The AI Sales Gap Nobody in Funeral Service Is Talking About
Every other industry is moving. The funeral profession is standing still.
# Ashworth Market Brief
Every industry around you is rebuilding its sales and marketing process around AI. Building products distributors. B2B software companies. Freight and logistics. Healthcare. And the funeral profession? For the most part, still mostly doing what it did ten years ago. Talking about AI, but still too busy to build.
That gap is the whole point of today’s brief.
## Families Are More Ready to Talk Than Ever Before
Before we get into the technology side, something from the hospice world deserves your attention.
Diana Franchitto, president and CEO of HopeHealth, is retiring after two decades leading one of New England’s largest nonprofit hospice and palliative care organizations. In a recent interview, she said something that forced me to include this story in today’s brief. When she started, hospice and palliative care were conversation stoppers. Now, she said, they are conversation starters. People are ready for the conversation.
Read that again. The public is MORE willing to talk about end of life than they used to be. They don’t need a free hamburger or piece of pizza to do it. The cultural resistance is softening. Franchitto’s organization cares for more than 1,500 patients and provides grief support to around 4,000 individuals a year. She noted that for every patient who experiences hospice, the conversation ripples outward to two, five, ten family members. That is how the movement grows. And you can light it on fire when you step into the conversation and build the education system that keeps it lit.
For you as a funeral home owner or preneed professional, this is as good as it gets. The door is opening. The question is whether you are standing on the right side of it with the right tools and the right presence.
A modern sales process, supported by AI, should help you step into these conversations more efficiently. Not replace the human connection. Create more room for it.
## What Every Other Industry Already Knows
Gartner is predicting that 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028, pushing over $15 trillion in spend through AI-driven exchanges. Already, 51% of B2B software buyers start their vendor research inside an AI assistant, ahead of review sites and company websites. Buyers are comparing twice as many vendors in half the time.
Meanwhile, QXO, a major building products distributor, [says AI could effectively double sales force productivity](https://distributionstrategy.com/2026/11/qxo-says-ai-could-double-sales-productivity-as-it-integrates-building-products-acquisitions/) in one of its business units. CEO Brad Jacobs called AI a key driver of both operational excellence and margin expansion. That is a $4.9 billion revenue company reorienting around this technology right now.
A Wharton professor, Ethan Mollick, recently tested the latest Claude AI model on a full business launch, and it screened 22 business ideas, selected one, read public agendas from 201 city and county governments, built a marketing plan, and started setting up operational tasks. He said the resulting business plan would have impressed him coming from a team of his MBA students at the end of a semester. His conclusion: AI is not yet running businesses independently, but with a few hours of human direction a week, you could make a real run at almost anything.
Now ask yourself: what is your preneed operation doing with AI right now?
## The Competencies That Separate Top Sellers Today
At Gong’s Celebrate 2026 conference in Las Vegas, a panel of senior sales leaders laid out four things] that separate top performers in the AI era. I want to walk through each one through the lens of a funeral home owner or a preneed agent.
**Judgment and taste.** Jason Magill from Deloitte and Callie Laden from Auris made the point that any rep can send AI-assisted emails in bulk. That is noise. The best performers know when to trust AI output, when to edit it, and when to override it. For you, this means using AI to draft outreach, research prospects, and prepare for conversations, while keeping the actual human moment exactly that: human.
**Adaptability.** Chad Mayfield from LinkedIn put it plainly: the role you hire for today will look different tomorrow. Top performers treat their own professional evolution as ongoing. They test new tools and new plays immediately rather than waiting for someone to hand them a new script. If you are still running the same preneed presentation you ran five years ago and you have never experimented with any AI tools to improve your research or your follow-up process, you are falling behind.
**Authentic curiosity.** Suzanna O’Donohue from LexisNexis described how their best reps run internal diagnostics, asking where the workflow is breaking down, what manual tasks could be automated, and what strategic questions they are not asking yet. For preneed, genuine curiosity about a family’s situation, their values, their fears, their timeline, is still the whole game. AI handles the admin. You handle the conversation.
**Technical and commercial fluency.** This one matters more than most funeral professionals realize. The objection Gong’s panel kept hearing in B2B sales was not “why your product over a competitor’s?” It was “why shouldn’t we just build our own solution?” In your world, the version of that objection is, “why do I need a preneed plan when I can just handle this later?” The reps who win are the ones who can walk someone through the real cost of waiting, the financial and emotional burden placed on the family, the decisions that have to be made under pressure, and the relief that comes from getting it done now. That is commercial fluency applied to your profession. And much of your success in Thie endeavor will come down to how well you can engage people long before they arrive on your doorstep, ready to talk.
The panel also defined what AI fluency actually looks like in practice. Can you embed AI into high-impact daily tasks, like pre-call research and follow-up summaries? Can you adapt when new tools emerge? Do you critically evaluate AI output before it reaches a family? The teams scoring low on those dimensions are not just slower. They risk damaging their credibility when it matters most.
## The Hole Nobody Is Filling
Here is what I keep coming back to. Every story above comes from outside the funeral profession. Building products. Enterprise software. Logistics. Business school research. And inside the funeral profession, there is a wide-open gap.
The tools that would let an independent funeral home owner or preneed agent build a modern, AI-supported sales and marketing system, the kind that keeps you present in your market, generates referrals, moves families through a conversation efficiently, and creates time and space for the personal touch that is still and always will be your magic, those tools are either hard to find, poorly adapted to your profession, or simply not being adopted. There is at least one really good now out there right now. If you want to hear more about it, call me at the VIP desk in Madison - 608-845-2252. If I’m here, I always pick-up.
That is the opportunity. And it is also the risk.
Because if you do not build this, someone will show up in your market who already has. The corporations have resources to do it. And increasingly, so do well-funded independents who are paying attention. The families who are more willing than ever to have this conversation will find whoever shows up in front of them first, most consistently, and with the most confidence.
AI gives you the ability to be that presence without burning yourself out. Research, follow-up, outreach cadence, content, appointment reminders. Those things can be systematized. What cannot be systematized is you sitting across from a family, earning their trust, and helping them make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
Do the unglamorous work of building the system. Then show up and do what only you can do.
-John
## Also Worth Noting
**Remento at NFDA 2026.**
A company called Remento exhibited at the National Funeral Directors Association convention in Charlotte this fall. Their product turns voice recordings into keepsake books, complete with QR codes that link readers back to the original audio. Families record stories via text or email prompts, no apps or passwords required, and Remento compiles them into a full-color hardcover. For funeral professionals thinking about ways to create value and start meaningful conversations with families before a death occurs, this is worth a look. More at agoodgoodbye.com.
(https://agoodgoodbye.com/tools-of-the-trade/whats-new-in-funeral-service-highlights-from-nfda-2026-part-one/)
Sources
Gartner Predicts 90% of B2B Buying Will Be AI-Agent Intermediated by 2028, Forcing Sellers to Rethink Commercial Playbooks
https://dev.to/blogwithsumit/your-next-buyer-is-an-ai-agent-selling-in-the-agentic-era-4mim
Retiring hospice CEO says families are increasingly willing to talk about end-of-life care
https://hospicenews.com/2026/11/12/hopehealth-ceo-retires-sees-change-on-hospices-horizon/
Gong Panel: Four Competencies That Define Top Sellers in the AI Era
https://www.gong.io/blog/ai-sales-talent-playbook
QXO CEO Says AI Could Double Sales-Force Productivity in One Business Unit as Platform Integration Proceeds
https://distributionstrategy.com/2026/11/qxo-says-ai-could-double-sales-productivity-as-it-integrates-building-products-acquisitions/
Wharton professor tests Claude Fable 5.2 on business launch and finds AI strong on research but unreliable on autonomous sales execution
Remento Story-Preservation Platform Exhibited at NFDA 2026 Convention
https://agoodgoodbye.com/tools-of-the-trade/whats-new-in-funeral-service-highlights-from-nfda-2026-part-one/