AI-enabled social media: implications for salespeople, sales leadership, and sales organizations

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded within social media, AI-enabled social media is increasingly changing how salespeople, sales leaders, and sales organizations engage with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders. Yet, sales research has largely focused on how sales actors use traditional social media with little emphasis on the implications of AI, a notable gap that also remains in the rapidly evolving research on AI in B2B sales. Thus, there is limited understanding of how embedding AI within social media alters the action possibilities available to sales actors. Drawing on affordance theory, we define AI-enabled social media and examine how AI alters and extends traditional social media affordances across external social media and enterprise social media (ESM), with implications for salespeople across the sales process, sales leadership across key leadership roles, and sales organizations across key organizational domains. We then discuss theoretical and managerial implications and develop a research agenda for advancing knowledge of AI-enabled social media in B2B sales.