AI- ENABLED TRANSFORMATIONS IN SALES ORGANIZATIONS: A SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a farfetched reality depicted in movies from decades ago.The AI revolution has begun transforming every aspect of organizational life.Business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations are among the business sectors profoundly affected by AI.Unlike previous sales technologies that disrupted B2B sales, such as sales force automation (SFA), customer relationship management (CRM), or social media platforms that--digitized and streamlined existing work routines of salespersons and sales managers-AI introduces a qualitatively different set of dynamics.Its advanced capabilities to mimic human behavior and intervein in decisionmaking, reshape traditional ways of approaching, developing, and maintaining buyer-seller relationships, reconfiguring how work sales work is organized.While sales organizations' interest in adopting AI has grown rapidly, recent industry reports reveal that the optimization of these technologies has fallen short of managerial expectations, with many forms struggling to realize the expected value from AI investments.Guided by the overarching research question "How do AI-enabled transformations reshape the socio-technical systems of sales organizations?", the thesis develops both conceptual and empirical insights by drawing on socio-technical systems theory (STS), which emphasizes that technologyinduced change cannot be understood in isolation but unfolds through interactions between people, structures, technologies, and work tasks.The thesis is comprised of three articles.Article I introduces STS as an external grand theory to the sales technology research domain to understand technology-enabled transformations holistically.By synthesizing literature across disciplines, Article I establishes the theoretical scaffolding for the thesis by foregrounding the core constructs of STS-socio-technical inertia, microfoundations, and sociomateriality.Article II empirically explores how AI reconfigures B2B sales processes across the pre-sales, sales, and postsales phases, illustrating that transformations brough forth by AI into the sales processes are recursive and uneven, characterized by tensions such as efficiency vs. contextual sensitivity of AI insights as well as managerial oversight vs. salesperson autonomy.Article III situates the analysis within the banking industry, where regulatory constraints, legacy infrastructures, and trust-based customer relationships shape how AI is integrated into customer advisory and sales practices.The findings underscore the notion that AI not only automates and augments sales tasks but also reshapes professional identities, redistributes decision-making authority, and redefines what constitutes as professional expertise.Taken together, the three articles in this thesis underline that AI-enabled transformations in sales organizations can be best understood as a sociotechnical phenomenon unfolding through five socio-technical mechanisms: centralization and power redistribution, data institutionalization and technology innovation, AI individualization and institutionalization of human-AI collaborations, identity negotiation and role reconfiguration, and legitimation of expertise and skill reconstitution.These mechanisms reveal that tensions arising from AI-enabled transformations are not mere obstacles but socio-technical entanglements that expose misalignments in sociotechnical sub-systems and that provide opportunities for sales organizations to learn and innovate.
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