253 sales and marketing pros voted across a category split between platform-native agents and AI-native data orchestration. Here is what the results reveal.
The May 2026 IT Brand Pulse AI Brand Leader survey asked 253 sales and marketing professionals to vote for Market, Intelligence & Innovation, Creativity & Expression, Accuracy & Trust, and Human Empowerment leaders in Sales Assistant, one of 18 products in the AI Sales and Marketing stack. Salesforce (Agentforce) was voted Market Leader with 35.34% of votes, with Microsoft (Copilot) finishing second at 26.10%. Clay was voted Intelligence & Innovation Leader (29.54%). Clay was voted Creativity & Expression Leader (35.96%). Salesforce (Agentforce) was voted Accuracy & Trust Leader (33.99%). HubSpot (Breeze) was voted Human Empowerment Leader (27.39%).
Salesforce Agentforce’s enterprise platform gravity wins Market and Trust, while Clay’s data orchestration and creative outreach win Innovation and Creativity, and HubSpot Breeze wins Empowerment by making AI accessible to mid-market sellers. The IT Brand Pulse analyst team expects AI Sales Assistants to evolve from co-pilots into fully autonomous SDR agents, with future Brand Leader voting categories rewarding multi-step task autonomy, account-level reasoning quality, and the ability to operate across CRM, email, and meeting platforms without breaking workflow.
What Is Sales Assistant?
IT Brand Pulse defines AI Sales Assistants as agent-based systems that augment sellers with research, account intelligence, outreach drafting, and pipeline triage. These platforms blend foundation model reasoning with CRM context, web data, and conversation history to handle high-volume tasks that previously required human cycles, freeing sellers to focus on relationship building and complex deal strategy. Sales Assistant sits within the AI Sales Products sublayer of the Horizontal Business Apps layer in the IT Brand Pulse AI Product Taxonomy, alongside Buyer Intent Data, Call Transcription & Analytics, CPQ (Configure Price Quote), Sales Compensation Management, Sales Enablement Platforms, Sales Engagement Platforms, Sales Forecasting Platforms, Sales Intelligence, Prospecting,, and Website Visitor Identification.
Download the Brand Leader Report for Sales Assistant.
