Artificial intelligence helps salespeople get back to what they do best -- selling

They're called salespeople, but they spend shockingly little of their time selling. Instead, their days consist of administrative work, manual data entry, looking for potential customers and communicating with those prospects: cold calling, sending emails, scheduling meetings and having conversations -- many of which lead to nothing. This is both time-consuming and expensive for companies. Lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budgets cost organizations $1 trillion dollars a year, according to industry estimates. Things are starting to shift, however.