Driving seller adoption of Sales Agent through role-based change management at Microsoft

Microsoft had a business programme manager take its sellers' workflows apart before rebuilding its sales AI agent, and is moving to judge the agent by deal speed rather than usage.

Microsoft's salespeople spent most of their time on admin spread across more than a dozen tools, so the company built an AI agent to take whole tasks off their hands. First, a business programme manager, Rene Vejlby, and his colleagues took each sales workflow apart and decided what the agent should do and what should be cut. Microsoft is now moving to judge the agent by how fast deals close, not by how many people use it.

• Microsoft's research found that about 70 percent of a seller's time went on work away from customers, across at least 15 tools.
• An earlier version of the agent, Sales Agent, only looked information up. Microsoft rebuilt it to complete tasks across up to 25 systems, such as creating a sales opportunity or submitting an investment request.
• Ajay Nair, the engineering manager who owns Sales Agent, says that usage alone does not show that the agent helps the business.
• The adoption team wrote pages for about 20 sales roles, checked them with people in those roles, and replaced one-way demonstrations with small peer discussions.

A team can take a workflow apart and decide what to cut before it asks an agent to do the work, and can choose its business measure before release. This is Microsoft's account of its own product, and the wider application is an inference.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: If you have a broken process, just laying AI on top of it is not going to fix it.

26 September 2026: when agents can finish whole tasks, teams redesign the work, the checks and the roles around them.