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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation tools appear to be saving sales professionals over two hours of work each day a new study has found.

According to the software company HubSpot, sales teams are saving two hours and 15 minutes each day by utilising AI tools to automate manual tasks such as meeting scheduling, note-taking, outreach creation and editing, and data entry.

The study surveyed 648 sales professionals and 303 business leaders in the US earlier in 2023 on "how they’re using AI and automation tools".

Sales professionals also reported 'huge time savings' in the areas of new representative onboarding and coaching.

About 80 per cent of sales professionals said that AI and automation tools can help them spend less time on manual tasks like data entry and scheduling meetings.

Moreover, the study noted the buzziest type of AI tool in 2023 was generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai -- and they have extensive sales applications, especially when it comes to the content creation and outreach involved in prospecting.

"Generative AI is most useful for sales teams re-purposing messages to prospects by adapting them to a different audience (32 per cent), writing messages to prospects (21 per cent), and getting ideas and inspiration for prospect outreach messages (20 per cent)," the study said.

However, nine out of ten sales professionals who use generative AI said they use AI chatbots as a starting point and make edits to the AI-generated text.

"AI isn’t replacing salespeople -- it’s just taking care of the most repetitive aspects of their work," the study stated.