Everyone Sounds Like a Robot: How AI Is Killing the Very Relevance It Promised
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
I'm going to say something that might surprise you coming from a guy who builds AI tools for a living.
Most salespeople are using generative AI completely wrong.
Here's what's happening in the field right now. A rep fires up ChatGPT, types "write me a cold email to a manufacturing CFO," and out comes a perfectly polished message. Then they hit send. To 500 people. And every one of those messages sounds exactly like every other AI-generated message clogging up that CFO's inbox (and looks like it too as it probably has an em dash or two in it, and in the history of the world, no salesperson has ever used an em dash in a sales communication).
The voicemail scripts sound like AI. The LinkedIn messages sound like AI. The follow-ups sound like AI.
We've taken the most powerful sales technology in history and used it to do the one thing that has never worked: mass-produce generic noise and hope someone bites.
The buyers know. A Gartner sales survey shows that 61% of B2B buyers prefer buying things without engaging a rep, and 73% actively avoid contacts that send them irrelevant messages. Read that again. Three out of four buyers are actively dodging you because what you're sending isn't relevant to them.
Back to Dale Carnegie
Almost 90 years ago, Dale Carnegie figured out what matters. People care about themselves. Their goals, their fears, their "care-abouts." Carnegie's first principle in How to Win Friends and Influence People was to become genuinely interested in other people.
That hasn't changed. In today's world, it's no longer enough to be interesting. Interesting is easy now. Anyone can have a slick website and a polished pitch. To win, you have to be interested. Authentically interested in your prospect. What are their goals? What's going on in their world? What do they actually care about?
Here's the irony. AI is the best tool ever invented to help you be genuinely interested in the other person. Yet most reps are using it to be more interesting, more polished, more "me, me, me" at scale.
The opportunity isn't using AI to write more messages. It's using AI to understand the other person so well that every message, every call, every meeting is relevant and valuable. That's Dr. Tony Alessandra's "Platinum Rule" with a turbocharger. Do unto others as they want done unto themselves. AI just makes it faster to figure out what "they want" actually is.
The research backs this up. Research on generative AI in sales suggests that the most immediate gains come from reducing manual work and improving how sellers allocate effort, rather than simply increasing activity volume. In other words, the win isn't more. The win is better. And the best teams already know it. AI is already changing how sales teams prospect and prioritize leads. What AI has not replaced is judgment. Deciding how to engage a buyer, when to push forward, and when to step back still requires human context and experience. The most effective sales teams use AI to remove noise and focus attention, not to eliminate human involvement entirely.
One non-negotiable rule before I get to the tools: AI does the research and the first draft. You do everything else. As I harp on over and over in my keynote presentations, "use AI to get you 85% of the way there." Generative AI can produce plausible-sounding content that is factually incorrect. Human review before sending is a non-negotiable step. If you skip the human pass, you're right back to sounding like a robot.
Five AI Tools to Help You Be Genuinely Interested
I evaluated these through one lens: does it help you understand and connect with the other person, or does it just help you blast more noise? Here are five worth your attention.
1. ZoomInfo. Think of this as your data backbone. It offers 500M+ verified contacts and 100M+ companies, refreshed continuously so reps are not chasing bounced emails or dead numbers. More important for relevance, it surfaces buyer intent. Reps use custom feeds of prioritized accounts, buyer intent data, and real-time alerts on funding events, personnel changes, and technology adoption to identify who to contact and when to engage. Knowing when something changed in your prospect's world is the first step to being relevant.
2. Clay. This is a workflow engine for teams that want to do the research right. Instead of just being a database, Clay connects with 100+ data providers, web scraping, and AI personalization tools in one place. It's not plug-and-play. It takes some setup. But it lets you automate the homework so your reps show up prepared instead of winging it.
3. Lavender. This one keeps you honest. Lavender sits inside your email client and scores every email you write in real time. It checks subject line length, reading level, personalization depth, mobile formatting, and spam trigger words, then gives each email a numerical score with specific suggestions to improve reply rates. If your message is all about you, Lavender will tell you. Use it to catch yourself before the buyer does.
4. HubSpot Breeze. If you live in HubSpot, this works inside your CRM. The AI assistant pulls relevant prospect info from details across the web, automatically enrolls leads to your CRM, and helps draft personalized outreach campaigns. The right way to use it is what HubSpot calls the ideal workflow. AI first draft, human second pass. AI proposes a structure, references relevant facts, and suggests angles. The rep then edits tone, adds specific anecdotes, and removes any phrasing that sounds too robotic or overly familiar for that buyer.
5. The Sales Intel Engine. This is the one I built, and I built it specifically to solve the problem in this article. Instead of getting millions of often irrelevant results from a traditional search, the Sales Intel Engine finds only the relevant information that matters. You enter a word or two, click the button matching your need, and let the Engine do the work. It helps you find the right prospects, at the right time, with the right message, so you can walk into every meeting knowing what the other person genuinely cares about. That's the whole point: real research, fast, so you can be authentically interested.
You can grab a free trial here: https://www.salesintelengine.ai/trial
The Bottom Line
AI is changing sales. That's not a question. The question is whether you'll use it to become one more voice in the noise, or whether you'll use it to do what Carnegie told us to do almost a century ago: become genuinely interested in the other person.
The reps who win won't be the ones sending the most messages. They'll be the ones who used AI to do their homework, understand the buyer's world, and show up relevant every single time. Knowledge is power. AI just makes that power easier to put into action.
Don't use it to sound smart. Use it to care.
---
About the Writer
Sam Richter is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, bestselling author, and entrepreneur considered one of the world's foremost experts on AI-powered digital information and sales intelligence. He is the founder and CEO of SBR Worldwide/Know More and the creator of the Intel Engine, a suite of AI-powered tools used by leading organizations worldwide. Learn more at www.sbrworldwide.com and www.samrichter.com