ActivityTracker

AI in sales

Best AI sales tools? Pick by the job, then run six checks before you pay

Most lists of AI sales tools rank the publisher's own tool first and quote prices nobody checked. This one sorts them by the job a rep needs done, describes each from its own website, and ends with the six things to check before you pay for any of them.

By the ActivityTracker team, updated

Start with the job, not the tool

You don't need an AI sales tool. You need an hour back from something that eats your week: research before calls, notes after them, the CRM, or the enquiry that came in at 10pm.

So the list below is sorted by job. Each job has one to three named tools, and each tool is described only from what its own website says, read on 28 September 2026. There's no ranking and no prices, because both change faster than a blog post. Check the current price on each tool's own site.

If you're still working out where AI fits in a sales week at all, read AI in sales first. It covers where AI helps and where it gets things wrong.

Prospect research and contact data

This is the job of finding the right people and walking into the first call knowing something about them.

  • Apollo says it gives you access to 240M contacts and 30M companies, a workspace for prospecting, outreach and dialling, and a way to use it from your CRM, Gmail or an AI chat app.
  • Clay describes agents that research target companies and people with AI, a marketplace to buy data from many providers in one place, and tracking for signals like job changes.
  • HubSpot's data agent answers questions about any contact or company, using what's already in your HubSpot CRM, calls, emails and documents.

What to watch: contact data goes stale as people change jobs. Spot-check ten records against LinkedIn before you trust a list.

Writing outreach

This job is the first email, the follow-up and the reply to "send me some info".

  • Lavender has an email coach that analyses your past emails to learn what works for you and your team, and an AI sales agent called Ora that drafts emails.
  • Instantly has a Copilot that finds leads, writes copy and builds campaigns, plus an AI Reply Agent and workflows that tag and route a lead when they reply or book.

What to watch: a tool that sends hundreds of emails a day can annoy your whole market by Friday. Read what it writes before it goes out, at least for the first month.

Call recording and notes

This is usually the quickest win, because everyone hates writing notes.

  • Fathom summarises your meetings, can record without a bot joining the call, pulls out action items, and syncs notes to tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack and Asana. You can also ask it questions across past meetings.
  • Otter transcribes meetings live with speaker recognition, writes a summary with decisions and action items, and pushes deal details and next steps to your CRM.
  • Gong captures customer calls and other interactions for a whole revenue team, and its agents handle follow-ups and pipeline edits.

What to watch: tell the other person you're recording, and check your country's rules on it. Read the summary before it goes into the client's record, because a wrong next step is worse than none.

Keeping the CRM up to date

This is the admin nobody does on a Friday afternoon.

What to watch: these work inside their own CRM. If your team lives in a spreadsheet or a different CRM, they don't help until you move.

Roleplay practice

This job is rehearsing the hard conversation before a real buyer hears it.

  • Hyperbound lets reps practise with AI buyers, scores the call against a rubric and says what to do differently next time. It can also record and score real calls.
  • Second Nature runs AI roleplays with avatars for discovery calls, objection handling and cold calls.
  • Yoodli offers private roleplay coaching with feedback on your content and delivery, and tracks progress over time.

What to watch: practice only helps if it's regular. Ten minutes every Monday beats a two-hour session once a quarter. The AI sales coaching post covers how to build that into a week.

Answering enquiries on chat

This job is the enquiry that arrives while you're in a meeting or asleep. The longer it waits, the more likely they've asked someone else. The lead response time entry covers how to measure it.

  • Fin by Intercom is an AI agent that answers customers across chat, email, voice and social channels, with a version for qualifying and converting sales leads.
  • Chili Piper qualifies someone the moment they fill a form or start a chat on your website, routes them to the right rep and books the meeting.
  • ActivityTracker's AI agent answers new WhatsApp enquiries on your own number, in the first person, from your website, brochures and past chats. It offers your free times, books the meeting onto your Google Calendar, and passes you the chat when it can't answer. It never chases people who never wrote back.

What to watch: the agent should say what it can't answer, hand over cleanly and never make up a price. Try it on yourself before a client sees it.

If the job you picked is answering enquiries after hours, ActivityTracker's AI agent answers new WhatsApp enquiries in your words, books the meeting and passes you the chat when a person should take it.

See the WhatsApp AI agent

Scheduling and planning your day

This job is the back-and-forth over times, and protecting the hours you meant to spend selling.

  • Calendly does booking links, and has Callie, an AI scheduling assistant in beta that you add to an email thread to find a time.
  • Reclaim protects focus time on your calendar, schedules your tasks and habits around meetings, and plans your day.

What to watch: a booking link helps the buyer. A calendar that blocks an hour for calls helps you. Most reps need the second one more.

What to check before you buy an AI sales tool

Run every tool on this list through the same six checks.

  1. The job it does. Say it in one sentence, like "writes my call notes". If you can't, you're buying a demo, and you'll stop opening it in a month.
  2. Where it gets its data. A tool that researches from the open web can be wrong in a confident voice. One that works from your own records is only as good as what you've logged.
  3. Whether it writes into what you already use. Notes that stay inside the note-taker mean you copy them across by hand, which is the job you were trying to get rid of.
  4. What it does with client data. Read whether it stores what you type or record, and whether it trains its models on it. Keep out anything a client told you in confidence.
  5. Who reviews its output. Name the person who reads the email, the summary or the chat reply before a client sees it. "Nobody" is an answer, and usually the wrong one.
  6. A two-week trial with a timed before and after. Time the job for a week without the tool, then for two weeks with it.

Made-up example: a team of six reps tries a note-taker. In the week before the trial, each rep times their notes and CRM updates after every call. It averages 14 minutes a call, across about 15 calls a week each.

For two weeks they use the tool. Each rep still reads and fixes every summary. With the fixing counted in, that averages 5 minutes a call.

That's about 9 minutes back per call, or a little over 2 hours per rep each week. The manager then checks whether calls per rep went up in those weeks. It did, by three calls each, so they keep it. The numbers are invented. Use your own.

If the time saved went into fixing mistakes, or didn't show up as more calls, drop the tool and try the next job on your list. The AI sales automation post covers the rule-based jobs you can hand over without AI at all.

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Pick one job first.

Then time it before and after.

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