The short answer
It helps most where the task is high volume, low judgment, and already has a clear right answer: transcribing and summarising calls, drafting first pass emails, enriching and deduping records, flagging deals that have gone quiet, and pulling the data a rep would otherwise have asked ops for. Gong's analysis across more than a million opportunities found meaningfully higher win rates when reps actually completed AI suggested next steps and when AI was used to research accounts before a call. Where it is still mostly theatre is fully autonomous outbound at scale and any AI generated forecast you cannot explain to your board line by line. The honest test is whether a human reviews the output before it reaches a customer or a number. If nobody does, you have not automated the work, you have automated the risk.