AI Market Map: Sales

This article is part of a series on AI Agents: see also AI Market Maps: Marketing & AI Market Maps: Fintech

Transforming every layer of the revenue organiztion

A lot of noise has been made about AI SDRs, and for good reason! There’s 600K+ SDRs out there, and AI can do as good a job as an entry level employee at researching leads, prioritizing them, personalizing outreach, and managing sales cadences across channels. That’s tens of billions of dollars in salaries made obsolete, making AI SDRs potentially one of the most exciting (and competitive) disruptions in sales technology.

But the promise of AI in the sales tech stack extends beyond automating top-of-funnel conversion. AI is rapidly transforming every layer of the revenue organization—from prospecting to deal management to post-sales—by embedding intelligence into each stage of the customer journey.

The winners in this space won’t just be another wave of point solutions—they’ll need to solve for the same challenges that Salesloft, Gong, Outreach, and Apollo did in the previous generation:

• Owning the system of engagement — AI tools that truly replace SDRs, AEs, or Sales Engineers need to integrate deeply across email, calls, LinkedIn, CRM, and product data — just like Outreach and Salesloft did for outbound.
• Becoming the central sales intelligence layer — Gong emerged as the de facto conversation intelligence platform by aggregating sales interactions. The AI-native winners of this era will need to unify and analyze all sales activity — not just outbound sequences, but buyer behavior, engagement signals, and deal momentum.
• Expanding into a full platform – Apollo started as a prospecting tool but became a go-to-market platform for data, outreach, and engagement. The strongest AI sales tech startups won’t stay single-feature solutions—they’ll expand across the sales funnel, integrating deeply with forecasting, deal execution, and customer success.

We’re still in the first inning of AI in sales. Today, most AI-native sales startups focus on isolated pain points—SDRs, note-taking, or automated demos;the real long-term opportunity is in building AI-native sales platforms that unify the revenue org’s data, automate workflows across the full funnel, and solve the fragmentation problem that has plagued the past generation of tools.

AI Market Map: Sales

With that, let’s dig into the AI-native opportunity in Sales.

‍Prospecting & Lead Gen: AI SDRs like 11x, Artisan and Valley help Sales orgs run their outbound on autopilot,end-to-end. AI SDRs can identify leads, prioritize high intent accounts, and personalize outreach to key stakeholders.

Unify takes a slightly different approach, focusing more on augmenting existing SDR teams. They do this by consolidating buyer intent signals, custom AI agent-driven research, and a company’s existing 3rd-party data enrichment providers to drive high quality top-of-funnel pipeline.

Some of these AI SDRs are already moving into other stages of the B2B Sales funnel - like Fullcontext’s AI agents that can automate product demos, or 11x’s AI agent Mike who can automate account management and monitor for potential upsells.

This shift matters because AI is no longer just an efficiency tool—AI-native platforms are beginning to own and manage customer relationships, pushing beyond lead gen into full-cycle sales execution.

Deal Management, Forecasting, & Other AE Tools: Aircover, Ctrl, and Winn.ai are AI assistants that sit on live sales calls with AEs and serve them real-time discovery questions, objection handling, competitive battlecards, and customer quotes - while also automating data entry in the CRM. This ensures sales playbooks are adopted across the sales organization and dramatically improves CRM hygiene.

Another interesting approach is Landbase, a proprietary AI agent model specifically built for GTM. Landbase deploys AI agents across a variety of GTM roles - automated marketing, high-volume SDRs, deal assistants for AEs, and support functions (RevOps, IT Manager, GTM Engineer). By consolidating GTM on one platform, Landbase is able to better optimize performance throughout the funnel.

CPQ & Deal Desk: Managing CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) is a pain for companies because it’s often complex, manual, and prone to errors — especially when dealing with customized products, dynamic pricing, and approvals across siloed systems. This slows down sales cycles, frustrates reps, and leads to inconsistent or inaccurate quotes. Logik.ai and Quivly are two companies trying to take the pain out of CPQ.

AI Sales Engineers: Technical sales remains one of the most time-intensive bottlenecks in the sales process. AI-native sales engineering tools like Docket, 1Up, HeySam, and Quilt help solve these problems by responding to buyer’s technical queries in seconds, filling RFPs and security questionnaires in minutes, and helping share best practices across the organization.

There’s also tools like Supademo that use AI to create interactive product demos - so that Sales Engineers aren’t spending countless hours preparing for product demos.

Why does this matter? AI is enabling sales engineers to support a higher number of AEs, or even in some cases empowering the AE to circumvent the sales engineer entirely.

Post-Sales: AI is not just helping close deals—it’s also redefining post-sales workflows. While Sammy Labs uses AI to automate sales demos, its main value proposition is using AI to tackle post-sales challenges like onboarding, customer support, generating training documentation, and identifying potential user problem areas ahead of time. 

Of course, AI is also transforming the entire customer support landscape (customer service platforms, chatbots, voice agents, customer success platforms, etc.), but that’s a topic for another article.

Sales Training & Enablement: Incumbents like Highspot, Showpad, and Seismic largely focus on content management systems, data-driven sales training modules, and sales coaching to help sales enablement teams get new hires up to speed faster. Newer generations of software like conversational intelligence platform Gong and Chorus.ai instead focus on recording, transcribing, and analyzing every sales call in order to communicate best practices across the organization at scale. Other large challenger point solutions like Outreach and Clari have launched competitive products as they continue to add products in their bids to become platforms.

Ctrl is an AI-first approach where best practice is embedded in the AEs user journey, in order to get the entire team up to speed.

CRM Data Entry, Data Enrichment & Notetakers: The term “CRM” has become synonymous with data entry. AI notetakers like Avoma, Attention, and Fireflies automatically capture data during video meetings and turn unstructured data into structured CRM data that can be used to automate sales workflows like lead routing, conversation intelligence, and forecasting.

Clay uses a combination of 100+ data providers and AI agents to augment 1st-party CRM data with best-in-class data enrichment - removing manual research and speeding time to value for workflows like territory planning,  lead routing, intent-based outreach, outbound campaigns, and account-based marketing.

Other notable tools worth mentioning that are helping RevOps teams keep their data clean to drive valuable full-funnel analytics include Tektonic AI, Scalestack, and Vasco.

AI CRM: The traditional CRM model is broken. Legacy CRMs are bogged down in custom workflows, a never-ending pile of point solutions, and an army of consultants to get things done. This has overcomplicated the problem CRMs were designed to solve and have created data silos.

AI-native CRMs promise to unify customer data, automate tedious work like data entry to ensure that all relevant data is captured, and provide actionable insights on the unified data.

Clarify and Attio are two businesses setting out to reduce the complexity of traditional CRMs by building modern, flexible, and intelligent CRMs that scale with businesses. Day.ai is taking an even more radical approach - treating every sales conversation as CRM data and building a CRM from the ground up around their AI meeting assistant.

AI is rapidly changing every aspect of revenue teams—from prospecting to deal execution to customer success. This is not just about automation; it’s about redefining how sales works from the ground up.

This is a generational opportunity to build and invest in startups. If you’re building an AI-native sales or GTM startup at the Seed-Series B stage, reach out to me at chris.millisits@antler.co.

Or if you’re just getting started, Antler runs the premier global pre-seed accelerator across 20 countries. You can apply to the relevant location using this link.

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