The findings, published July 16, come from the firm’s 2026 B2B Pulse Survey of nearly 4,000 buyers and sellers across 13 countries, as well as interviews with revenue leaders at global companies.
Widespread experimentation, limited payoff
According to McKinsey, fragmented data, weak insights, manual processes, disconnected teams, and limited change management continue to cap the impact of AI tools layered onto existing sales processes. Adding AI on top of those constraints, the report notes, often just automates complexity rather than improving performance.
Fewer than 10% of organizations have scaled AI in any given function, McKinsey found, even as adoption of individual AI tools has become nearly universal across B2B sales teams.
“Growth champions” rewire the whole workflow
McKinsey’s research identifies a smaller group of growth champions, companies growing faster than their peers, that are pulling away from the pack. The distinguishing factor is not more AI spending on its own, but a willingness to redesign entire sales workflows, or “impact journeys,” around agentic AI rather than bolting tools onto processes that stay otherwise unchanged.
High-growth companies were three times more likely to increase AI investment by double digits year over year, at 71% versus 25%. They were also nearly three times more likely to have fundamentally redesigned individual workflows around AI, according to the report.
Five workflows stand out as priorities for this kind of redesign: lead generation and opportunity mapping, go-to-market and account coverage, account planning and growing existing customers, pricing, and seller coaching and performance management.
In one example cited in the report, a global enterprise technology company deployed an AI-powered sales advisor used by more than 8,000 sellers, cutting onboarding time from roughly three months to six weeks while making top performers’ selling approaches more consistently available across the organization.
Why this matters for outsourced sales and CX
Growth leaders embedding AI into core workflows point to seller efficiency (59% of respondents) and better customer experiences (53% of respondents) as the main benefits. Case examples from financial services firms that rewired prospecting and relationship-management workflows showed 3–15% higher revenue per relationship manager and 20–40% lower cost-to-serve ratios.
For BPO providers running outsourced sales, lead qualification, or customer success, this indicates that clients will increasingly judge partners on agent-augmented workflows that improve productivity and consistency, not just headcount, making AI-enabled workflow redesign a stronger differentiator than staff augmentation alone.
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Dierks, A., Huber, I., Valdivieso, M., Deveau, R., & Singh, N. (2025, July 16). The future of B2B sales: How growth champions rewire their playbooks with AI. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-future-of-b2b-sales-how-growth-champions-rewire-their-playbooks-with-ai
