As AI becomes more capable in the buying cycle, one question keeps coming up:
Will AI replace Sales Engineers?
In a recent discussion with Ahmed Qadri of Vanta, Morgan Ballevre of impact.com, and Paul H. Pearce of Great Demo, the answer was clear.
AI can make presales teams faster and more efficient by helping with research, preparation, information synthesis, and other parts of the sales process.
However, the panel asserted that AI is also increasing the importance of distinctly human presales skills: storytelling, critical thinking, relationship-building, customer credibility, and adaptability.
Rather than making these skills less relevant, AI may make them some of the biggest differentiators between average and exceptional Sales Engineers.
What Skills Will SEs Need in the Age of AI?
As AI handles more repeatable presales tasks, Sales Engineers increasingly need to excel at the work that requires judgment, context, communication, and trust.
Five skills stood out:
- Storytelling
- Critical thinking
- Relationship-building
- Customer credibility
- Adaptability
These aren’t new presales skills. What’s changing is their relative importance.
1. Storytelling Becomes a Core Presales Skill
Morgan Ballevre of impact.com puts storytelling near the top of his hiring criteria.
“I look for people that are able to tell an effective story more than anything. Most people think they’re good storytellers, but the reality of storytelling is way harder than people think.”
Product knowledge alone doesn’t make an effective Sales Engineer.
A strong SE needs to understand the buyer’s situation, determine what matters, and turn product capabilities into a story that connects those capabilities to a meaningful business outcome.
As AI makes information and product knowledge easier to access, simply knowing the facts becomes less differentiated.
The ability to decide which facts matter and how to communicate them persuasively becomes more valuable.
2. AI Makes Critical Thinking More Important
AI can accelerate research and preparation, but its output still requires human judgment.
Ballevre connected this directly to another increasingly important presales skill: critical thinking.
“Critical thinking is more important today than it was before, because now you are being given wrong information by the AI. It comes back to your ability to cut through the noise and understand, is this true? Is it hallucinating, or is it giving me correct information?”
That changes how Sales Engineers should approach AI-generated research.
Instead of treating AI output as established fact, strong presales professionals need to evaluate it as an input.
That means asking:
- What is the source of this information?
- Does it align with what we already know about the account?
- What assumptions is the AI making?
- What needs to be validated with the customer?
- Is this information relevant to the actual sales conversation?
The value of AI isn’t simply producing more information.
It’s helping an experienced SE get useful information faster, while that person remains responsible for deciding what to do with it.
3. Relationship-Building Still Separates Great Sales Engineers
There is also a fundamentally human dimension to presales that became even more visible as selling moved heavily into video calls and remote interactions.
Ballevre described how he evaluates this during hiring:
“Through that interview process, are you able to create some sort of a relationship with me in half an hour? If you are, that means you’re able to do the same thing with a prospect.”
His conclusion was straightforward:
“I think it’s just doubling down on what makes us human.”
For SEs, relationship-building isn’t simply being personable.
It means reading a conversation, recognizing uncertainty, understanding when a buyer needs more evidence, adapting the message to different stakeholders, and creating space for prospects to share what they actually think.
Those interactions can determine whether a technically correct demonstration becomes a productive buying conversation.
4. Customer Credibility Can Matter More Than Demo Experience
Paul H. Pearce of Great Demo emphasized another quality he values when hiring Sales Engineers: credibility with the customer.
He shares that he would rather hire someone who has worked directly with customers than someone whose primary experience is delivering product demos.
“I would rather have someone from services or a CSM team than someone from outside of the industry who’s been doing demos for twenty years.”
His reasoning is that many of the mechanics of presales can be taught. Deep customer understanding is harder to build.
“If you can, bring in someone who truly knows the customer story. Because you can teach the demo aspects. You can teach the skills and the storytelling. For me, I want immediate credibility.”
That becomes increasingly important as buyers arrive with more product information before they ever meet an SE.
The Sales Engineer’s value is no longer simply knowing how the software works.
It’s understanding how customers actually use it, where implementations succeed or struggle, what tradeoffs buyers should consider, and how the product fits into a real operating environment.
5. Adaptability May Be the Defining Presales Skill
Ahmed Qadri of Vanta identified adaptability as another essential skill because the Sales Engineer role itself is changing so quickly.
“What presales was two years ago, completely shifted to what we do right now. And it will shift in the next couple years.”
That means hiring solely for today’s presales workflow can be risky.
Qadri looks for people who can evolve with the role:
“One of the skills to look for is how quickly they can adapt to the changes and if they’re not just catching up to it, but actually innovating, being part of that change.”
That distinction matters.
The strongest SEs won’t simply learn how to use the latest AI tool. They’ll evaluate how new tools change buyer behavior, preparation, discovery, demos, and the broader sales process.
Adaptability becomes less about learning software and more about continually redesigning how the job gets done.
Will AI Replace Sales Engineers?
No, the panel does not expect AI to simply replace the Sales Engineer in the buying process.
Qadri expects AI to improve efficiency across the sales cycle while human connection remains important.
“It will make presales very efficient in the sales cycle. But it’s not going to replace the SE. Human connection is still needed.”
Ballevre went even further, reasoning that sales still involves humans buying from humans.
“It will make us more human, I think. Until there is an AI that buys from an AI that sells, you still want a human in the loop.”
As AI takes on more research, preparation, and repetitive work, he believes successful Sales Engineers will have more reason to concentrate on the interactions that require human judgment and trust.
“AI will push us to double down on these human skills, which I think will make the biggest difference.”
AI May Replace Some Presales Work
Pearce offered an important counterpoint.
AI may not eliminate the Sales Engineer role, but that doesn’t mean every existing presales approach will remain valuable.
“I think efficiency is definitely it. But I think it will replace some people.”
In particular, he questioned the future of Sales Engineers whose primary contribution is delivering traditional feature-by-feature demonstrations.
“If you’re doing the old diatribe demo and you’re just showing a feature, guess what? You’re done.”
That highlights an important distinction in the AI-versus-presales debate:
AI doesn’t need to replace everything a Sales Engineer does for it to change what companies value in Sales Engineers.
Tasks based primarily on information retrieval, repetition, and standard product walkthroughs are increasingly susceptible to automation.
Skills based on judgment, credibility, storytelling, adaptation, and human interaction become more differentiated.
How Should Presales Teams Use AI?
The idea isn’t to compete against AI. It’s to use AI to outsource lower-value, repetitive work while becoming better at the high-value, judgment-based parts of presales.
For Sales Engineers, that means using AI to help:
- Research accounts and stakeholders before meetings
- Surface potential customer priorities and use cases
- Organize large amounts of account information
- Accelerate repetitive preparation work
Then apply human judgment to validate those inputs, understand the buyer, tell the right story, and guide the conversation.
The goal isn’t simply greater efficiency. It’s using that efficiency to spend more time on the work that moves the needle.
The Future of Presales is More Human, Not Less
The common thread across all three panelists was that AI is changing what makes a Sales Engineer valuable.
Being able to recite features or deliver the same product walkthrough repeatedly becomes less differentiated when agents can increasingly perform those tasks.
The Sales Engineers who stand out will be the ones who can:
- Tell a compelling value story
- Challenge and validate AI-generated information
- Build trust quickly
- Bring authentic customer expertise
- Adapt as the role changes
AI may make presales more efficient. But efficiency alone isn’t what makes someone exceptional at the job.
The more technology handles the repeatable parts, the more valuable judgment, credibility, adaptability, and human connection become.
Hear the full discussion, including how each panelist coaches their team to use AI without over-indexing on it. Watch the webinar on demand.
