Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026.  Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive. 

By Jason Ambrose, CEO of People.ai

The AI hype cycle is over. What’s next is harder-and more interesting.

I’ve spent the last year talking to sales leaders, RevOps teams, and CROs across every industry imaginable. The same themes keep surfacing. Not fear about AI replacing people. Not excitement about shiny new tools. Something more fundamental: a shift in how we measure value, how we work, and what stays irreplaceably human.

Here are five predictions for where sales is headed in 2026-and why they matter.

1. Tokens, not seats, begin setting the bill.

The way we pay for software is about to change. In 2026, the value of software solutions will increasingly be measured by token consumption rather than traditional pricing models.

As AI becomes more embedded into enterprise tools, organizations will need to rethink the cost and efficiency of their AI usage and begin to measure the value of software by the “tokens” it consumes to perform tasks. This shift towards a new economic model of token consumption represents a fundamental change in how software value is calculated and delivered to customers.

2. The era of AI experimentation is dead.

Proof of concepts and AI experimentation is no longer going to cut it in 2026. I see it everyday with People.ai customers-trying a tool or platform just to “see what happens” won’t cut it.

We are moving beyond mere hype into a place where AI projects must deliver real measurable results to compete. Organizations have moved past the testing phase and now expect concrete outcomes from their AI investments, so the focus will shift entirely to production implementations that deliver tangible business value.

3. Spoiler: people will still have jobs.

Despite some pundits saying AI’s wiping out jobs, we will realize that sentiment is a bit too premature. As customers better understand AI’s limitations, there will be renewed confidence in identifying which lines of work must be human-led and helping humans upskill to evolve with the changing landscape.

Just as technology freed us from typing letters on typewriters, AI is now handling routine reasoning, and that’s a good thing. This shift will give leaders clarity on where to focus: the irreplaceable human work of judgment, creativity, and relationship-building. We’re not being replaced; we’re being elevated to do what humans do best.

4. Goodbye walled gardens. Hello personal interfaces.

Sales leaders are done logging into CRMs. They want answers, not another system. ChatGPT and Claude are breaking open the walls enterprise software spent years building. Companies are tired of lock-in and software bloat.

What’s next? Every person gets an interface that fits exactly how they work. A rep’s view will look nothing like a CEO’s. Same intelligence. Different lenses.

Sales tech is not consolidating, but it is running full speed towards custom interfaces so people can focus on strategy and relationships while AI handles the rest.

5. AI killed the strategy deck. Implementation is everything now.

Customers used to wait months for consultants to tell them what to do. Now tech providers ship best practices directly into the product. AI handles the “what to do” part-strategy, techniques, success patterns. But follow-through? Organizational change? Getting humans to actually do the thing? That’s still brutally hard.

Traditional consulting isn’t dead. It’s just getting cut in half. The diagnosis and recommendation phase? Gone. The implementation and change management phase? More valuable than ever.

The bottom line

2026 won’t be the year AI takes over sales. It’ll be the year we finally figure out the division of labor.

AI gets the data processing, the pattern recognition, the summarization at scale. Humans get the judgment calls, the relationship building, the messy work of actually driving change inside organizations.

The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most AI. They’ll be the ones who figured out where to apply it-and where to stay human.

That’s what I’m betting on. That’s what we’re building toward at People.ai.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Ambrose is the Chief Executive Officer of People.ai. With more than two decades of leadership experience in enterprise software, Jason has led global teams across sales, operations, and strategy to drive transformation and growth. 

In his previous role as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, Jason guided a key moment of growth for People.ai, helping to shape the company’s forward-looking business strategy that will define its next phase of scale and product evolution.

His background includes leadership roles at McKinsey, Appirio, and Motive Partners, where he specialized in scaling enterprise software and delivering outcomes for B2B sales organizations. Jason is passionate about redefining how revenue teams work by bringing precision and trusted, data-driven answers to both humans and AI agents at scale.