Can my role be done by AI? Let's see.

Conclusion - Updated Sep 27 2023:

You can't AI a Sales Manager role 100%.

You can AI some of it. All the number crunching. Any time you touch or send a spreadsheet, you should be thinking "this should be done by AI". Any time you're alt-tabbing between CRM reports and figuring out what they mean in aggregate, you should be thinking "is this doable by AI?" (probably Yes).

Generative AI is too new for me to have relied upon heavily. Our CRM vendor just released some generative AI that looks very good at first glance.

Instead, I preferred to use 3 older, less fashionable types of AI - 2 branches of Machine Learning called classification and clustering, and one very old branch of semi-AI called multivariate regression.

These 3 methods help answer these questions better than just a human sales manager sifting through the data by themselves.

1. What types of deals are we doing? What are the main "buckets" or "clusters" that we should understand very well?
2. What is the best way to find, progress and close those deals?
3. When I see a new lead or opportunity, how can I know which "bucket" or "cluster" it's most likely to belong to?

Things you can't AI about a Sales Manager role:

• Personal coaching. For us this has to be basically 100% human to human
• Deal coaching. AI can add some great data insights, but the act of deal coaching should stay human, for us.
• Caring for internal customers who don't trust AI yet - our CFO prefers a human to describe what's going on in our pipeline. He wants the data, for sure, but he wants a live person to answer the phone when he has questions about it.

And another thing I learned - individual B2B salesperson roles are even harder to AI than Sales Manager roles.

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(Previous updates to my journey were made as comments to this Article, below)

I work at a Culture Consulting company and a lot of what I do requires a type of nuanced understanding and empathy for the human condition and the human experience in the workplace. I don't know of any AI's that can provide that yet (June, 2023).

But, there are other things I do that involve working with data, analyzing it, looking for patterns, sharing my analyses with others and making recommendations based on it, that I think AI is perfectly capable of doing. I think it's inevitable that these things will be taken out of human job roles and given to AI, like the job of welding pieces of metal together in assembly plants was transferred from people to robots, mostly.

Rather than wait for this to "happen to me" I choose to actively participate. This feels better to me, and it has the very positive effect of giving me insights into the boundaries of what AI can do in my type of job, which is really interesting to me.

It should also free me up to do the more "human" aspects of my job, which are way more fulfilling to me than the data handling parts.

Starting today, June 27 2023 I'm going to update this running journal of observations as I see just how much of my job can be transferred to an AI.

6/27/23. I've contacted my Salesforce Account Exec to arrange an initial conversation, because I think Salesforce may already have a lot of the AI that can do the data handling and analysis parts of my job, and probably also the part where I recommend actions based on the data analysis. But this morning my boss also asked me to convene a type of regular meeting that would need human-level, nuanced understanding of our clients and how we can help solve their problems. I don't think there's an AI that can help us with this particular meeting set. The info involved is just too complex and sometimes not recorded as high fidelity app data. Sometimes it's literally something like a facial expression we observed in a meeting.