AI and the Future of Sales

The AI Tipping Point – How to Use AI in Sales Without Losing the Human Touch

In this thought-provoking episode of Smart Business Growth, Nicky dives deep into one of the most critical conversations leaders and sales professionals need to have right now — the role of AI in modern sales.

After an unexpectedly delightful interaction with an AI receptionist named Sadie, Nicky explores what that experience reveals about how AI is being used — and misused — in the sales process.

This episode tackles:

• The two dangerous camps businesses fall into: avoidance or overuse
• What HubSpot’s latest data reveals about how sales teams are using AI (and where they’re falling short)
• Why trust is the true currency in sales — and how over-automating could be costing you more than time
• Practical ways to integrate AI tools like ChatGPT, Gong, and HubSpot without losing your voice or connection
• The critical difference between AI as a tool vs AI as a crutch

Nicky shares a grounded, leadership-first perspective on how to find the middle ground — where speed meets strategy, and where human judgement turns AI into an asset.

A must-listen for any business owner, sales leader or team navigating this fast-evolving space.

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Email: hello@nickymiklos.com

Music by Jules Miklos-Woodley

Transcript

Speaker: 0:06

Hello, you gorgeous human. Thank you so much for joining me on this week's episode of Smart Business Growth. And I really want to talk today about AI and the future of sales. Now, I don't know if this has happened to you, but last week I made a phone call to a restaurant. I wanted to see if it was dog friendly, so I could bring my old boy Eddie along. Actually, if you've watched the YouTube videos, then you might sometimes see Eddie walking in and out in the background. Anyway, I made this phone call. I wanted to see if it was dog friendly. And what was really interesting is, I mean, it wasn't a human that answered. It was Sadie, the AI receptionist. Now, that in itself is not that interesting. We do live in 2025. You know, we're going to come across this. But what actually really took me back was that normally in this kind of interaction, it's frustrating. I um don't get the answers that I need. I have to hit a hundred different buttons, or it just doesn't feel like a very good experience or interaction. But in this instance, it actually, really was. Sadie sounded so friendly. At first, I had to double take. I second guessed if I actually heard her right when she answered the phone. And she answered the phone, introducing herself as this is Sadie, your AI receptionist, and asking how she could help. So I actually found myself really answering the questions or asking my question in a very friendly, courteous tone, almost just in case it was a real life human. But what it actually made me think, you know, I'd really been pondering and percolating and marinating and all the things on the AI and future of sales topic point of view. And I actually was in the middle of writing an article, which I'll link in the bottom of this podcast episode as well. But it really made me think about the fact that, you know, we need to be able to embrace AI, obviously. Like there's so many conversations now about how are we embracing AI in a really resourceful way in our business. And I want to go a bit deeper as well to look at not just in our business, but from a sales point of view, but also how important it is to use AI well. That interaction, typically, if there was some kind of tech or AI in the past, it hasn't usually been the best experience. But in this instance, I was blown away at how the connection still felt like it was there. I felt like I was taken care of. And there were many reasons for that. Not only was it efficient, effective, but also how she sounded and how she interacted with me. And so when I think about Sadie and the AI receptionist, and I think about AI and embracing it in our sales process, it really gets me thinking about how I'm seeing clients and businesses embracing or avoiding it currently in market. Because there's two key camps that I witness. One is ignore, avoid. And it's not even avoid or ignore from a place of ignorance in that, you know, businesses, you might know if you relate to that, it might be that you know that it's important, but you just don't have the time to get your head around it. There's no capacity because you're really stuck in the day-to-day chaos of the business. So it could be that that is driving the lack of time, capacity, headspace that's actually driving the behavior of ignoring or avoiding embracing AI in sales or in your business. Or it could be fear or confusion or overwhelm around, I just don't even know where to start. And hopefully it's not avoidance because you're trying to avoid it, because this is not just the future state of business, this is actually the current state of business, and we have to remember that. But that's one key camp that I see avoidance and ignoring that it's actually there. And it can be a really valuable tool. The other camp that I see is overuse. So there's sales teams, salespeople, business owners, leaders that are really actually embracing it, but they're overusing it. So it doesn't have that human connection like the experience that I had with Sadie. So we can really go from one extreme to the other. And as leaders, we need to be really aware of not falling into either of those camps. There's a middle ground. And the middle ground is where the magic happens. And the middle ground is absolutely the future of AI and using it successfully in your business and for your sales today and every day going forward. And that's what I want to talk about today is what does that middle ground look like? Because the middle ground is using AI as a tool, but not relying on it as a crutch. Now, HubSpot recently released some survey results. It's the HubSpot 2025 Sales Trends Report. And it actually shows that 8% of sales reps don't use AI at all. So that's only 8% aren't using AI. It also showed that 32% of sales reps say that leveraging AI is one of their biggest challenges in the sales process. So what does this tell us? It tells us that 92% of salespeople are using AI, but how well are they using it? And we know that 32% of sales reps say that leveraging and using AI is actually a really big challenge in their sales process. So if you're using it, good on you, like massive props for that. And then we have to start looking at the quality of how we're using it. It also tells us that there's still plenty of room for growth in how we're building our relationship with AI and integrating it into the way that we sell. And what I mean by building our relationship with AI as leaders, we need to look at my open and embracing it, am I ignoring and avoiding it because I'm too busy, too overwhelmed, or just don't want to deal? Or am I overusing it? You know, where do I sit? What is my relationship? That's what I want you to think about. Because how you view and you embrace and you use AI will absolutely have a ripple effect onto your team. Now you might also be dealing with your boss or leader, or maybe you're not the business owner, and the business owner may sit in either camp as well. So, you know, that's something that you then have to manage and manage those expectations, whether it's up, across, or down. So first get really clear on what is your relationship with AI. How do you feel about it, in other words, what are your thoughts on it? And then look at how am I actually utilizing it? How am I integrating it into the day-to-day? Now, what's also really interesting is that this HubSpot report, the same report, 2025 sales trends, um, showed that 74% of salespeople say that AI tools have made buyer research easier, putting more pressure on the salespeople to deliver value. Let me repeat that. 74% of salespeople say that AI tools have made buyer research easier, putting more pressure on them to deliver value. What that is basically saying is that there's so much information and resources available that the buyer, your customer, your client, your buyer has a lot of information when they're coming to you, when they're coming to your salespeople. So they already are probably in awareness and consideration and moving into decision phase, which means that no longer is it enough for you and your salespeople just to offer a smile, a discount, shake hands, and then we're done. There's a lot more pressure on salespeople to deliver value in a different way to perhaps in the past. And so with all of this in mind, it really serves us well to consider what actually is our role as salespeople in this modern-day landscape of sales? Because it really has evolved over the years, and arguably it's evolved even more in the last few years than ever. A quick interruption to this podcast episode. I'm really curious, do you want to close more sales in less time? If the answer is yes, which I hope that it is, then you need to get your hands on the growth code. It is going to give you three proven frameworks and tools that will help future-proof your business and scale with clarity. All you have to do is head down to the show notes and click the link below. So let's talk about the danger zone of utilizing AI. The danger zone, as I mentioned before, we can overuse it. By overusing it, what that actually means is that you would have seen this. I'm sure you would have seen this. Tell me, reach out to me and give me your examples of this. Generic LinkedIn messages. Oh, and really, really long ones. Even commenting on socials, like generic. What about the overuse of dashes? You know, that just drives me crazy. Proposals, again, that look really generic, scripts that that really scream auto-generated. So initially they might save time, but at the end of the day, they're actually going to cost you something much, much bigger. And that cost is trust. So we want to make sure that you're not actually risking trust. Trust is at an all-time low. And everything we do in terms of our interactions for sales, business growth, serving clients and customers, trust needs to be at the forefront. And so the danger zone is when we don't intentionally, deliberately, and consciously use AI, it can absolutely break that trust. When your outreach, for example, feels really generic, when your nurturing feels really generic, when it feels like anybody in the world could have actually said or done that, then you don't actually just risk being ignored. You risk damaging your brand. And so this is a really important message and danger zone and conversation for you to have with your sales teams. So how do we get it right? We know that there's two different camps that we fall into ignore, avoid, or overuse. We know the danger zone is that we overuse it in a very generic, robotic way, not like Sadie, but we also know that if we don't use it at all, there's a danger zone and a risk of being left behind. And so when it comes down to how to use AI in your sales process or sales aspects of your business, there's something really important to keep in mind, which is critical thinking and human judgment has to be a part of every step. You know, for example, if you use Chat GBT or a version of, then we don't just put a couple of words in for the brief and then it spits out whatever we've asked it for, whether it's a sales script or content or an email and then paste it in and send it off to the client. We have to bring critical thinking, human judgment into how we're briefing it and then into how we adapt it once it comes out. So based on things that I'm seeing in market and a little bit of research, I have my own chat bot, of course, set up and highly recommend it, depending on your role as a sales leader business owner. Highly recommend it. But here's some interesting ways that you can be using it. Now we can break this out into two key categories. We've got Chat GPT style, generative AI. So things like OpenAI, Gemini, Claude. I don't personally use those. I use ChatGPT, but I know a lot of people out there do. They're mostly being used for things like drafting and proofing emails, proposals. There's amazing tools out there to create proposals. I think gamma is a really popular one. Drafting LinkedIn posts or social content. Now, again, if you're using it for any of these things, you have to be really switched on around what is the brief that you're giving, and then how are you adapting and tweaking it when it comes out the other end before you put it in that email, send off that proposal, do that LinkedIn post. It is so critical. We are absolutely trained now to pick up on what is generically auto-generated and created to the point that it actually serves us sometimes to make things look a little bit clunky. You know, maybe there's a space that's missing or an extra space or an uppercase instead of a lowercase. Maybe not so much as far as spelling errors, if that's going to affect your brand. But, you know, when it when there's a little human error element in it, then our brain goes, okay, maybe a human wrote this. So it's just something to think about. The other ways that we use these types of generative AI could be things like brainstorming objection responses. I love, I was on a Reddit thread and I was reading through this Reddit thread or channel. I'm not usually on Reddit, that's a Jules thing, but she showed me and I was looking into how are people using Chat GPT as an example for their sales process. Now people are actually using it to workshop objection responses. Now that there's the voice option available, I don't mean like why not? Again, we've got to think about what is the brief and what's the quality of the output. But as a sales leader, if I had a direct team, I absolutely would get them set up on something similar to or equivalent of ChatGPT where there's voice. And you can actually brief in different scenarios. You can get them to do verbal role plays with Chat GPT. I call mine Chatty Kathy. And then you can even get a transcript. So you can then, as the leader, go back and audit or have a look at how they respond to that objection. So I think there's a lot of potential around exploring and getting curious around this. Okay, so other ways that people use generative AI. Researching prospects and markets is a great one. Summarizing calls and meetings. I mean, we see that a lot, transcripts. And again, I mentioned creating pitched X presentation slides. Always remember that the quality needs to be double-checked. Amazing friend of mine, Donna McGeorge, who is an incredible author and side note, she's just launched a book called Red Brick Thinking. Go out there and get it if you haven't already. She also wrote a book called ChatGPT Revolution. And I love her uh description because she says that it's like a hungover intern. They're really great for all the ways that I just suggested you can use them, but you can't rely on her or him or them for quality. So you've got to double check everything that they do. Now, the other way that a lot of businesses are using AI are specialized sales AI platforms. So things that are built into CRMs or they're standalone tools like Gong, Outreach, HubSpot, Salesforce, Epstein. There's so many different tools out there. So these are these are being used for things like lead scoring and prioritization, understanding the quality of leads as they move through your workforce, workflow or sales flow, conversation intelligence. So looking at analyzing call meetings. I guess that's a different way of doing what I talked about with the live role plays, forecasting and pipeline insights, guided selling prompts and workflow automations. These are the classic checklists to think what camp am I in? Am I avoiding it? How could I start using it? Just start using it for things like your proposals, your presentation, asking questions, and then build on that. How else can I really implement this? So think about it like this Chat GPT or the equivalent is your hungover assistant or hungover intern. Really good for content, for research, for drafts, for ideas, for boosting different thoughts. Whereas sales AI platforms, they're your specialists. So they're thinking good for things like CRM data, your pipeline forecasting, and really specific analytics. Now remember, this is a very high-level overview of how you can be using it to really embed and integrate into your sales process. So I really want to remind you that the middle ground is where the magic happens. We can't deny that AI will give us speed access to more information than we've ever had before. But it is the humans, it is the people that give perspective and meaning. And the business, your business, really needs to learn how to harness both because it's the businesses who find that middle ground that will absolutely lead the market. The businesses that win will be the ones who don't ignore or avoid AI or be the ones that over-outsource. You know, you don't want to outsource your voice entirely without intention. So what do you need to do to find that middle ground? How can you get creative around how you're applying AI? So your action from today's podcast is to really get clear and identify what camp do I sit on? Am I in camp ignore and avoid? Am I in camp overuse? Or am I already playing in the middle ground? Go back and listen to that checklist of how you can be using AI in your sales process and pick one thing that you can start to embed. The other thing I would say is bring your sales team on board for the ride. Make sure you have the conversation with them. How do they feel about it? What camp do they sit in? And what are they currently doing? And how can you find the 1% to keep growing and moving in the right direction? To really find that middle ground so you can future proof your business alongside AI. Have fun with it, take it lightly. I'd love to hear how you go, and I'll see you in the next episode.