More and more businesses are turning to artificial intelligence to boost productivity and efficiency but what if AI could actually increase sales too?
Adam Lyons, founder of Upsells.com, believes AI sales agents can play a crucial role both in helping businesses make more sales and supporting their human sales team. His company builds custom AI sales agents for small businesses, which can handle upselling and following up with leads.
Unlike their human colleagues, AI agents can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week without ever expecting to be paid a cent of commission. And Adam believes it could be a gamechanger for entrepreneurs who don’t enjoy the sales element of running their business.
He says: “What we do at Upsells is we create a digital AI sales team for a company that they just send their potential customers to. The AI does all the follow up and all the selling.”
Adam came up with the idea of AI sales agents when he realized people were missing a trick by not turning to artificial intelligence to take over essential but mundane tasks that they’d rather not tackle themselves.
He says: “People got AI wrong – we all assumed that AI was coming to take away the basic mundane tasks, grocery, shopping, cleaning, laundry, so that as humans, we could express ourselves through artistic pursuits. But the reality is the opposite.
“AI has come and taken away artistic pursuits, and we’re left doing dishes and laundry. That got me thinking – what is something which is regarded as a soft skill, a social skill, which AI would be very good at and humans don’t like doing?
“The answer I came up with was sales.”
Upsells.com started offering the AI sales agent service in 2024 and interest is building steadily. Extensive internal testing was carried out to test how effective AI would be at selling and troubleshooting any potential problems before launch.
Adam, who is originally from London in the UK and now based in Austin, Texas, adds: “AI is really good at selling and doesn’t have the same time limitations as people. We used to struggle to get a salesperson to contact 65 customers a day but our AI sales agent on day one contacted 3,600 customers, and spent the entire day talking to them.
“Sales staff will get to the point where they are peopled out, whereas AI can handle thousands of customers in a day and shows no favoritism. It’s also really smart – it can handle objections, it can dig into people’s sticking points and it can negotiate.”
However, Adam does recommend that companies keep some sales staff for customers who want to get on the phone and talk to a human. But he argues that outsourcing to AI will allow people to get rid of team members who aren’t productive, while keeping those with a genuine talent for sales.