When we’re handed a long, complicated sales proposal these days, the instinct is increasingly to take a shortcut: paste the email into Gemini or ChatGPT and ask it to explain what the seller actually meant. The AI delivers a summary in seconds, but according to psychologist and marketing strategist Roberto Levak, that convenience comes with a catch.
Speaking on an AI-in-sales panel, Levak warned that once AI starts summarizing offers on our behalf, it effectively becomes a gatekeeper standing between buyers and their decisions, and gatekeepers can drop things. A single detail that gets quietly left out of an AI-generated summary can turn out to be decisive. The buyer reads the shortened version, never sees that one critical piece of information, and ends up making a purchase decision without it. He concludes that people still need to go through a full offer themselves before committing to a purchase, rather than outsourcing that judgment entirely to an AI recap.
Reading a buyer before you even meet them
Levak also described how AI is starting to change the preparation stage of sales, well before a meeting ever happens. AI tools can now analyze the psychological profile of a prospective buyer in advance, for instance, by scanning their public social media activity. That kind of profiling helps a salesperson gauge compatibility early on, since long-term fit matters for any lasting business relationship. It also makes the meeting itself easier to navigate: knowing ahead of time what topics to raise, what tone to strike, and what to avoid. Work that used to be done manually, or outsourced entirely, AI can now speed up dramatically.
Even so, Levak was clear that none of this changes what actually closes a deal. The end goal remains building a genuine connection with the other person, and that, he argued, is exactly where the value of a human being becomes obvious again, because people trust people. Technology can be relied on for plenty of things, but it doesn’t carry intentions the way a person does. It can be accurate, he noted, but can it be honest? Does it hold moral positions, or a vision? In his view, those are games only humans play, not technology.
What experience is really worth
Asked where sales is headed, Levak offered a comparison to medicine: a physician’s years of hands-on experience treating real patients, and the judgment that comes with that experience, outweigh whatever AI can pull together from textbooks or online sources. He expects the same pattern to play out in sales. Experienced, skilled salespeople — the ones with real depth behind their instincts — will become even harder to replace. Weaker performers, without that depth of experience to fall back on, will find themselves easier to replace than ever.
Levak’s overall reading of the panel’s discussion was straightforward: AI is already reshaping how offers are written, read, and prepared for, but it’s not replacing sales, and the human element isn’t going anywhere.
Based on reporting by Lider (July 4, 2026), from a panel at Lider’s Marketing & Sales by Numbers conference Original: https://lidermedia.hr/tvrtke-i-trzista/ai-postaje-gatekeeper-u-donosenju-odluka-o-kupnji/