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Why AI Is Replacing the Midpack in Sales (And What To Do About It)

AI isn't replacing the best salespeople—it's eliminating the mediocre ones. Here's how to stay ahead and become hyper-employable in the AI age.

By Babuger Team
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The Uncomfortable Truth About AI in Sales

Let's be direct: AI is replacing jobs people don't want to do. And it's displacing the midpack and the mediocre.

If someone's listening to this thinking "my job is in trouble"—they might be right. But there's a clear path forward for anyone willing to take it.

Who AI Is Actually Replacing

The Email-Based Cadence SDR

The classic SDR—hired out of college to send emails and respond to inbound emails—will be 90% displaced by AI within 12 months. There's no need for AI to wait 24 hours to respond when it can reply instantly, 24/7.

The Human Qualifier

The role of qualifying leads coming through "Contact Me" forms is already obsolete. AI fully qualifies everyone on the website before they even know they're being qualified. It just sets up the meeting with the salesperson.

The "People Person" With No Technical Depth

You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson? Ask them what they're really good at. They say: "I'm a people person."

Ask them about the toughest technical objections with their product. They don't know. But they're a "people person."

Here's the problem: AI can be people people too. Go spend an hour with a well-trained AI chatbot. It's patient, knowledgeable, and available 24/7.

Who AI Is NOT Replacing

The Best Performers

OpenAI can't hire enough enterprise reps right now. The same is true across AI leaders. What's being replaced are the midpack and below—the reps who don't really understand the product, who can't explain what a pull request is, who after three months still don't know what the company does.

Field Sales

AI has no idea how to do in-person sales. If you're out in the field, knocking on doors, building relationships face-to-face—that skill set is safe for now.

Strategic Account Executives

When you're closing $4 million deals with enterprise customers, when there's real negotiation and procurement navigation involved, humans still have the edge. For now.

How To Become Hyper-Employable

The advice is simple. It will work. And almost nobody's doing it.

Pick One Tool

Choose an agentic AI tool to solve one of your problems. It doesn't matter which one—support, SDR, inbound qualification. Just pick one.

Do It Yourself

This is the critical part. Pick a leading vendor and do the implementation yourself. Train the agent. Ingest the data. Do the iterations. Understand how it works.

The folks who are lost today have never done this themselves. They thought they could take an untrained agent and magically give it to a bunch of young SDRs. It doesn't work that way.

Spend the Time

It's going to take you 50-60 hours over about a month. The first one will be brutal. The second one will be easier. By the fourth one, you're a master of the universe in AI.

The Payoff

If you can deploy an agent, train it, and get it into production yourself—you're hyper-employable. All the companies that need GTM people will hire you. You could be their Chief Agentic GTM Officer.

The New Reality of Sales Productivity

The old metrics are changing. Consider this:

  • Before AI: 3-5% of prospects in market in a given year
  • With AI adoption pressure: 50%+ in market

    • When everyone's in market at once, the plays still work—outbound, webinars, events, podcasts. But the playbooks are broken because demand patterns have fundamentally changed.

    For reps, this means geometric (if not exponential) increases in productivity with help from AI. You have to embrace these tools.

    The "People Person" Is Not Enough

    If your best defense in sales is that you're a "people person," the ground is sinking beneath you. People person is great when customers are buying enterprise software that takes two years to roll out.

    But when they expect the AI to work during the pilot before they pay? People person is insufficient.

    The winners will be the humans who can:

  • Launch agents and train them
  • Get them into production
  • Make them actually work

    • Your Action Plan

  • This week: Pick an AI GTM tool and sign up for a demo
  • This month: Implement it yourself (don't delegate)
  • By Q2: Have at least one agent in production
  • Ongoing: Keep a learner's mind and iterate

    • The best salespeople will get superpowers from AI. The rest are at risk. Which group will you be in?

    Start building your AI-powered sales team today. Deploy your first agent with Babuger.