RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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SpaceX is hiring Starlink sales people to win complex corporate and government deals.
Business leaders say AI can support sales, but trust and accountability still require humans.
Palantir is shrinking its sales team, though its model may be an exception.
One of the hottest jobs at SpaceX right now relies on an old-fashioned skill: talking to people.
CEO Elon Musk , who also founded xAI, the company behind the chatbot Grok, has spent years saying that AI and robots will take on more of the work humans do. Yet on SpaceX's earnings call Tuesday, he said the company is building a large enterprise sales team for the satellite internet system Starlink — work he described in distinctly human terms.
"This requires just going out there, talking to people, educating them about the currency of the Starlink system and where it's going," Musk said.
Musk's comments echo what other business leaders told Business Insider: Even as AI automates parts of sales, winning complex deals still requires a human touch. Good salespeople, they said, give buyers confidence that someone will be accountable if a product or service falls short.
"Generally speaking, people still want to buy from humans," said Brian Smith, founder of IA Business Advisors, a management consulting firm. "Even companies as large as SpaceX are selling relationships, not just a service or a technology."
AI can help, but humans still close
AI can still play a valuable part in the sales process. For example, it can be used for customer research, preparing pitch decks, and role-playing how to triumph over rejection.
Smith said his firm uses AI to create sales scripts tailored to prospective buyers in different regions. "AI is helping to get that done faster," he said.
The technology is likely to fall short, however, when it comes to closing a sale.
"AI is not going out for dinner with people to buy and sell," said Alan Stein , CEO of a career-coaching firm and a former hiring manager at Google, Meta, and American Express. While AI may be able to replace some professionals, he added that "relationship-driven roles like sales are going to be less impacted."
On Tuesday's SpaceX earnings call , Musk said the sales team's job will be to convince corporate and government customers that Starlink is reliable enough to serve as their primary internet provider, rather than as merely a backup.
While SpaceX is a household name that recently pulled off the largest IPO in history, it still needs to convince prospective corporate and government customers to purchase Starlink, and that's not something AI can likely do on its own, said Alex Sobol, cofounder of the Millennium Alliance, an invite-only community for C-suite executives in North America and Europe.
"Elon's probably not just relying on the fact that his products and technologies are received really well," said Sobol. "I think he realizes this is probably more complicated than anything he's put to market before, and it's going to need a lot of people in the field talking to customers, potential customers, advocates, and skeptics."
Palantir is shrinking its sales team
Musk's comments contrasted with those made by another high-profile CEO this week. Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote in a shareholder letter released Monday that his company's sales team is getting smaller , even as its commercial business is surging.
"It must be noted that we have achieved these results with a minuscule and shrinking sales head count, another way in which we have discarded conventional wisdom in favor of our own, unique path," Karp wrote.
Stein, Smith, and Sobol cautioned against interpreting Karp's remarks as evidence that AI is broadly replacing salespeople. They said Palantir may be unusual because of the strong demand for its products and the nature of its customer base.
"I don't think it's AI. I think it's Alex Karp's philosophy," said Stein.
Sobol said his own company is using AI to make its salespeople more efficient while continuing to expand the team. The Millennium Alliance has about 100 sales employees and 12 more scheduled to start in September, he said.
"We're hiring like crazy," he said.
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