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Every sales leader I talk to right now wants to mandate AI use for their wholesalers.
The pitch is always the same. Example: Use AI to do your pre-meeting research. Here's a prompt. Go.
That instruction quietly assumes something. It assumes the wholesaler was already doing pre-meeting research before AI showed up. Many of them weren't.
So you hand someone the most powerful research tool they've ever had access to, and they don't know what to do with it. Not because the tool is confusing. Because there was no process underneath it to begin with.
It's like handing someone who's never picked up a golf club a sand wedge and a page of instructions on escaping a bunker. The instructions aren't the problem. The problem is you skipped the part where they learn to golf.
This is what AI is actually doing inside most wholesaling teams. It isn't making weak processes strong. It's making weak processes visible.
A wholesaler with a real pre-call routine uses AI and gets sharper. Faster prep, better questions, more relevant talking points. A wholesaler with no pre-call routine uses AI and produces a generic summary they don't know how to use, in a meeting they weren't going to prepare for anyway.
Same tool. Same prompt. Completely different outcome. The difference was never the AI.
AI Prompts are NOT Sales Enablement
This is the part managers keep missing. Distributing prompts feels like enablement. It feels like progress. But a prompt is an accelerant, not a foundation. Pour it on a process that doesn't exist and you don't get speed. You get noise, faster.
Before you mandate AI adoption, look at what your wholesalers are actually doing today. Do they have a defined pre-meeting workflow? Do they know what a good research output even looks like.? Do they know what they're supposed to do with the information once they have it?
If the answer to any of these is "no," the AI rollout isn't your first move. It's your second. Shore up the workflow first. Define what preparation actually means on your team. Then hand them the tool.
Skip that step and you'll get adoption numbers that look great in a dashboard and a sales team that's no closer to selling better.
This is a lot of what I'm doing with teams right now. Not just teaching the tools. Diagnosing the process gaps AI is dragging into the light, and fixing those first.
Let me know if you want to talk about what that looks like for your team.
Related: Five Quick Checks to See If You're Actually Using AI in Your Practice