Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference: Day 2 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Day 2 of the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 2, we are highlighting five AI use cases actually improving sales productivity and performance, understanding AI’s impact on ROI and sales capacity, and how to use AI to build unbreakable sales organizations.

• Gartner Survey Shows 31% of Chief Sales Officers Cited Difficulty Proving ROI of AI-driven Tools as a Top Challenge for Sales Objectives in 2026
• Gartner Survey Finds AI Saves Sellers Nearly 5 Hours Per Week, Yet 72% of Sales Organizations Fail to Reinvest Time in High-Value Activities
• Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights
• Gartner Survey Finds Sales Organizations That Provide AI-Enabled Next Best Actions Are 2.6x More Likely to Achieve Commercial Growth

Presented by Dan Gottlieb, Vice President Analyst, Gartner

Sales leaders are under intense pressure to “do more with less,” but many AI investments are still getting stuck in pilots or delivering uneven adoption. In this session, Dan Gottlieb, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, cut through the hype and discussed what's actually working right now.

• The 5 sales AI use cases for improving productivity now include: AI-powered account and buyer intelligence; lead management; deal orchestration; sales coaching; and pipeline and forecast management.

• “AI-powered account and buyer intelligence is transforming how sellers prepare and win. By researching across multiple data sources, AI guides sellers with actionable insights and recommendations as it scans data, turns it into insight, and embeds a point of view directly into the seller’s workflow.”

• “In lead management, agentic AI combined with automation is redefining inbound qualification—handling prospects and booking meetings digitally at scale. Within just two months of deploying AI SDRs, companies are seeing 91% more meetings booked, and a 50% chat-to-meeting conversion rate.”

• “Deal orchestration uses AI to analyze signals, assess risk, and recommend next-best actions—while enabling coordinated, team-based selling. It brings together stakeholder alignment, deal momentum, and guided execution, all configured with company and product expertise.”

• “Sales coaching identifies skills gaps and sales productivity blockers, while guiding managers with precise, data-driven coaching recommendations. Outcomes include a 55% reduction in onboarding ramp time, 21% improvement in seller performance, and 14% stronger opportunity progression.”

• “Pipeline and forecast management is shifting from static dashboards to proactive, AI-driven interrogation of the business. Leaders can quickly uncover hidden issues, ask better follow-up questions, and make smarter resourcing decisions to consistently hit their number.”

   

  Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Dan Gottlieb by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

Presented by Steve Rietberg, Vice President Analyst, Gartner 

As AI becomes embedded across the revenue technology stack, Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) are under growing pressure to forecast sales capacity further into the future—yet AI also makes those forecasts harder to trust. In this session,  Steve Rietberg, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, explained why traditional capacity models (headcount × average productivity) are no longer sufficient for “human + AI” sales organizations

• “Sales capacity isn’t your target or your budget. It’s a prediction of what your organization is actually capable of delivering, measured in seller time, deals managed, or revenue output.”

• “The classic mode of Sales Capacity = Headcount × Average Productivity can’t keep up with AI, because it can’t separate human capacity from digital capacity.”

• “A Digital Capacity Unit (dCU) is not the number of AI tools you bought, and it’s not your vendor’s agentic ‘work units.’ A dCU is the human-equivalent capacity AI adds, grounded in what changes at the workflow level.”

• “Digital ROI (dROI) is a powerful lens, but it’s not the same as true ROI. If sellers can’t capitalize on time savings, then ROI won’t improve, and that gap is a leadership problem to solve.”

• “The goal isn’t a ‘magic bullet’ forecast. The goal is a model you can defend, —one that helps you place smarter bets on where AI can safely add capacity, and where hiring is still the more cost-effective lever.”

   

  Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Steve Rietberg by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

Presented by Luke Tipping, Director Analyst, Gartner 

Disruption is no longer a rare event that explains away missed numbers — it’s a constant condition that exposes whether sales organizations are built to adapt or built to break. In this session, Luke Tipping, Director Analyst at Gartner, shared a strategic playbook for weaving disruption-readiness into a CSO’s commercial model.  

• “Almost half of CSOs tell us they struggle to adapt strategic plans when the business context shifts — being reactive creates revenue unpredictability.”

• “Lack of risk visibility is no longer an excuse when AI expands access to risk intelligence and disruption signals.”

• “Revenue resilience isn’t disaster recovery. It’s the capability to detect change earlier, respond faster, and emerge stronger than competitors.”

• “Standardized scales turn disruption debates into comparable data. CSOs evaluate scenarios by likelihood, impact, and velocity, not opinions.”

• “Measure every response with predefined metrics. Without them, you can’t tell whether your actions worked or whether you just got lucky.”

   

  Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Luke Tipping by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.