The Age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us! So will you lose your job in 2017? Man the photon torpedos and tune your dilithium crystals because sales 3.0 or even 4.0 is upon us. AI is steadily creeping into sales assistants that loop into Slack Bots to sync to Salesforce like Troops.ai. You can even deploy a virtual sales assistant that schedules meetings for you (x.ai)!

Artificial intelligence (AI) - and robotics - has been around for a long time but it has not yet disrupted white collar work very much yet - or has it? And surely our sales profession is safe - no robot could ever sell - or could it? As it turns out AI development has accelerated in recent year and it is now contributing considerably to the sales world and influencing significant change. I asked Tony Hughes to explain how and asked him for his futuristic view of what AI and robotics will mean to us in the sales world - and how soon can we expect it to impact us? He said that the impact of AI on sales was already significant - so much so that within only 4 years (2020) 85% of business to business (B2B) sales transactions will occur without human intervention resulting in the redundancy of about 25% of current B2B sales roles in that time.