5 minutes - AI Sells More and More for Us. But Our Best Deals Still Come From People

Written by: Kristoffer Kvam
May 4, 2026

SalesLead Generation5 minutes series

Season 1, Episode 8 of "5 Minutes" – documenting SMOC's journey toward becoming a fully AI-driven company, and our goal of enabling any customer to launch their first AI sales agent in under 5 minutes.

It's easy to get so excited about AI that you forget the obvious: the largest and most complex enterprise deals still require human trust, relationships, and contextual understanding. We learned that the hard way.

We tried building a full internal commercial team. The experience was that it got expensive fast – and generating consistent volume was harder than expected. Large companies don't buy from a company. They buy from people they trust.

So we chose a different model: agents and partners.

Instead of salaried salespeople, we work with agents who earn a share of every deal they close. Their success is directly tied to our growth – a genuine win-win. The best agents combine deep domain expertise with strong networks and real credibility in the market. And yes – they use SMOC's own tools to book their meetings.

Two of our best are Henrik and Torsten (pictured), working across Scandinavia with impressive results. They reach decision-makers we would never have accessed through cold outreach alone – and they close enterprise deals with the kind of credibility that only comes from genuine relationships.

In practice, our model looks like this:

  • Enterprise – human agents and partners with strong networks
  • SMB – increasingly AI-driven and self-serve

Over time, AI will handle a growing share of SMB sales automatically. But the enterprise market will require the human layer for the foreseeable future – and we're comfortable with that. It's not either/or. It's about putting the right resource on the right segment.

👉 Follow the full series here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/5-minutes-series

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