Ashworth Market Brief
by John Ashworth
The Sales Job Just Got Narrower, and That’s the Point - really…
Zillow Rentals runs a large direct sales operation. Each rep manages a territory of up to 200 property management accounts. Context on those accounts lives scattered across Salesforce, Databricks, conversational intelligence tools, Slack, email threads, and external signals. No single person can hold all of that and still walk into a call prepared to say something genuinely useful.
So they brought in an AI agent to do the holding. Every morning, each rep gets a short list: who to focus on, why, and what action to take. Renewal risk. Upsell opportunity. The right email, ready to approve. According to Actively AI’s announcement, those recommendations are hitting above 80% approval and action rates. Reps went live within a week. Meaningful results were visible in four weeks.
Jami Thomas, VP of Sales at Zillow Rentals, put it plainly: the best sales teams will run on proactive agents that take care of everything around the conversation, so the sales pros can focus on the customer.
That framing is worth sitting with.
The Machine Does the Research. You Do the Deciding.
I heard the keynote speaker at NFDA saying the same thing. This is the way. And the more you embrace it, the more opportunity you’ll create for yourself and those you work with.
Where your sales career might go from here…
Gartner data shows that 69% of B2B buyers deliberately turn to a human sales representative to validate what AI told them. The machine did the research. The buyer still wants a person to make sense of it. To read what’s actually going on. To earn their trust.
That is already the job in 2026.
When automated scores and agent recommendations flood into a manager’s view, the same principle applies one level up. The FMI forecast on sales coaching software makes this point directly: automated scores alone don’t confirm improvement. Managers still have to interpret the data in context. The number tells you something happened, or triggers a reminder or a closer look and the experienced human salesperson makes a decision about what to do about it.
What You Are Actually Being Hired to Do Now
If you are a mid-career salesperson who has always known that the real work happens in the conversation, this shift is good news, provided you position yourself correctly inside this new sales equation.
AI is absorbing the work that used to eat your day: the territory research, the account prioritization, the meeting prep, the follow-up email that needed to exist but didn’t because you ran out of time. That work is not glamorous. It is also not what separates the people who build real relationships from the people who don’t.
What remains, once the machine handles the memory and the logistics, is the actual job. Reading the room and the people inside of it. Asking the question the buyer didn’t know they needed to answer, and just at the right time. Being the person someone trusts enough to move forward with. The person the prospect is truly connected with. This will change over time too. Don’t kid yourself. I heard a statistic on the radio this morning that 70% of high-school students know someone who is erotically involved with a chatbot.
If you’ve spent years doing that work, across different industries and different kinds of buyers, you have something the AI genuinely cannot replicate. The challenge is naming it clearly enough that the people hiring or buying from you understand what they are getting. And for you to embrace your unique backgrounds, begin to build your knowledge vault, and then start building unique combinations of you and AI that take your ability to sell through service to an entirely different level.
The Zillow story illustrates the direction. Kelly McCauley, Director of Sales, described it this way: they spend less time researching and more time having the right conversations that drive deals. Instead as many of those other useless conversations that drive you crazy and steal your energy.
That’s the accelerant. Everything around the conversation gets handled. The conversation itself becomes the whole job. A good direct-response marketer already knows just how true this is. That if you build an expert sales and marketing system, steeped in education and service, you spend more and more time with people who have more affinity for you and what you’re offering; and a lot less time burning out on people who don’t belong in the same room as you.
This brief wouldn’t reach you at this pace without the valiant efforts of the AI tools that help me find, sort, and frame what matters. The writing is still mine. The research lift is shared. That’s the model.
Get the full Ashworth Market Brief each week at johnashworth.com/market-brief
- John
Sources
Actively AI Deploys Proactive Background Agents for Zillow Rentals Sales Teams Following Four-Week Pilot
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/actively-deploys-proactive-ai-agents-for-sales-productivity-at-zillow-rentals-302935251.htmlGartner data signals AI reshaping B2B sales rep roles toward advisory and validation work in 2026
https://bteanalytics.co/knowledge/how_are_growth_teams_adapting_to_b2b_sales_ai_in_2026.phpArrow Electronics Shifts to AI Infrastructure Services as Q3 Sales Rise 39%
http://distributionstrategy.com/2026/11/arrow-electronics-expands-ai-infrastructure-business-as-quarterly-sales-jump-39/AI Sales Tools Transforming Indian Sales Teams: Predictive Scoring, Agentic Automation and WhatsApp-First Workflows
https://www.inventiva.co.in/trends/top-10-best-ai-sales-tools-in-india-in-2027/FMI Projects Sales Coaching Software Market to Reach $113 Billion by 2036 as AI Reshapes Coaching Workflows
https://www.openpr.com/news/4674684/top-players-in-the-sales-coaching-software-market-fmi-forecasts18 AI Sales Tools Compared by Use Case: From LinkedIn Outreach to Revenue Forecasting
https://expandi.io/blog/ai-sales-tools/