Yesterday I saw a presentation on how sales people are usig AI. I discovered that they use it to automated their work. I found it very insightful.
So what did I learn?
First, sales people are doing a lot of manual, tedious work. Their before workflow consisted in finding emails or reports, copying and pasting those into spreadsheets, and then sending emails to the right people. As a software developer, I find it suprising. We software developers tend to automated tedious tasks so quickly that we aren't even aware that we automate our work.
Second, the existing sales software is failing sales people. It seems like the greatest problem was integrating the different systems with each other. I don't know the domain, but even this simple description shows that it is a hard problem to solve. At the same time, the systems don't seem to put too much effort and make it easy.
Scripting / low code / no code is not as successful as we had hoped. We keep thinking that Visual Basic, Python, Scratch or some drag and drop solution will democratize programming so that regular people can write personal programs to automate their tedious tasks. This is an unfair expectation. Sales people need to sell, not to figure out how to install pyenv. Yes, we could present coding in colorful blocks with animation as low code does, but it is still coding.
Sales is so important to our culture, so I find it surprising how poorly software supports sales people. I know that there is a complex economic and social reasons that caused this; I won't meditate on that right now. But since sales generate money, I assumed that it was taken cared of. I was so wrong.
Now I want to talk to more sales people to see what they need. I also want to talk to people who are not software engineers to see how they do their job. This talk excited me because it means that there are many areas where software development can improve peoples lives in meaningful ways if we bother to talk to others and find out what they need.