AI for Sales: Tools, Benefits & Best Practices (2025)

August 21, 2025·14 min read

Vidyard

Dig into the details of how sales teams are using AI today including use cases, real-world examples, and how to accelerate adoption at your company.

By now, everyone knows that artificial intelligence has transformed sales. Right?

The data is starting to pour out when it comes to the increased efficiency AI-powered sales tools provide from prospecting research to AI agents that help with creating personalized videos at scale.

According to ZoomInfo, AI sales tools are helping users achieve a 47% boost in productivity and saving GTM professionals 12 hours per week on average.

If you’re not using AI in sales, you’re falling behind. But don’t worry — in this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about using artificial intelligence in sales, from AI use cases to tips for adoption.

Understanding AI’s role in modern sales

We believe that the best uses of AI enhances and scales the work real people are doing — while not losing sight of the human touch that builds long-term sales success.

The most popular use cases for AI in the most innovative sales teams include automating sales tasks, scaling personalization, and providing far more in-depth sales forecasting and predictive analytics.

Gartner predicts that:

By 2025, up to 30% of outbound messages will be created by AI
By 2028, as much as60% of selling work will be done through AI-powered conversational user interfaces
Teams who use AI like a teammate for sales reps (instead of a tool or replacement) will see the biggest impacts on deals and productivity

Here at Vidyard, we encourage our teams to explore AI and understand the best tools, techniques, and use cases for this technology. That’s why one of our most active Slack channels internally is all about empowering our team members to explore AI tools and use cases and share insights with other team members.

Team members have shared how they’re able to complete admin tasks like drafting follow-up emails and easy automations using our own platform, including using our Video Sales Agent to trigger from Gong once a call has ended, summarize that call and generates a video sales script to create a follow-up video featuring an AI Avatar of the rep to send within minutes of a meeting ending.

Think of the time that would take if done manually!

The evolution of AI in sales

Since the fall of 2022, with the launch of ChatGPT, AI has advanced sales faster than any technology before! It’s gone from basic automation tools to sophisticated systems capable of predictive analytics and decision-making. While of course there are considerations to evaluate prior to launching and scaling your AI usage, if you aren’t dipping your toes in and staying on the pulse of what’s new, you’re likely to get left behind.

Back when the first generation of sales engagement platforms, like Gong, Clari, and Outreach, came on the scene their big benefit was automating specific parts of the sales process like cold emailing, note-taking, and CRM data capture. Nowadays, these tools have AI-powered capabilities that go far beyond the basics such as detecting signals a deal is slipping to reviewing what worked across deals to helping teams optimize around what’s working best. For a closer look at top solutions in this category, see our guide to the best sales automation tools for your team.

Learning to use AI means saving time, staying competitive, and future-proofing your skills.

Key benefits of AI for sales teams

We’ve talked about the rapidly growing use cases for AI in sales, but if we take a step back, what are the broader benefits AI can have for revenue teams of all shapes and sizes?

Automate repetitive tasks: Team members can save time while managers still get the data they need through AI-powered automation tools to help with CRM data entry, recapping meetings, and preparing follow-up messages.

Personalization at scale: By now, the power of personalized messaging has been proven. Something that used to require manual research, creation, and editing can mostly be done with AI!

Better data for better decision-making: While sales leaders have data, they often don’t know exactly what lever to pull. With AI-powered data analysis, no longer do you need a data scientist to extract insights and proactively track what’s resonating best.

These are the three main benefits of using AIi for sales, but as you jump in, you’ll definitely see how it can have much larger business benefits including reducing speed to lead and increasing sales velocity while creating a culture of continuous improvement.

How AI is transforming the sales process

We believe there are five key ways in which AI brings new value to the sales process. While these are the potential pros, we’ll get into the challenges teams may face later on.

1. Greater efficiency

AI can automate repetitive tasks like researching prospects and responding to demo requests, allowing sales professionals to be more strategic. More time can be spent on high-value activities. While this could potentially reduce demand for entry-level sales roles, salespeople will need to evolve to remain relevant, becoming a trusted advisor rather than task manager.

Some types of AI sales tools that help increase efficiency are lead scoring and routing agents, AI research agents, and video sales agents.

2. Improved decision-making

AI analytics can help identify trends, predict customer behavior, and optimize pricing strategies. Teams will better be able to pitch specific product packages, speed up negotiations by using AI to navigate objections, and sales leaders will have far more data when deciding which direction to take and where to expand next.

Sales leaders are using AI in sales to help with more precise forecasting, knowing when to hire, and more insights into which sales levers could have the most impact.

3. Personalized communication

AI can tailor messaging and content to individual prospects, increasing engagement and conversions by using historical internal company data and information from public sources. But don’t over-rely on AI. Remember that you should use it as a tool to level up, not check out!

Here at Vidyard, we offer a free AI video sales script generator within our Chrome Extension. There are other tools like sales email generators often built into tools you’re already using.

4. Better lead prioritization

Speed to lead can be one of the biggest reasons why a prospect chooses you over your competitors. With AI, teams can implement always-learning systems that score leads more effectively while routing them to the best possible team member to close the deal.

With Vidyard’s Video Sales Agents, once a lead is scored and sent to a specific team member to follow up, we can create and automatically send a hyperpersonalized video message featuring their AI Avatar. Connect our Video Agents to an AI-powered lead scoring and routing system and you can see how automated personalized setups can help teams scale success rapidly.

So not only are leads followed up faster with the right person managing the account, they’re sent messages that resonate with them throughout the entire sales process.

5. Faster sales cycles

AI-powered tools can streamline the sales process, helping you close deals faster and reduce sales cycle times. Imagine having a call and a proposal is already being drafted based on what you discussed in the call.

Overall, every single AI optimization your team makes should tie to larger business goals like increasing revenue, increasing the number of customers, and accelerating sales cycles.

Every tool you evaluate should be tied to somehow increasing sales velocity — so as you start to integrate this tech across your revenue teams, you have a clear north star.

How to use AI in sales: 9 top use cases

AI is already baked into many sales tools—including many of the ones you probably already use daily. Here are a few key AI applications you can experiment with in your regular sales workflows.

1. CRM and sales automation

AI sales agents can automate sales tasks around the clock, from logging activities and summarizing calls in Salesforce to optimizing outreach and lead qualification.

2. Sales enablement and analytics

Try using AI to analyze sales calls, meetings, and content, providing concrete recommendations for improved communication and deal closure.

Ren Fischer, our very own Director of Demand Generation, has an extra tip:“At the end of your first query add ‘Ask me 2-3 clarifying questions before responding’. Using this with ChatGPT has helped shorten my time to get to an end result I’m happy with, while also ‘prompting me’ to think a bit more deeply about what I’m trying to accomplish.”

3. Lead generation and list-building

While we’ve all been able to build lists using various filters on lead generation tools of the past, artificial intelligence is making target account list creation faster and more precise, while providing in-depth company and contact information. More accurate data means more accurate outreach!

4. Lead scoring and prioritization

With AI integrated into your lead scoring tools, you can more effectively digest data points about who’s in the market for a solution like yours and analyze prospect behavior — ensuring that you focus spending the most time on the highest-value leads.

5. Chatbots and conversational AI

Sales and marketing teams can set up AI-powered chatbots and conversational AI to engage with website visitors, qualify leads, and assist customers, streamlining communication and support with prospects and customers.

6. Marketing automation and personalization

Marketers are using AI to create personalized sales enablement content, social media captions and video scripts, and automating data analysis to ensure they’re making the most out of their efforts.

7. TL;CR (Too Long; ChatGPT Read)

ChatGPT can do more than just answer questions or write a good sales email. We use it for synthesizing interesting articles, analyzing changes our competitors are making in their positioning, and sales coaching including extracting insights from sales calls.

(Here’s a seller-focused guide to making the most of ChatGPT.)

8. Mastering sales roleplaying

Speaking of coaching, want to sharpen your sales skills but dread role-playing?

For a unique approach to sales training, try sales role-playing with ChatGPT. Run through sales scenarios, practice your pitch, and navigate as many tricky objections as possible. With the right prompts, you can setup relevant scenarios that mimic how prospects really respond and get honest feedback once the exercise is over.

9. Social media

Go-to-market teams can use AI to analyze social media data, track brand sentiment, and inform marketing strategies faster and more nimbly.

With the rise of B2B social selling, teams can embrace their own personal profiles and use AI to help craft on-brand social posts and video content, enabling you to communicate your ideas quickly and effectively.

Overcoming challenges with AI in sales

You can’t wave a magical wand and automatically be successful integrating and scaling AI usage across your team. While I think we all wish it were that easy, like any technology, AI has its challenges. They can be overcome — but you’re going to need a strategy to evaluate, integrate, and scale AI across your revenue teams.

Here are some challenges we’ve seen and insights into how to overcome them:

Ensuring data privacy and security

At least a dozen new AI-powered sales tools seem to pop up every week. Just because a company has a fancy landing page and some convincing website copy, doesn’t mean their technology works how they say it will. This is especially true when it comes to data privacy and cybersecurity practices.

Artificial intelligence requires data, which means when you integrate a new AI-powered tool, you’ll be sharing a lot of business intelligence with them from who your prospects and customers are to data analysis based on real numbers.

Make sure you have your technical team evaluate the product and documentation to ensure what they’re preaching aligns with what they’re practicing when it comes to data security and compliance! Other helpful ways to evaluate a company’s commitment to data privacy and cybersecurity are to ask what they would do in case of a data breach and take a look at their technical team on LinkedIn to see how much they’re investing in this area.

Balancing automation with the human touch

While AI can do a lot of things, they shouldn’t do everything.

At the end of the day, we want AI to make us better at our jobs by adding extra assistance. Like having an extra pair of hands who can help review your work, challenge your thinking, and help you think of ways to scale your efforts without losing the human connection.

Salespeople’s roles are shifting from task-based work to becoming knowledgeable product advisors because those tedious tasks are taken care of. Buyers appreciate this shift — 88% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase when they view a salesperson as a trusted advisor according to a recent Salesforce study.

While AI can write emails and automate the video creation process, human oversight ensures that everything it produces is accurate, on brand, and the best it can be. Think of using AI as a way to level up, not check out.

Training teams to use AI effectively

The best way to ensure your teams are using safe AI tools as a way to level up is to provide a place for them to start. Think about purchasing company licenses to tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, not only to ensure they’re using advanced security features, but also so they know that you want to encourage innovative AI adoption.

Your existing tools are likely adding AI features and capabilities, but does your team know how to actually get the most out of them? Teams can forget about certain capabilities if they don’t intentionally integrate them.

To overcome adoption hurdles, sales leaders should create training documentation, best practices, and encourage teams to share insights with each other on how they’re using different tools to inspire others.

Choosing the right AI tools for your sales team

While having robust cybersecurity and data privacy protection is table stakes, it’s not the only thing to consider when choosing a new tool.

Scalability and flexibility

As you implement any solution, you should always be thinking about the future. How will this scale? What features are on their roadmap so you can prepare? Are they adaptable to the way your teams want to use them?

Thinking ahead will ensure the tools you choose today will be good investments far into the future.

Integration with existing systems

Siloed systems don’t just create headaches, they create dirty data and mismatched workflows. If tools don’t integrate easily with your CRM, email provider, etc., teams are less likely to adopt them and sales leaders are less likely to find value in them.

Integrations don’t just ensure smooth data flow between all relevant parties, they encourage team-wide adoption.

Advanced analytics and reporting

One of the best parts about AI-powered tools is their ability to extract deeper insights automatically. No longer does your team need to crunch numbers to find which email copy ad is performing best – this can, and should be, automated with the adoption of AI.

Think about all the data your team gathers every month – now go find ways to automate this entire process from data collection to synthesization to recommendations!

You should be using these tools to identify what levers and when to pull them for the best results. But, you also need to set up goals and KPIs for these new tools including increased weekly efficiency, team adoption, and general usage. This will ensure that not only are teams actively using the technology to extract insights, you’re actively tracking its effectiveness.

If your team is looking for the top AI-powered sales tools, we’ve got you covered across the board:

The future of AI in sales

Do you remember when you were first allowed—encouraged, even—to use a calculator in math class? You not only could work a whole lot faster, but it also freed up your brain to tackle more significant, more complicated problems that would have taken ages to work out on paper.

The same thing is happening with AI in sales and marketing. Everyone will get their own assistant and, like using a calculator, it’ll free you up to tackle more interesting problems.

Here at Vidyard, we’ve played a large part in reshaping how b2b teams sell online through the power of personalized video. Now, with our AI-advancements we’re on the frontlines of helping our over 200,000 customers continue standing out in the inbox and being the best sales people they can be.

Want to see the future of AI in sales through Vidyard’s latest launches including Video Sales Agents and our AI Avatars? Schedule some time to talk with our team today.

If you’re looking to keep going down the AI in sales rabbit hole, we have many guides and resources to keep the learning going.

AI Sales Strategy

ChatGPT for Sales

Generative AI for Sales

AI Prospecting Tools

This post was originally published on July 17, 2023. It was updated on July 8, 2025.

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