AI Sales Role-Play Just Became a Gartner Category — and 72% of Reps Are Wasting the Time It Saves Them

Gartner has recognized AI sales role-play as a distinct market category, and Hyperbound’s read on what comes next centers on a number that should worry more sales leaders than it currently does: AI tools save sellers an average of 4.8 hours a week, but 72% of sales organizations fail to reinvest that reclaimed time into higher-value selling activity. Among the organizations that do reinvest it, results diverge sharply — 25% report 50%-plus ROI on their AI investment, while 20% report 50%-plus negative returns from the same category of spend. Gartner Senior Director Analyst Greg Hessong frames the shift underway as sales orgs moving “from revenue intelligence to revenue activation,” redesigning seller workflows rather than layering AI onto how reps already work.

The reinvestment gap isn’t hypothetical. Second Nature’s case study of United Rentals and the University of Houston — a combined 5,000-plus reps and 1,300-plus students per semester — found that reps running AI role-play saw 2.6% more revenue uplift than reps who didn’t, with lower performers seeing gains up to 35.2%, and that the uplift was consistently larger when a manager actively bridged practice sessions into real calls. The pattern in both pieces is the same: the AI tool creates the opening, but a manager or a deliberate reinvestment decision determines whether that opening turns into pipeline.

The category’s own growing pains show up in Hyperbound’s other data point: 69% of B2B buyers still turn to a human rep to validate what an AI-generated insight told them. Role-play tools can compress how fast a rep gets good. They can’t yet replace the moment a buyer decides to trust the person on the other end of the call.