Gartner: 7 Technology Disruptions to Impact Sales Through 2027
Gartner identified seven technology disruptions that will transform sales over the next five years, including generative artificial intelligence (AI), digital twin of the customer, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), machine customers, digital humans, emotion AI, and multimodality. Here’s a look at each:
Machine Customers – non-human economic actors that obtain goods or services for payment. It may not be a reality yet – but Gartner says it’s coming and to plan now, so plan for sales forces that can navigate the challenges of human, machine, and hybrid selling environments.
Generative AI – Generative AI learns from existing content artifacts, generating realistic artifacts that reflect training data characteristics but do not repeat them. It can produce images, video, music, speech, text, software code, and product designs. By 2025, large organizations will synthetically generate 30% of outbound messages. Note to self—find another industry by 2025.
Digital Twin of the Customer – a dynamic virtual representation of a customer that predicts what does and doesn’t work for that customer.
AR/VR – 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025. The AR/VR experience will be significant as the metaverse ramps up and B2B buying and selling becomes almost exclusively digital.
Digital Humans – interactive, AI-driven representations that exhibit some of a human’s characteristics, personality, knowledge, and mindset. By 2026, digital humans will take on tasks that humans don’t want to, such as handling lead nurturing, old opportunities, or leads that went nowhere.
Emotion AI helps by disrupting sellers’ empathic ability and alters buyer engagement. It analyzes, processes, and responds to user emotions.
Multimodality – there will be multiple modes for sellers to log activities, helping sales leaders to address data challenges. By 2025, companies will record 70% of all B2B seller-buyer interactions to extract competitive, deal, and market insights using AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP).
Read more in “7 Technology Disruptions Affecting Sales Through 2027.”
