AI-Enabled SalesTech: Separating Hype from the Real Disruption
Clementine Gazay
March 2025
The Rise of AI in SalesTech
At XAnge, we’ve been actively tracking and discussing the explosion of AI-enabled SalesTech solutions across Europe. Last year in France alone, over €110M in funding was poured into early-stage Sales, Customer Care & Marketing AI Startups in 2024 – more than 40% of new capital going into horizontal AI solutions. If you remove outlier Photoroom, that’s 1 of every 2 euros invested in horizontal AI solutions in France.
Seems huge, but unsurprising given the market depth of sales teams. From B2C to B2B, SMBs to startups in hypergrowth, to generational enterprises, 13.7M Europeans or 7% of total EU employment are “sales workers” looking to boost their contact, conversion, and closing rates.
Startups are surfing on the new capabilities brought about by AI to build hundreds of new products with the promise of better lead gen (lead tracking & enrichment), better data (CRM optimization, enablement, reporting), and even full contact automation with AI SDRs and BDRs.
Among the first “winners” of the current AI SalesTech movement are UK-native 11x and Artisan building AI sales reps. Both are growing at breakneck speed and securing head-turning funding rounds - take 11X’s $24 million Series A led by Benchmark in September followed almost immediately by a $50 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz.
As investors, we’re looking to pick the well-packaged “hype” (or given recent accusations 11x has been misreporting ARR by 3-4x – should we dare say fraud?) from the real, sustainable disruption.
What’s Driving Real Change?
Previous waves of SalesTech focused on digitalizing customer interactions and providing sales intelligence. Launched in 2014, LinkedIn SalesNav became fully integrated in modern sales stacks about 5 years ago. Around 2020, RevOps leaders shifted their focus from lead-gen optimization to integrating enablement tools like Outreach.io & Gong into their workflows.
But in 2025, the world is a different place – the next frontier isn’t about optimizing but fully automating work previously done by sales reps.
With LLMs as the backbone of AI-native sales tools, scalability and hypergrowth potential are on a new level. Relying on AI voice model adaptation tools like Gladia, SalesTech products can develop capabilities to support dozens of languages nearly instantly. Solutions with near-complete automation in voice and intent can run 24/7. Tech stacks are more easily integrated than ever before, built on RAGs that adapt to specific industry use cases with ease.
ROI is also more ambitious and straightforward than ever before. With B2B SDRs costing between €60-€110K per year and spending 50-60% of their time on admin tasks, even cutting their lead identification time in half can mean hundreds of thousands in savings for the average 15 person B2B sales team.
As a result, AI-driven sales solutions are cutting the time to reach $1M ARR dramatically. From what we’ve seen at XAnge, the best startups surpass the benchmark in just a few months, with sales cycles around 2 weeks for top performers. Hypergrowth being the first cause of addiction among VCs, it’s not surprising the deals don’t stop.
But let’s not forget there is a sea of difference between the limits of innovation and the ground reality. Speaking with sales professionals at large European enterprises, a large population of sales leaders aren’t near full speed on AI SDRs. Testing the waters with automated CRM enrichment tools and lead gen first, most sales teams are on different maturity levels and are still working on incorporating the pre-ChatGPT innovators.
Amid the excitement, we can’t ignore the orange flags.
The speed at which companies are fundraising and reaching new heights of growth is impressive, but sustaining that revenue is a different challenge altogether. Churn remains a major issue. While AI can scale outreach, the quality of leads isn’t necessarily improving. More customer contact & outreach doesn’t mean better conversions, and we’re seeing a growing gap between vanity metrics (emails sent, meetings booked) and actual sales growth. This is also reflected in churn from AI Sales tools. The same teams taking a few months to reach $1M ARR can be victims of monthly logo churn that can range from 40-50% - deadly in the context of sustainable growth.
Then there’s the potential brand and reputation risk. AI SDRs, if not deployed thoughtfully, can become nothing more than sophisticated spam cannons. We’ve seen this happen before in automated email sequencing—initial excitement, followed by a decline in effectiveness as recipients become desensitized. We’ve spoken with early-stage startup sales teams who won’t even dial prospects with phone numbers tied to a business and only operate with phone numbers tied to individuals – if they fall for a call center, phone pick-up rate will drop to near 0. Will AI-powered sales outreach follow the same trajectory? And for high-touch enterprise sales, where relationships are paramount, will full automation ultimately hurt more than it helps?
Another major concern is integration. Many of these AI-driven tools claim to enhance sales workflows, but too often they lack deep CRM integrations beyond just logging meetings. And even when integrations exist, they’re only as good as the data within the CRM—the infamous garbage in / garbage out. Especially when dealing with companies with field sales or sales requiring off-line presence, the quality of CRM data simply isn’t good enough to build an AI stack on top. Some sales leaders are focusing on ramping up on AI knowledge management tools like Dust to build up their own integrating agents, skipping the need for tool-specific integrations altogether.
From an economics perspective, while things change fast, the pricing of these tools is another factor holding back wide-scale adoption. With AI SDR costs reaching $5,000 for 3,000 contacts / over $1.50 per contact, it’s a steep price that many businesses aren’t yet willing to pay for low success rates.
The XAnge PoV: Where We Stand Today
Surveying a selection of sales leaders in the European ecosystem, we’re convinced the use of AI to automate sales interactions will fundamentally change RevOps. But it’s still early innings in from an adoption perspective and the pace at which new SalesTech startups are being created is setting up a perfect storm for a graveyard of pre-seed companies who won’t make it past their 2024 funding rounds.
From where we’re sitting:
- Despite the funding gold rush, enterprise adoption is taking longer than expected. Some hypergrowth SaaS companies are running AI-powered sales experiments but traditional enterprises remain hesitant. Large RevOps teams are focused on automating CRM data and team enablement with tools like Modjo, Donna as a priority, laying the foundations of a healthy data stack first.
- AI SDRs are being integrated by many teams but in the grand scheme of business processes, non-human voice communications are in the experimental phase. We are in the early stages of implementing robo-callers like Topo.io’s AI SDRs. CROs of European scale-ups we’ve spoken with share that results for fully automated voice solutions aren’t there yet and can’t be put on autopilot now – but with the pace of change, it's coming soon.
- As of now, hybrid solutions outperform full AI automation. A blended approach—leveraging custom GPTs, call intelligence, and smart automation—is currently proving more effective than fully AI-driven SDRs. Companies in the XAnge portfolio have been more likely to use a mix of ChatGPT & Perplexity to improve automated communications than to fully outsource these tasks to point solutions.
- Internal buy-in is critical. No matter how advanced the tool is, if sales leaders aren’t engaged, adoption won’t stick. The CRO of a well-known European unicorn reports that even in the most tech-savvy organizations, a main challenge to adoption remains the time-old change management and education processes.
- Integration capabilities is a true moat. The most successful AI SalesTech companies will need to embed deeply into sales operations not just to book meetings, but to drive meaningful pipeline outcomes. This requires hyper personalization and thus real integration with company data sources and context. There is value to creating and leveraging data from integrations.
When it comes to sales, leaders feel the human touch will always matter. While its clear non-core sales activities in lead gen and reporting will be easy candidates for AI automation, this isn’t as straightforward for contact activities. Especially for complex, high-ticket sales, AI simply can’t replace the nuance and relationship-building that humans bring to the table. CROs feel that while an automated SDR excels at booking meetings, the emotional intelligence required to nurture relationships and convert prospects into customers is still largely a human-driven process. In high-value B2B sales, founder-led or highly personalized outreach consistently delivers stronger results. And if robot outreach becomes table stakes, human intervention will be needed to stand out of the lot.
Special thanks to Alexis du Peloux for his guidance and Elsa Hayoun & Mohamed El Gamil for their contributions to this market map.