My industry wants you to fire your sales team. One of my customers plans to double theirs

EliseAI plans to double its sales team over the next 12 months.

The company, which sells AI to housing and health care businesses and is a customer of my company, says its sales headcount has already grown 74% over the past year.

Every one of its salespeople uses AI, according to Ben Rey, its vice president of enterprise sales.

EliseAI even builds some of its own tools because, he says, outside vendors can’t keep up.

“We’ve tripled the productivity of our AEs, and many of them now close $5 million to $15 million per quarter each,” Rey says.

“That productivity has us hiring faster than ever.” At Attention , I build AI for sales teams, so this is a particularly interesting thing to hear.

My industry has spent years selling the idea that software will let you stop paying salespeople.

One vendor currently advertises, “Replace your $90k SDR with our AI Sales Agent.” The savings are easy to picture.

A salary is a large expense, and a software subscription looks small beside it.

But a salesperson also brings in business.

If AI helps that person win more of it, a company with room to grow has a reason to hire another.

EliseAI is making that calculation.

Its salespeople have become more productive, and it sees an opportunity to put more of them to work.

Those are company-reported results.