An AI sales agent is software that does sales work without being asked. Depending on the agent, that means prospecting, answering inbound leads, keeping the CRM current, or working the deals in your pipeline. Which one you need depends on the job your team is short on. If that job is working open deals, Arrows is built for it.
Here’s our honest take: most of the “AI for sales” conversation has been about prospecting and building pipeline. That was the first obvious use case, so that’s where everyone went. But so much of sales is what happens after a deal is in your pipeline.
What is an AI sales agent?
An agent does a piece of sales work on its own once it’s set up. That’s the line between an agent and an assistant. An assistant waits for a prompt. You open it, point it at a deal, and ask for the follow-up. An agent acts when something happens: a call ends, an email arrives, a meeting moves, or a new person shows up on a thread. It decides what to do and does it, or prepares it for a person to approve.
The difference sounds small until you run a team. On a busy day, the deals that need the most attention are the ones nobody has time to prompt for.
Arrows sits on the agent side of that line. No prompt required.
The four jobs AI sales agents do
Most agents on the market are built for one of four jobs. The first three show up on almost every list. The fourth usually doesn’t.
1. Outbound prospecting
These agents find accounts, research them, write the first message, and book meetings. They’re often called AI SDRs. HubSpot’s Prospecting agent, Artisan’s Ava, 11x’s email and social agents, and Salesforce’s Agentforce Prospecting agent all describe this job.
2. Inbound response
These agents answer the leads that come to you, qualify them, and get a meeting on the calendar fast. 11x’s chat and voice agents and Salesforce’s Engagement agent describe this job.
3. Keeping records and call data current
These agents work on the records you already keep. They update opportunity fields, summarize deals and calls, and run recurring tasks inside the CRM or sales platform you already use. Salesforce’s Pipeline Management agent, Outreach’s Deal Agent, Day AI, and Gong’s Agents sit here.
4. Working open deals
This is the work between calls on every deal in your pipeline. Call prep, the follow-up email, the CRM update, multi-threading to the people who haven’t joined a call yet, research on a new stakeholder, and the nudge when a deal goes quiet.
Our CEO, Daniel Zarick, put the problem this way: “Sales output got cheap fast. But follow-ups still go out late. The CRM is never current. And fifteen deals go quiet while your reps work their top five.”
Your CRM tells you where every deal was. Nothing in your stack decides what happens next. That’s the job Arrows does.
The best AI sales agents for B2B sales teams
Here are eight agents, placed by job.
| Agent | Job | Who approves before it sends | Price as listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arrows | Working open deals | Nothing sends until a rep approves it | Priced on deals worked, not seats |
| Outreach Deal Agent | Opportunity updates and deal summaries | Updates applied automatically, or reviewed and edited by sellers first, per Outreach | Not listed on the Deal Agent page |
| Salesforce Agentforce | Several: prospecting, inbound, pipeline, coaching, quoting, and more | Pipeline Management agent: autonomous mode, or review and approve in suggestive mode. Not stated for the others | Agentforce for Sales add-on: $125 per user per month, billed annually |
| HubSpot Prospecting agent | Outbound prospecting | Review and edit drafts before they send, or switch to fully autonomous mode, per HubSpot | $1 per lead it recommends outreach for, paid in HubSpot Credits |
| Day AI | CRM upkeep and call coaching | Not stated on its product page | Not listed on its product page |
| Gong Agents | Recurring AI tasks inside Gong | Outputs appear in Gong Assistant, per Gong | Available on any Gong plan; Gong says running Agents uses no AI Credits |
| 11x | Outbound and inbound, by channel | Not stated on its homepage | Not listed; you book a demo |
| Artisan (Ava) | Outbound prospecting | Approval mode or let Ava send, chosen per campaign, per Artisan | Free to start, per Artisan; no figure on the page |
Arrows: working open deals
Arrows is promptless AI for AEs. It’s built for B2B sales teams whose AEs carry a pipeline of open deals and can’t give every one of them their best work.
Two words carry the idea. The playbook is how your team works its best deals, written in plain English: your methodology, your buyers, and what your top reps do on instinct. Every time something happens on a deal, the agent reads the playbook and decides the best next action for that deal. The gameplan is a path to close for each deal, built from the playbook and from what’s actually happening on that deal. A call doesn’t trigger a fixed list of tasks. It changes the plan from now until the close date.
From there, Arrows does everything you expect your reps to do on every deal, plus everything you wish they did, down to the battle card before a competitive demo. Every follow-up, CRM update, and sales room refresh arrives finished, one click from done, for a rep to approve. Here’s what Arrows does for AEs day to day.
Worth knowing: it takes one kickoff call. The agents start working your open deals from your best rep’s playbook that same day.
Outreach Deal Agent
Outreach’s Deal Agent is about the opportunity record. Outreach says it works by “surfacing AI-recommended updates to your opportunity fields and providing custom AI deal summaries.” It draws on “conversational intelligence captured from Outreach calls and meetings.” It makes sense if your team already runs its selling in Outreach.
Worth knowing: Outreach says Deal Agent works “directly within the Outreach platform or via the Slack integration,” with “supported CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.”
Salesforce Agentforce
Salesforce’s page lists its Agentforce sales agents by job: Prospecting, Engagement, Pipeline Management, Account Management, Sales Coaching, Quoting, and Partner Success. On prospecting, Salesforce says “Agentforce automatically ranks prospects using intent signals from enrichment data” and “generates brand-aligned, personalized outreach for every prospect.” For inbound, the page says to “route inbound leads to Agentforce and set clear guardrails for when and how to reach out.” Sales Coaching offers Pitch Practice and role-plays “tailored to each deal and deal stage.” It fits a Salesforce team that wants agents across several jobs from one vendor.
Worth knowing: Salesforce’s add-ons page says Agentforce for Sales is available for purchase with the Enterprise/Core, Unlimited/Advanced, and Performance editions.
HubSpot Prospecting agent
HubSpot says its Prospecting agent “researches accounts, finds the right contacts, and drafts personalized outreach.” It “monitors buying signals, scores accounts against your ideal customer profile,” and “drafts emails in each rep’s voice.” It’s for HubSpot teams that want outbound prospecting inside their CRM.
Worth knowing: HubSpot says it sources the buying committee from data providers such as ZoomInfo and Apollo.
Day AI
Day AI’s product page has sections titled “Never update the CRM again” and “One skill. Eighteen agents. Every call coached.” It says its agents can “create and run workflows before your day begins, using scheduled runs and event triggers.” Day AI suits teams that want agents doing the CRM upkeep, with coaching on every call.
Worth knowing: Day AI lists Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Zoom, Gong, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zapier among its integrations.
Gong Agents
Gong’s help article says Agents “let team members turn recurring AI tasks into reusable workflows.” A team member builds each one for a task they repeat, on top of the calls, accounts, and opportunities your team already has in Gong, which puts them closer to the assistant side of the line. They’re for teams already on Gong.
Worth knowing: Gong’s help article says each agent “is available only to the team member who created it.”
11x
11x sells agents by channel. Its homepage describes “Email & social agents built to research every account, craft a relevant message, and earn the reply,” “Chat agents built to answer instantly and qualify prospects without a form,” and “Voice agents built to qualify and convert inbound demand, and drive expansion revenue,” plus SMS and WhatsApp agents for follow-up. It fits teams that want outbound and inbound covered across several channels.
Worth knowing: 11x says its inbound agents respond “in under 60 seconds.”
Artisan (Ava)
Artisan’s page introduces “Ava, the autonomous AI BDR built for enterprise. Ava sources leads, writes personalized emails, handles replies, and books meetings on your reps’ calendars.” It’s for teams that want an outbound BDR agent filling the calendar.
Worth knowing: Artisan says Ava integrates with Salesforce and HubSpot, and its FAQ says Ava “creates a list of qualified prospects for your reps to dial and shows full context and talking points on each lead.”
What working an open deal looks like
The fourth job is easier to see than to describe. Here’s one real deal from our own pipeline, anonymized. One discovery call on September 17, and nothing booked after it. This is what the gameplan did over the next three weeks with no call on the calendar.
- September 17, right after the call: follow-up email and CRM update drafted. The buyer had said he’d loop in a chief of staff and a GTM engineer, so Arrows researched both, drafted the intro ask, and queued a LinkedIn connect.
- September 24: a warm bump drafted with a relevant proof point, timed ahead of the early-October reconnect the buyer had named.
- September 28: the buyer emailed that they’re pausing until they hire a sales leader. Arrows drafted the reply and proposed a CRM update: push the close date, lower confidence, and set a new next step.
- October 5: checked public sources for a sales-leader announcement, so the next note could name them.
- October 6: re-engagement note drafted, with a short walkthrough to forward to the new hire.
Every draft and every proposed CRM change waited for the rep. Nobody prompted any of it. The plan re-formed each time something changed, and after the buyer’s email on September 28, the next two steps were about the sales leader they planned to hire.
Can you do this with Claude or ChatGPT instead?
For one rep, often yes. HubSpot’s page for its Claude connector says “Claude uses the HubSpot MCP to read from and write to your CRM directly from any conversation,” and that the connector is available for free.
We tested the team version on ourselves. In January, our two reps started working every deal through Claude, with Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Grain, and HubSpot connected, plus scheduled tasks in Cowork. For a team, it broke in four places: someone always had to prompt it, context drifted, every rep ended up with their own version of the skills, and nobody owned the plan for each deal. The complaint we heard most: “I keep having to prompt this.”
What we learned: the work has to happen whether or not anyone asks. It has to run the same way for every rep, on every deal. And somebody has to keep it current as your process changes. The full story is in what happened when we ran our sales team in Claude, and the side-by-side is on Arrows vs. Claude for sales teams.
How to choose an AI sales agent
Start with the job. Find where your deals stall, then look only at the agents built for that job. After that, three questions separate the options.
Who approves before anything sends?
Read the approval column first. HubSpot, Artisan, Outreach, and Salesforce’s Pipeline Management agent each describe a reviewed mode and an automatic one. Decide which you want before the demo, and ask which mode your account starts in.
Buyers have a view on this too. A Gartner survey of B2B buyers found 69% prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. When a buyer checks with your rep, the rep should already know what the agent said. With Arrows today, nothing sends until a rep approves it.
Does it act without a prompt?
Ask what starts the work. If a person has to ask every time, you’ve bought an assistant. If a fixed trigger starts it, you’ve bought a workflow. A workflow says: when this happens, do this. If something else happens in between (the buyer replies before the follow-up goes out, a stakeholder changes, the timeline slips), the next instruction is already wrong, because nothing re-reads the situation. An agent that reads the deal each time something happens can change course.
Does it work with the CRM and notetaker you already have?
Gartner VP Analyst Dan Gottlieb made the point in Gartner’s July 2026 prediction: “AI agents should not be viewed as a shortcut to sales productivity. They are only as effective as the systems they operate within. If those systems are fragmented, the agents will scale the fragmentation.”
So pick the agent that reads the systems your team already keeps current, and writes approved changes back to them. Arrows works with HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio, Close, and Pipedrive, and reads calls from Grain, Granola, Fireflies, Fathom, and Gong. Here’s the full list of CRM and notetaker integrations.
