Agents of agility
How agentic AI is transforming sales—from prospecting to close
Even the most efficient sales teams struggle with busywork. High-value sellers are often burdened with administrative chores and overwhelmed by data. CRM and other sales tech solutions can record and track information but are largely static. Early generative AI-driven tools can draft emails and summarize calls, but remain passive assistants.
Now agentic AI, the next wave of AI innovation, is changing the game with new capabilities that boost the efficiency, agility and capabilities of core functions, including sales, marketing and customer experience. In fact, 70% of respondents to “Agentic AI: Expectations, Readiness, and Results,“ a 2025 Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of more than 600 decision-makers say they are already using—or exploring the use of—agents in sales and marketing.1
“At every step, you’ll find opportunities where agents can augment and improve what sales forces are doing.”
Agentic AI differs from generative AI in ways that make it a natural fit with the dynamic, fast-paced world of sales. Unlike generative models, which respond to isolated prompts, agents are proactive and collaborative. For example, agents can accelerate the sales process by taking action and executing complex, multi-step workflows.
“I see agentic AI transforming every part of the sales lifecycle, from lead generation through ongoing customer management,” says Richard Geraffo, Vice President and Managing Director of AWS Global Sales for North America. “At every step, you’ll find opportunities where agents can augment and improve what sales forces are doing.”
Geraffo offers a unique perspective on AI, since AWS is both an AI innovator and adopter—empowering its thousands of sellers with extensive AI-driven sales-enablement tools, including Field Advisor, a sales assistant, and Account Summaries for customer engagement preparation. “I keep challenging all of our sellers to look for ways to use it to make us more effective, efficient and productive, so we can spend more time with customers.”
AI agents rely on memory, reasoning and planning to act as a virtual assistant. For example, agents can qualify a long list of incoming prospects then send the most promising leads to the seller. By digging more deeply, agents can review online data about top prospects and summarize top challenges, executive profiles and other context-building information. The result? Sellers can turn initial calls into more focused, effective conversations that move prospects closer to a sale.
Agents can also analyze intent, orchestrate multi-touch outreach, prepare sellers for meetings and coordinate follow-ups. Above all, agents can help enterprises raise win rates and revenue without burning out sales teams or inflating operating expenses. B2B companies adopting AI in sales can increase leads and appointments by more than 50%—and reduce call times by up to 60%, according to McKinsey.
“Adopt the best solution and keep evolving, quickly. That’s agility.”
“I think we’ll see more organizations using agents to give their sellers the knowledge and insights they need to make every customer conversation a high-value discussion about what the customer really needs,” says John Barrows, CEO of JB Sales and an award-winning sales trainer who has worked with more than ten thousand sellers at fast-growing brands. “Sales isn’t about trying to convince someone to buy something anymore,” says Barrow. “It’s about helping people solve problems and achieve their goals.”
Agentic AI is a major leap forward from initial AI-driven sales tools, and Barrows says its arrival is timely. “Success is all about agility right now. You have to be able to evolve quickly and adopt new tools and practices, because what worked six months ago just isn’t working anymore. With AI, sales groups can brainstorm, test and learn together. I tell sales leaders to choose a tough pain point, then challenge sellers to use agents to solve it. Adopt the best solution and keep evolving, quickly. That’s agility.”
Although agentic AI is still in its early days, 90% of those surveyed by Harvard Business Review agreed that most organizations in their industry will use the technology.
Leading B2B organizations are already using it to empower their salespeople and transform their operations. They’re leveraging agents to improve conversion rates with hyper-personalization and insight-driven engagement, build sales pipeline velocity, increase the accuracy of forecasting and keep messaging consistent and brand-aligned across the sales cycle. All while ensuring data security and compliance. Here are a few examples of how companies are already putting AWS agentic AI to work in sales:
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Gong.io
AI revenue platform Gong.io is using AWS AI to help its 4,500+ customers to capture and contextualize interactions, surface insights and predictions and power workflows that increase sales effectiveness and optimize revenue.
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US Foods
US Foods, one of the largest food services distributors in the U.S., is improving the efficiency of its onboarding process with AWS AI, saving more than 12,000 hours for its sellers.
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Rox
And Rox, an agentic AI sales platform built on AWS, deploys a swarm of autonomous agents—one per account—that continuously gather context from CRMs, data warehouses and public sources to provide real-time insights to sellers. Rox customers report 50% higher productivity with sales reps, 20% faster deal velocity and 2x revenue per rep.
Many enterprises are still working to integrate early generative AI solutions (e.g., customer service chatbots) into their organizations. Now comes agentic AI. What should sales executives do to get started? AWS’s Geraffo offers his guidance, based on dozens of conversations with sales leaders and other colleagues across all sectors:
Geraffo added: “Use agentic AI as an opportunity to break down silos and collaborate with other parts of your organization—across your GTM functions, RevOps and beyond. After all, leveraging agentic AI is a team sport that requires enterprise-wide ideas and enthusiasm.”
Most organizations have already invested heavily in sales tech—including CRMs, business intelligence (BI) tools, marketing automation, custom sales workflows and more. Sales leaders want to ensure that their investment in agentic AI not only achieves results, but also fits within their infrastructure. When evaluating technology partners, detailed questions about integration, enterprise scalability and data security should be part of the conversation.
Sales is a data-fueled process, including sensitive information about customers and proprietary projects that must be protected from unauthorized access by competitors and other unauthorized personnel. Enterprise-grade security and governance are crucial. That’s why AWS provides built-in controls that ensure that AI-driven engagement meets compliance, brand and data-residency requirements.
Scalability is a major concern for sales organizations, which need to trust that any technology they adopt can grow seamlessly with their organization. By using its agentic AI successfully as part of its own complex, high-value sales operation, AWS puts its solutions to the test, finding them to be enterprise-ready now—and able to scale far into the future. And so have the long list of enterprise customers that rely on AWS agentic AI solutions.
The promise of agentic AI is becoming a day-to-day reality. With agentic AI, sales forces and the executives who lead them no longer have to choose between productivity and personalization. Or scale and quality. Now sellers can use their time and talents to build relationships, while agents partner with them to handle research, preparation, follow up and other key tasks. All while increasing security, scaling seamlessly and ensuring all sales touchpoints are on brand.
That’s the real-world promise of agentic AI behind all the hype. And early innovators are already achieving impressive results.
Explore AWS agentic AI solutions.
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