AI Is a Powerful Sales Tool But It Can’t Replace the Human Aspect In Business

by: Colin Medcalf, Sales Manager at Impact Funding Solutions

This year, AI changed how we run outreach at Impact Funding Solutions. Starting to integrate AI into our sales process through email outreach.

Where AI genuinely helped

We used AI to do the things that used to eat entire weeks: building prospect lists, drafting outreach at scale, and personalizing hundreds of emails without starting from a blank page every time. A 200 organization outreach campaign targeting disability services, animal rescue, arts, and community nonprofits went from a manual research slog to a structured, repeatable process. A food-bank follow-up campaign covering roughly 200 organizations across the US and Canada moved just as fast because the heavy lifting of sorting, matching, and drafting was already done.

When we needed to go bigger, sourcing a fresh list of 100 new nonprofit prospects worldwide against specific mission criteria. Manual research simply couldn’t keep pace with the volume, so we shifted to AI-driven research to source and verify organizations. That’s not a small efficiency gain. That’s work that used to be a bottleneck issue transforming into a non issue.

Where it hits a ceiling

None of that changes what actually happens once we get on a discovery call.

AI can find an organization and draft a competent email. It can’t read the hesitation in someone’s voice on a discovery call. It can’t tell when a prospect’s “we’ll think about it” means “convince me” versus “leave us alone.” It can’t visually see the love, care, and empathy a team is putting into an organization. It can’t adjust its tone in real time when a conversation turns out to be about more than grant funding because for a lot of nonprofits, it is. Funding conversations touch on capacity, mission, sometimes survival. That’s a human conversation, not a template.

The real division of labour

The way I’d put it: AI is the force multiplier for volume and research. Humans are still responsible for qualification, tone, negotiation, and relationship-building. The cold email gets an organization’s attention. AI is genuinely good at that part now. But the discovery call is still where trust gets built and relationships begin, and that’s still entirely a human skill.

AI got us in front of more of the right organizations, faster, this year. It didn’t close a single one of them. The human aspect did, the relationship building, love, care, empathy, growth, and genuine care did. AI is changing every industry, everyday life, every aspect of the way we do business. That being said, it will never be able to replace the human experience that is put into the operations day in, day out. 

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A Special Thank You to Colin

A special thank you to Colin for sharing his perspective and experience for this week’s guest blog.

Over the past year, Colin has played an important role in helping Impact Funding Solutions explore how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into our business development and outreach processes. Like so many businesses, we are learning where AI can save time, improve efficiency, and help us reach more of the organizations that could benefit from our services. We are also learning where technology needs to stop and people need to take over.

One thing I never want us to lose as we grow is the human side of our business. We work with nonprofit leaders who are incredibly passionate about their missions, often stretched thin, and sometimes facing very real concerns about how they are going to fund the programs and services their communities depend on. Those relationships require listening, empathy, trust, and genuine care.

AI can help us work smarter. It can help us research, organize information, identify opportunities, and improve efficiency. But the relationships we build with our clients, and the care our team puts into helping them succeed, will always be human.

Thank you, Colin, for helping us find that balance and for sharing your thoughts with our community!

You can learn more about Colin on our TEAM Page