You Bought the AI. You Forgot the System That Makes It Work.

Gartner's Leadership Vision 2026 report outlines the top three strategic priorities for sales enablement leaders. If you haven't read it, the #1 priority is to focus on AI in Leadership and Team Strategy. 

But, here's the line that should stop you cold:

"Leaders across enterprises expect teams to find new efficiencies and optimizations through AI, but many enablement functions operate without a charter, struggle to operate at the speed of change, and can't overcome seller resistance."

The report isn't saying don't buy the tools or don't build the stack. It's simply asking a harder question: Do you have a plan to change behavior at the speed your AI investment requires?

That's a different problem. And most sales leaders are solving the wrong one.

The Investment Is Real. So Is the Waste.

Let's talk about what's actually happening inside most sales organizations right now. 

A 10-person sales team running modern AI-enabled tools (Gong, Clari, Salesloft, or similar) is spending somewhere between $6,000 and $18,000 per year in licensing alone. That's before implementation, training, or a single hour of manager time. 

Now here's the number no one wants to say out loud: multiple studies show that fewer than half of reps use AI tools consistently, and some put that number as low as 30%. Which means on a typical team, somewhere between 5 and 7 out of 10 reps are generating call summaries nobody reads, action items nobody schedules, and follow-up suggestions nobody sends. 

You're not getting a 30% return on your AI investment. You're getting less. Possibly much less. 

But here's what that licensing investment is hiding: the performance gap underneath it. 

If consistent AI usage drives even a 5% lift in win rate on a $1.5M quota, that's $75,000 per rep per year. Across a 10-person team, that's $750,000 in recoverable revenue sitting on the table, waiting for someone to actually install the behavioral system around the tools. 

Every month that you wait costs you roughly $62,500. 

That's not a technology problem. That's a leadership problem.  

AI Doesn't Have a Resistance Problem. Your Sellers Do.

Gartner names seller resistance as one of the primary barriers to enablement ROI in 2026. They're right. But the reason most organizations can't overcome it is that they're treating AI adoption like a software rollout instead of a behavior change initiative.

Here's what behavior change actually looks like in most organizations: licenses get purchased, a demo happens, a best-practices email goes out, and adoption becomes "the rep's responsibility."

That is not enablement. That is distribution. Nothing more than a hope and a prayer.

Reps don't avoid AI because they think it doesn't work. They avoid it because it's new, it slows them down at first, and it forces them to sit inside lost deals and uncomfortable data.

Relationship instinct feels faster. Winging a meeting feels easier. AI requires structure, and structure requires change.

Change always meets resistance.  Unless a leader is standing in the gap, making the new behavior visible, specific, and expected, the resistance will pull users back to the old, comfortable behaviors.    

The Real Gap Gartner Is Pointing To

Priority one in Gartner's 2026 report isn't "buy better tools." It's this: 

"Enablement must orchestrate seller behaviors at scale, leverage data-driven insights to identify gaps, track behavior change, and proactively target interventions." 

Orchestrate behavior. Track behavior change. Proactively intervene. 

That's a coaching system. Not a tech system. 

And right now, most managers aren't equipped to run it. They know how to review pipeline numbers. They know how to run a forecast call. They do not know how to look at an AI-generated call summary and coach against what it surfaces. 

That's the gap. Not the platform. Its’ the manager standing between the platform and the rep. 

What It Looks Like When It Works

The fix isn't complicated. It requires discipline and leadership. 

It starts in the weekly 1:1. Instead of "How's your pipeline?" the manager asks: "What did AI surface from your last call?" "Show me the action items. Are they on your calendar?" "What did AI flag as the real risk in this deal?" "How did you use AI to prep for this meeting?" 

Now the behavior is visible. Visible behavior can be coached. Coached behavior compounds. 

It also requires structure beyond the conversation: stored prompt libraries so reps aren't starting from scratch, standardized workflows so AI usage becomes low-friction and high-repetition, and leadership modeling so managers are using the same tools they're holding reps accountable to. 

That's how behaviors normalize. That's how a $750,000 performance gap becomes recoverable revenue. 

The Diagnostic Question

Here's the one that matters:

If your team stopped using AI tomorrow, would your revenue change?

If the honest answer is "not much," then you haven't installed AI. You've installed access. And access without behavioral accountability is just expensive shelfware.

Gartner's report confirms what I see every week with sales leaders: the organizations winning with AI in 2026 won't be the ones with the best tools. They'll be the ones with the best behavioral systems surrounding those tools.

AI is not your problem. Behavior is. And behavior doesn't change without leadership taking point.

If you're investing in AI and not seeing the performance lift, the platform isn't failing you. The system around it is.

That's exactly what a Sales Performance Diagnostic is designed to surface: the specific behavioral gaps between your AI investment and your revenue results, and a clear path to close them.

If you want to have that conversation, I'd like to have it with you.

Schedule a Sales Performance Diagnostic, and we can chat about the best system to move your organization forward. 

Reference: Gartner Leadership Vision 2026 — Top 3 Strategic Priorities for Sales Enablement Leaders. Available at gartner.com (registration required).