AI sales automation is turning every salesperson into a spam bot - and customers are noticing | AI Insights | Lumman.ai

I got a sales email last week that began with this line:

“Hi [First Name]! I noticed you’re crushing it at [Your Company]…”

They forgot to fill in the fields.

So what did I do?

I opened it anyway. Out of morbid curiosity.

It went on to tell me how “passionate I must be about growth” and how “we should totally connect.” Like it was written by an overeager intern speed-scrolling my LinkedIn profile at 3x.

It wasn’t.

It was written by artificial intelligence. Trained to sound helpful. Optimized to drive clicks. And sterilized to the point of being indistinguishable from spam wearing a name tag.

And it made me realize something:

AI isn't ruining sales – it's revealing just how broken it already was.

We've mistaken activity for intimacy

If you’ve noticed your inbox has turned into a polite graveyard of identical outreach emails, you’re not alone.

What was once human awkwardness – cold calls, forced small talk, fake rapport – has become machine-accelerated awkwardness. And it’s louder than ever.

You can send 1,000 “personalized” emails a day now.

Pull in first names.
Reference job titles.
Auto-generate subject lines based on scraped data.

And still, none of it feels like a person talking to another person.

Because it's not. It's a simulation of connection – optimized for engagement, but empty of insight.

Take a step back and ask: what’s really happening here?

We told AI to help us “connect at scale.” It listened. Now it's auto-populating our calendars with demos that go nowhere, stuffing our pipeline with half-qualified leads, and teaching a generation of reps that success is a math problem: more sequences, more opens, more meetings.

It's not a tech failure. It's a values failure.

The salesman was a template long before the machine showed up

Let’s be honest. We automated sales before AI got involved.

We’ve had:

CRM drip campaigns “checking in” every three days
Pre-fab call scripts with fake discovery questions
Playbooks copied from the top rep on the team, whoever had the best quarter in 2019

All that’s changed is scale.

AI took the fake and poured gasoline on it. Now every inbox is flooded with “just circling back”s and “noticed you’re hiring”s written in language that almost, but never quite, passes for human.

And buyers? They’re noticing.

Unsubscribe rates are surging. Email engagement is plummeting. And responses—when they come—feel like micro-aggressions. (“Looks like you didn’t actually read my comment,” is a personal favorite.)

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:

When AI writes the message, but a human can't explain it, the trust dies instantly.

Everyone smells the same now

Look at how companies pitch their AI sales tools:

“Write hundreds of personalized emails in minutes”
“Book more meetings with less effort”
“Never let a lead go cold again”

Great.

Now imagine every SDR in your industry using the same model, trained on the same outreach strategy, deploying similar prompts.

What happens?

Differentiation vanishes.

Same subject lines. Same timing. Same formatting. Same emotional tone.

And if everyone sounds vaguely human in the same canned way, nobody sounds human at all.

The result isn’t just message fatigue. It’s emotional fatigue.

Buyers get overwhelmed. Salespeople feel invisible. And the whole system cannibalizes itself in a sea of polite, data-driven irrelevance.

Personalization theater is still just theater

Let’s clear something up.

Dropping my first name into a templated email isn’t personalization. It’s Mad Libs.

Adding a line like “I saw your recent blog post on [Topic]” isn't insight. It’s evidence that you can type a sentence into Google.

True personalization—the kind that sparks attention and wins deals—isn’t about customizing sentences. It’s about understanding context.

Why is this person even a candidate for your product?
What pain are they likely feeling that your offer genuinely addresses?
What’s happening in their role, their company, their market that makes this the right time?

That kind of insight takes judgment. Empathy. Curiosity.

All things AI doesn’t have.

But you do.

AI is a hammer. You’ve still got to aim

The best sales teams aren’t abandoning AI.

They’re using it to get smarter, not louder.

Companies like Lavender, Regie.ai, DevRev—they’re not just pushing out more messages. They’re using AI to inform outreach, not replace it.

Scanning product usage patterns to find context for re-engagement
Analyzing which phrases in call transcripts make buyers lean in—or check out
Identifying subtle, non-obvious connections between roles or industries that indicate buying intent

That’s not “scale.” That’s craftsmanship.

And it leads to real conversations instead of robotic ping-pong.

We’re not automating sales. We’re industrializing fakery.

The scariest thing isn’t that AI is replacing human salespeople.

It’s that we’re training a generation of salespeople to act like bots.

And not well-trained ones.

When messaging becomes mechanical, relationships suffer.

And the irony? This whole mess started because we wanted more time for real connection. We said: “Let AI do the busywork, so we can be more human.”

Instead, we let it define what “human” looks like—then copy-paste the performance.

We industrialized fake empathy.

Reverse engineered trust signals.

And now the entire profession is teetering at the edge of becoming... irrelevant.

A weird trick that still works: being honest

Here’s how you stand out in a sea of AI spam:

Say something real.

Not clever. Not slick. Not chatty-corporate cool.

Real.

I’ve seen this work over and over:

A sales rep sends a short voice note instead of a long email. Personal. Flawed. Human.
A founder records a 30-second Loom saying, “I saw your comment on [X] and it made me rethink something about our roadmap. Thought I'd share.”
A customer success lead replies with, “Honestly, you’re probably too early for us. But if it helps, here’s how I’d approach this problem if I were you.”

No pitch. No brute force cadence. Just signal.

You don’t need fancier prompts. You need better instincts.

AI won’t kill sales. But lazy thinking might.

Here’s the real threat:

Using AI to reinforce bad habits at scale.

Turning intent signals into spam triggers
Optimizing open rates instead of win rates
Replacing generative insight with generative text

If your pipeline is a numbers game, AI wins.

If your business is built on trust, originality, and long-term thinking, you’d better rethink how you use this tool.

Because when trust dies at scale, it doesn’t come back with a better template.

Three inconvenient truths we need to admit

1. Automation doesn’t save time if it creates double-work.

Sending 500 cold emails is easy. Backpedaling from that reputational damage takes longer.

2. Personalization is not about saying their name. It's about proving you deserve their time.

If you can’t articulate why you're reaching out without leaning on templates, you’re not ready to reach out.

3. Buyers don't hate being sold to. They hate being treated like search terms.

So here’s the challenge:

Use AI not to replace your humanity—but to amplify the parts that matter.

Let it handle the noise. You bring the signal.

Because if there’s one job AI can’t do well, it’s giving a damn.