Salesforce Survey Finds AI Agents Boost Sales Productivity

Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM*, announced findings from its latest State of Sales report, revealing that 91% of Indian sales professionals say AI agents are essential to driving business success. As sales teams kick off 2026 with ambitious new quotas, they're turning to AI — especially agents — to hit their numbers. The survey reveals AI as the top tactic to drive company growth this year.

The data also reveals why: Sales teams are increasingly stretched between changing customer demands and limited bandwidth to meet them. The real drag on productivity, the research suggests, isn’t effort or skill; it’s administrative bottlenecks.

Detailed Findings:

Sellers are doubling down on AI agents and deploying them across the entire sales cycle.

• AI adoption in sales is already mainstream: 90% of Indian sales organizations currently use some form of AI for tasks like prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, or drafting emails.
• Indian sellers using AI report meaningful value: 94% say AI deepens customer understanding, and 89% say it makes their job less stressful.
• AI agent adoption is accelerating quickly: 54% of Indian sellers say they’ve used agents, and nearly 43% plan to by 2027. Once fully implemented, Indian sellers expect agents to cut prospect research time by 35% and email drafting by 38%, giving sales teams meaningful time back in their day.

Top-performing sellers are 1.7 times more likely to use prospecting AI agents for outreach than underperformers.

• 58% of Indian sales reps point to cold calling as the worst part of their job, yet a strong pipeline requires more contacts and more engagement than teams can deliver on their own.
• Despite devoting nearly one full day of their workweek to prospecting efforts, 61% of Indian sellers say they lack bandwidth to do adequate cold outreach.
• To close the capacity gap, 54% of Indian sales professionals are using AI for prospecting, with another 41% planning to do so in the future.
• 92% of global sellers with AI agents say it benefits their prospecting efforts.
• Globally, high performers — sellers who have substantially increased year-over-year revenue — are 1.7 times more likely to use agents to help with prospecting than underperformers who merely maintained or decreased YOY revenue.

Administrative friction is hitting the lower rungs of the career ladder hardest.

• The grunt work tax is real: While the average seller spends 40% of their time selling (or 41% in India), Gen Z reps overall are trapped at just 35% — losing approximately two full hours each week to manual data entry that senior reps spend researching prospects and building relationships.
• They're also navigating a mentorship drought:
• 46% rarely get feedback on their sales conversations.
• 47% don't get enough roleplay opportunities before customer calls.
• When asked what prevents effective enablement, Gen Z points to lack of manager time as the #1 obstacle, while millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers cite lack of access to data and insights.

Sales teams — particularly high-performing ones — are tackling messy data to better support AI initiatives.

• To get the most from AI, sales professionals are focusing on trusted, connected data — with high performers leading the charge.
• Over half of Indian sales leaders with AI (66%) say disconnected systems are slowing down their AI initiatives.
• To help, 82% of Indian sales professionals are focusing on data cleansing — doing the unglamorous but essential work of removing duplicates, correcting errors or omissions, and standardizing formats across siloed systems to maximize their AI returns.
• High performers take it further:
• 79% prioritize data hygiene compared with only 54% of underperformers overall.

Comment on the News :

Sangeeta Giri, SVP & Chief Operating Officer - South Asia, Salesforce said, “In India’s hyper-competitive market, we are seeing a fundamental shift from 'hustle' to 'high-precision. AI agents are becoming the great equaliser by removing friction, accelerating learning, and giving teams back the time they need to build trust with customers. In a market as fast-moving and relationship-driven as India, the sellers who win in 2026 will be those who pair human judgment with AI agents working relentlessly in the background”.