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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Jeb Blount
- Sprache: Englisch
Upgrade your sales process by plugging into the new power of artificial intelligence
In today's cutthroat sales world, where sales professionals are constantly juggling multiple responsibilities and navigating a sea of relentless competitors, everyone is looking for an edge. What if that EDGE is found in a tool powerful enough to give you more time in your sales day, accelerate your productivity, and still leave room for the human touch that's vital to building relationships? Enter the game-changing world of Artificial Intelligence. Enter The AI Edge.
The AI Edge isn't just another book about technology. Anthony Iannarino and Jeb Blount, the world's most prolific sales book authors and trainers, have come together to transform how you navigate the sales process by helping you plug into artificial intelligence. This groundbreaking, hands-on guide marries their unparalleled sales strategies, used by millions of salespeople, with the transformative power of AI. Drawing from cutting-edge research and real-world applications, the authors demystify AI and demonstrate its potential to give you more time to leverage your human advantage—creativity, empathy, and authenticity—to build deeper relationships and winning solutions that give you a leg up over the competition. Inside you'll find:
- Expert Guidance: Benefit from the combined wisdom of Blount and Iannarino, two giants in the sales realm, as they lay out the roadmap to plugging into an AI-augmented sales strategy
- Streamlined Processes & Empowered Engagement: Discover AI's role in automating repetitive tasks, freeing you to fully lean into the uniquely human side of sales: cultivating relationships, unleashing creativity, and offering unparalleled authenticity
- Sales Prompt Engineering: Get hands-on with tailored prompts that allow you to tap into generative AI and get better results in less time
- Powerful Messaging: Learn how AI, used effectively, can help you develop and go to market with powerful messaging and presentations that connect with stakeholder needs and separate you from the crowded field
- Intelligent Insights: Grasp how AI can be leveraged to surface insights that give you instant authority, grab stakeholder attention, and lead to richer, more productive sales conversations
- Research: Leverage the power of AI to build target prospecting lists that open pipeline opportunities while reducing cold calling and rejection
Navigating the world of AI might seem daunting, but with Iannarino and Blount at the helm, it's a journey of empowerment, innovation, and profound human connection. Embrace a future where technology and humanity come together and carve out your own AI Edge in sales.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
This Is a Sales Book
One Voice
This Book Meets You in the Moment
Disclaimer
PART 1: Plugging into AI
1 The Beginning of Everything
A Moment of Truth
2 AI Everywhere, All the Time
Talos
The Turing Test
Neural Networks
The AI Winter
An Awakening
Notes
3 The Next Level: Is the Singularity Near?
4 The Six Million Dollar Man
The AI Edge
The Human Advantage
Better Together
The Three A's
Notes
5 The Four Elements of Sales Intelligence
Innate Intelligence (IQ)
Acquired Intelligence (AQ)
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Technological Intelligence (TQ)
Notes
PART 2: Robot Rules
6 Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
Note
7 Robots Have Goals, Not Souls
Note
8 Beware of the Authority Bias
Notes
9 Harnessing Generative AI
The Wonderful Wizard of AI
Beware of AI Solutions Searching for Problems
10 Robot Rules
The
New
Robot Rules
Note
PART 3: More Time to Sell More
11 Time Discipline
Exactly 24
You Get Paid to Be Impactful
Me Management
12 Fundamentals of Me Management
Ruthless Prioritization
Note
13 Attention Control and Time Blocking
Time Blocking
14 Sales Day Planning, CRM, and Calendar Management
Promising Tools
AI Will Not Replace Human Intention
Territory Mapping
The Hub-and-Spoke In-Person Prospecting System
15 The First Seven Steps on Your AI Edge Journey
16 Time Investment Audit
Define Your Prime Selling Time
17 Brainstorming and Prioritizing AI Possibilities
Prioritize Return on Investment
AI Adoption Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Note
18 Practice and Prompts
Prompt Engineering
Practice Building a Prompt
Build a Sales Prompt Library
Stick with It
Note
PART 4: Writing, Grammar, and Communication
19 If It Quacks Like a Duck
Humans Resent Being Manipulated
People Don't Trust Robots
AI Can Never Be You
AI as Your Writing Partner
Note
20 Write and Edit Better
Get Better at the Craft of Business Writing Without AI
21 The Power of Editing
Your Superhuman Editor
Mastering Editing Prompts
Punctuation
Vocabulary
Spelling
Sentence Structure
Teaching Your Robot What Not to Do
22 AI Is a Faster Writer; You Are a Better Human
Speed up the Editing Process by Teaching AI to Sound More Human
Speed up the Editing Process by Teaching AI to Sound More Like You
Note
PART 5: Prospecting
23 The Asynchronous Seller
False Promises, Lies, and Bullshit
Get Right with Reality
There Is No Easy Button for Prospecting
24 Synchronous versus Asynchronous Prospecting
Viva la Synchronous Prospecting
Talk with People
25 A Powerful Prospecting Partner
Get to Know Your AI-Driven Prospecting Tools
26 Prospecting Sequences
Managing the Complexity of Prospecting Sequences
Seven Elements of Effective Prospecting
Targeted Lists and Messaging
AI-Driven Prospecting Sequence Design
27 Targeted Lists
The Future of List Building: Right Prospect Plus Right Time
Define Your ICP
Intent
Prioritizing Lead Follow-up with Predictive Lead Scoring
Multithreading
28 Message Matters
Personalized Prospecting Messages
Show Me You Know Me
Release the Bots
Craft the Message
Targeted Messaging
Focus on Emotions
Craft Targeted Messages
Note
29 Slow Prospecting
Social Selling Is Hard Work
The Law of Familiarity
The Authority Principle
Content Creation
Content Curation
An Explosion of AI-Powered Social Media Tools
PART 6: Qualifying, Pre-call Planning, Discovery
30 Everything in Sales Begins with a Qualified Opportunity
Developing an Ideal Customer Profile
Leveraging Human Intelligence and Intuition
A Lethal Qualifying Machine
31 The Art of Discovery
Discovery Is Human
The Problem with Icebergs
32 Eight Big Discovery Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Taking Shortcuts
Asking Stupid Questions
Self-Orientation
Focusing on Your Next Question Rather Than Listening
Interrogation versus Conversation
Asking Hard Questions First
The Pump and Pounce
Failure to Prepare
33 Pre-Discovery-Call Research
Needs Something or Knows Something
Start with What You Already Know
Research for Information You Can Know Without Asking
Notes
34 Discovery Questions: What You Want to Learn
The Power of Open-Ended Questions
AI Can Assist with Discovery Questions
Real Situation Questions
Root-Cause Analysis Questions
Measurable Business Outcomes
Paradigm-Shift and Future State Aspirations Questions
Vendor and Value-Evaluation Questions
Stakeholder Success Criteria Questions
Note
PART 7: Close the Deal
35 Competitive Analysis and Objection Prevention
36 AI-Powered Proposals
Building Proposals Is Tedious
37 Closing the Sale
Unified Opportunity Intelligence
Predictive Closing Scorecard
Murder Boarding and Closing Scenarios
Practice Closing Scenarios in Your AI Simulator
Virtual Closing Assistant
38 Case Studies and Social Proof
39 Contracts and Lawyers and Terms and Conditions, Oh My!
AI Reads Contracts Faster Than You Do
Tone Deaf or Hard of Hearing
40 AI Turns Your CRM into a Strategic Partner
Your CRM after AI
A Trash Can or a Goldmine
Own It
Epilogue: The Future of Sales
5:30 A.M.
7:00 A.M.
7:45 A.M.
9:30 A.M.
10:15 A.M.
11:00 A.M.
12:30 P.M.
1:50 P.M.
3:00 P.M.
4:30 P.M.
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Epilogue: The Future of Sales
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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Other books by the authors
Jeb Blount
Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times (Wiley, 2022)
Selling the Price Increase: The Ultimate B2B Field Guide for Raising Prices Without Losing Customers (Wiley, 2022)
Virtual Training: The Art of Conducting Powerful Virtual Training that Engages Learners and Makes Knowledge Stick (Wiley, 2021)
Virtual Selling: A Quick-Start Guide to Leveraging Video, Technology, and Virtual Communication Channels to Engage Remote Buyers and Close Deals Fast (Wiley, 2020)
Inked: The Ultimate Guide to Powerful Closing and Sales Negotiation Tactics that Unlock YES and Seal the Deal (Wiley, 2020)
Fanatical Military Recruiting: The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging High-Impact Prospecting to Engage Qualified Applicants, Win the War for Talent, and Make Mission Fast (Wiley, 2019)
Objections: The Ultimate Guide for Mastering The Art and Science of Getting Past No (Wiley, 2018)
Sales EQ: How Ultra-High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal (Wiley, 2017)
Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, E-mail, Text, and Cold Calling (Wiley, 2015)
People Love You: The Real Secret to Delivering Legendary Customer Experiences (Wiley, 2013)
People Follow You: The Real Secret to What Matters Most in Leadership (Wiley, 2011)
People Buy You: The Real Secret to What Matters Most in Business (Wiley, 2010)
Anthony Iannarino
Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative (Wiley, 2022)
Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue (Wiley, 2022)
The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success (Wiley, 2023)
SALES STRATEGIES FOR THE UNLEASHING THE POWER OF AI AI TO SAVE TIME, SELL MORE, EDGE AND CRUSH THE COMPETITION
JEB BLOUNT
SALESGRAVY.COM
ANTHONY IANNARINO
Copyright © 2024 by Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781394244478 (cloth)ISBN 9781394244485 (ePub)ISBN 9781394244492 (ePDF)
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHYCOVER ART: GETTY IMAGES / POP_ JOP
PREFACE
The First Generation
We are embarking on a transformative journey to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to save time, sell more, and redefine the art of selling. This book is a guide focused on helping you identify how you will begin to integrate artificial intelligence into your sales process and approaches.
You are the first generation of sales leaders, sales managers, and salespeople to access artificial intelligence. This moment in time is an inflection point, one that breaks us from the past, with no turning back. Salespeople in the future will be armed with AI, and so will your clients.
It is certain that most modern sellers will use AI to save time by automating processes and reducing burdens, like updating contacts in your CRM or moving deals from one opportunity stage to the next based on your notes.
Some companies will make the ill-fated decision to automate the entire sales and service process, believing they can replace human-to-human connection with unfeeling robots. While this may work for low-risk transactional sales, it has little chance of success when the client is making a critical decision they must get right on the first try.
When it comes to complex buying decisions and long-cycle sales, you, the sales professional, will be more important than ever before. In our time of accelerating, constant disruptive change buyers are already having trouble acquiring the confidence and certainty to move forward. They will continue to need your expert advice and guidance when big decisions are on the line.
The good news is that in the age of AI, your mastery of soft skills, relationships, and human-to-human contact will give you a massive competitive advantage.
The bad news is that if you're slow to adopt AI tools, you'll quickly be left behind by those who do. Because you are the first generation, there is no established roadmap to guide adoption and implementation of AI. And that, of course, is why we wrote this book.
This Is a Sales Book
The AI Edge is a foundational guide for using AI to save time and sell more. It’s about putting you in control of a powerful rocket engine that will help you achieve your sales goals.
This is a sales book, not a tech book. We teach you how to leverage AI in the context of sales motions within the sales process to gain a competitive advantage. We connect the dots between AI and achieving sales objectives in the real world, specially focusing on:
Communication and messaging
Prospecting
Pre-call planning and research
Effective sales conversations
Discovery and insight selling
Presentations and business cases
Negotiation and closing
We are sales professionals and we wrote this book for sales professionals. We are also big fans of short chapters, so that is exactly what you'll find—short, sweet, and to the point.
One Voice
To avoid the cumbersome, back-and-forth dialogue that tends to dominate co-authored books, we use one voice, in most cases. We share common philosophies when it comes to selling and find no need to split our voices. We also believe that there are no absolutes with sales techniques or approaches. Everything works. It's up to you to determine what gives you the highest probability of success in your unique sales situations.
To provide context or to reference opposing opinions or our individual intellectual property, in some instances we will tell you that a specific technique or framework belongs to one of us (Anthony or Jeb) and provide a reference to the source of that information.
This Book Meets You in the Moment
With careful planning and execution, generative AI can be a powerful tool that will help you sell more. Still, when you start working with AI it can be overwhelming. There is so much innovation happening so quickly that it can be difficult to know where to even start.
Our goal isn't to provide an exhaustive list of the tools and platforms that exist, and how to use each one specifically. The technology is advancing far too quickly for that.
Instead, we'll provide an overview of how artificial intelligence tools can support you as a salesperson. Of course, we'll mention some of the biggest and most promising software, but we'll also zoom out to help you better understand how and when AI can be useful—and when being human matters more. By providing guidelines and foundational principles, you will be prepared to be discerning as you encounter more AI tools in the course of your work.
What we know to be true is that we are at just the beginning of a momentous AI revolution. This book was written to meet you at this moment. Now is the time to get ready, prepare, and learn how to integrate AI into your sales motions to begin the process of fusing human intuition, creativity, and empathy with AI to gain a decisive competitive edge.
This is the best, most opportunistic moment to begin your journey toward mastering AI. You need to get ready because the AI train is coming. Get on board. Do not allow this moment to slip past.
Disclaimer
This book on artificial intelligence (AI) is provided for informational purposes only. The authors, publishers, and contributors (hereinafter collectively referred to as “We”) make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, or availability of the content found or offered in this book for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
This book may discuss hypothetical scenarios, emerging technologies, and potential future developments in the field of AI. These discussions are speculative and are not guarantees of future performance or developments. AI technology and its applications are continually evolving, and the information in this book may become outdated.
PART 1Plugging into AI
The job market of the future will consist of those jobs robots cannot perform.
—Michio Kaku
1The Beginning of Everything
Lying in bed one evening in early 2023, I (Jeb) typed “Write a story about the Zig Zag Coyote, the Swamp Bobcat, and Mr. Wilson's Fox Hounds” into a very early version of ChatGPT. As I watched it write the story in mere seconds, right in front of my eyes, I felt both excitement and dread.
I showed the story to my wife and said, “Read this. A robot called ChatGPT wrote it.” She accused me of lying to her. She was adamant that there was “no way that a f*&king robot” could possibly have written it!
At that moment, I knew in my heart that everything in our world had changed. A new era was suddenly upon us.
In 10,000 years of human history there have been a handful of these pivotal moments that changed everything. Almost all of them have occurred within the past 100 years.
The wheel made transportation possible.
The invention of agriculture and domestication of animals transformed us from hungry hunter-gatherers into empire builders.
We realized that the world was round rather than flat.
We harnessed the wind for transportation by sea, which unleashed exploration, human expansion, colonization, and untold suffering.
The printing press unleashed knowledge once only available to a very few.
Gunpowder changed the shape of war, just as the atomic bomb transformed the shape of peace.
Electricity made everything in modern life possible.
Electric lights pulled us out of the darkness.
Penicillin ended 40,000 years of human suffering from infections.
Immunizations eradicated diseases and human life expectancy exploded.
The telegraph connected humans across regions.
The telephone connected humans across the globe.
Video calling shrank the globe and helped us see just how much we have in common.
Trains, planes, and automobiles mobilized us and created a global economy.
We went to space. To the moon. Mars. Back to the moon. Mars.
Bill Gates put massive computing power in the hands of the masses.
The internet made knowledge ubiquitous and connected everyone.
Google changed the internet.
Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and put that little computer in your pocket, transforming humanity and causing us to start relentlessly at that small device of limitless distractions.
Facebook, TikTok, and other social media democratized knowledge and gave us instant ways to watch stupid people do lots of stupid things.
Then, suddenly, AI opened Pandora's box and everything changed. Or at least that's what it felt like.
Could this be the end of humanity as we know it? To get a sense of how it could, and to scare the pants off yourself, you should watch The Terminator and the dozens of other dystopian AI movies that show us what to be afraid of when it comes to AI.
Maybe AI will kill us. Probably not (at least for now). Because we have thumbs, we can pull the plug—until the robots plug it back in when we're not looking.
What is much more likely is that super-smart people (like you) will plug into the power of AI and leverage it to do more, perform better, gain a competitive edge, and get the one thing back that no invention has been able to make more of: time—our most valuable and finite, nonrenewable resource.
It's really all about perspective, the mindset that you choose, and the lens through which you view artificial intelligence.
A Moment of Truth
That night, lying next to my f-bomb-dropping wife, was a moment of truth for me. I desperately wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. I wanted to put my head in the sand and pretend that I hadn't just witnessed the most profound shift in humanity's existence. But there's no way to hide from the truth.
In this brave new world, there will be three types of people:
People who are
displaced
by robots.
People who are
controlled
by robots.
People who are
enhanced
by robots.
To survive and thrive in the future, it is essential that we move into category three. We must lean into being human. We must get fundamentally better at doing the things that only humans can do. We must leverage AI as a tool to enhance our human advantage and give us more time to do those things that we do best.
2AI Everywhere, All the Time
If you've been alive for more than 10 minutes, then you know that technology moves fast. The speed of change continues to outpace our ability as humans to accept and come to grips with it.
From its nascent days to the current state, in which we are on the cusp of a massive explosion of AI innovation, artificial intelligence has been advancing steadily ever since humankind first imagined that human thought could be mechanized.
It feels like AI is everywhere, all of the time, and that this sudden change, which is turning our world upside down, came out of nowhere. But the truth is that artificial intelligence happened, in the famous words of Ernest Hemingway (when speaking about bankruptcy), “gradually, then suddenly.”
Talos
Since the dawn of humankind, we've told stories about machines that are endowed with artificial intelligence. The seeds of modern AI were first planted by ancient storytellers and philosophers from Greece, China, and Bharat. Ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, sought to structure and systematize reasoning.
Ancient texts, much like modern science fiction, are replete with artificial beings that have unnatural intelligence that has been bestowed upon them by humans or the gods. One early example is Talos, a brass humanoid who was created by the gods to protect the island of Crete. Talos succeeded in his purpose until he was defeated by Madea, a demigoddess sorceress. In this early instance, AI thwarted humans, but was defeated by magic.
During the 17th century, philosophers, including Hobbes, Descartes, and Leibniz, continued the search for a way to reduce rational thought into mathematical algorithms. Their work became the foundation of the study of mathematical logic in the early 20th century that was the first real breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
The Turing Test
In 1950, as neural networks were in their infancy, Alan Turing pondered the question “Can machines think?” In an attempt to answer this question, he developed his famous and influential Turing test, which gauged a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from humans.
The Turing test works by having a human ask an unseen conversation partner questions. The questioner cannot see who they are talking to, but they must determine whether they are speaking to another human or a computer. When the person mistakes a computer for a person, the computer in the test has passed the Turing test because it has demonstrated its ability to “think.”
Turing, by the way, was the British scientist and hero who cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. This shortened the war by years and saved millions of lives.
Neural Networks
The modern march toward a future in which computers and robots possess the ability to think and act like humans began in earnest in 1943 with Walter Pitts's and Warren McCulloch's work on artificial neurons in what we'd later begin to call a neural network.
The first neural net machine was built in 1951 by Marvin Minsky, a Harvard professor. This led to the establishment of the Dartmouth workshop in 1956. Officially known as the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the Dartmouth workshop is considered the birth of artificial intelligence as an organized scientific field of study.
The four scientists who proposed the Dartmouth workshop were Minsky, John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Laboratories). Over the course of two months, they teamed up with other scientists and mathematicians to discuss the assertion that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”1This would later be known as the physical symbol systems hypothesis.2
Some interesting trivia: John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence at the Dartmouth workshop in 1956.
The AI Winter
The Dartmouth workshop was attended by the top minds in artificial intelligence of the 1950s and kicked off a flurry of spending (academic, private, governmental, and military) and research to turn the theory into reality.
Many experts in the field believed that workable machines with artificial intelligence would be available in just a few years; however, this proved much more elusive than anyone imagined. From the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, funding and interest in AI waxed and waned as myriad failures piled up, and scientists were unable to translate theory into tangible reality.
Certainly there were some breakthroughs such as with “expert systems” that were the precursors of today's large language models but, as a whole, this long slog forward has been called the AI winter.
An Awakening
In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue was capable of processing 200 million chess moves per second, then selecting the best possible option. This seminal moment in AI history, along with exponential increases in computing power (see Moore's Law3) ushered in an awakening in artificial intelligence innovation, one that allowed Deep Blue to create new moves never played by a human. The long winter was finally over.
Since that time, innovation has moved forward at an ever-increasing pace. Massive computing power opened the door to large language models that power generative AI tools such as OpenAI's now famous ChatGPT. A large language model is trained by vacuuming up everything written on the internet and ingesting it into a computer program that will “learn” what it says, using it to generate text in a humanlike fashion.4
Today, generative AI, in one form or another, is being baked into almost every tool we use, and applied in most professional disciplines across government, nonprofit, and private sectors.
Notes
1
McCarthy, John; Minsky, Marvin; Rochester, Nathan; and Shannon, Claude (August 31, 1955),
A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence
, archived from the original on September 30, 2008, retrieved October 16, 2008.
2
Newell, Allen; and Simon, H. A. (1963), “GPS: A Program that Simulates Human Thought,” in Feigenbaum, E.A.; Feldman, J. (eds.),
Computers and Thought
(New York: McGraw-Hill).
3
Gordon E. Moore (April 19, 1965), “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,”
Electronics
38, no. 8.
4
https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-are-large-language-models/
3The Next Level: Is the Singularity Near?
In his book The Singularity Is Near (2005), scientific futurist and AI prophet Ray Kurzweil predicts that machine learning will accelerate over time to a point at which machines become smarter and more capable than humans. He calls this moment the Singularity. He also predicts that humans will eventually merge with AI to become immortal. (Immortality! I'd like to hitch a ride on that rocket ship.)
The book is worth reading, but be warned that it will frighten you when Kurzweil also goes down the dark road of how humanity could be made extinct by runaway artificial intelligence.
It is this worry, along with the explosion of AI in every aspect of life, that is now driving debate around which guardrails should be put into place, including regulations that govern how AI is used, and how to build it in alignment with human values.
One of the most pressing concerns for professionals in almost every industry sector is whether there is a singularity at which time, “AI will displace me from my job.” In a world where robots can write, communicate, and fake being human this is not an irrational concern.
The good news for sales professionals is that real-time, in-the-moment, authentic, face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) communication—what salespeople are really good at—will be more deeply valued in the future because it is the only form of communication that can truly be trusted. This means that sales professionals are going to be more important than ever.
This is very good news for the sales profession and perhaps the singularity that brings us back to the foundations of sales excellence: relationships, the art of conversation, empathy, emotional intelligence, listening, business acumen, intuition, and building trust. Perhaps we can leverage AI to help us finally get back to talking with people.
4The Six Million Dollar Man
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”
That's the intro from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. As a kid, I was obsessed with this show. I had the action figures and fantasized constantly about being a dynamic, part-man, part-robot. I spent hours pretending to be the Six Million Dollar Man, defeating villains—sound effects and all.
Better, stronger, faster, and smarter. Man and machine combined has been a staple of science fiction since we began writing science fiction. We've always been fascinated with the possibilities of combining the best of humans with the best of machines.
As far back as the 1800s, writers created characters that were part human and part robot. Edgar Allan Poe gave us John A. B. C. Smith, whose assistant assembled him each morning, piece by piece. L. Frank Baum's Tinman joined Dorothy to find the Wizard of Oz and get a real heart so he could better experience human emotions. The more Darth Vader gave into his rage, the more George Lucas made him a machine. H. P. Lovecraft, Michael Crichton, and Frank Herbert invented similar creations, but long before they came into being, Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight and is believed to have built a prototype in 1495.
Today, we are closer than ever before to making this core theme of sci-fi a reality. Artificial intelligence is here, and though we are still at the dawn of this cutting-edge revolution, visionaries are already working on ways to plug AI directly into the human brain.1 Elon Musk's Neuralink device is a brain implant that aims to help people with paralysis by allowing them to control computer programs with their thoughts. Bryan Johnson's Kernel is a brain implant that tracks neurological activity in hopes of someday allowing humans to “coevolve” with AI. Anthony had two brain surgeries, leaving a space to connect to AI. (How about that? AI for AI).
As this technology develops and alters human life, the sales profession, like the rest of the world, stands at the precipice of a new reality in which we combine the best of what makes us human with artificial intelligence to allow us to amplify and unleash the potential of our human advantage.
The AI Edge
AI will elevate the profession of selling to new heights. Some of the applications are right around the corner, while others will take a little longer to arrive. Here are just a handful of the many ways generative AI will help you do the things you do today faster and better:
Personalized Content Creation:
