A month or so ago, I wrote about the emerging AI business model and its potential impact on white-collar employment. As I said in the post, I'm skeptical that AI will reduce the number of white-collar workers, particularly salespeople. With that in mind, I came across a concept called the Jevons Paradox.

The Jevons Paradox says that when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource, that leads to higher consumption of that resource, not less.

A couple of examples:

Technologies like home insulation, in theory, would reduce the need for heating and cooling energy consumption. But the effect was that people invested in larger homes resulting in more overall energy consumption.

Electric/hybrid cars bring down energy costs, leading to more frequent driving and longer trips, and more overall energy consumption.

This concept also applies to work.

Flexible work tools like Zoom have added convenience but also made it possible to work more, increasing the number of hours worked.

Communication tools like Slack and email make communication more efficient but have also led to far more communications and increased workloads.

I think we'll see the Jevons Paradox at work with AI in sales. As AI takes on more of the job of a salesperson and does things like lead scoring, opportunity prioritization, CRM automation, communication personalization, sentiment analysis, etc., it will bring down the cost of sales. That means that each salesperson costs less per dollar in sales than they did prior to the adoption of AI. That will cause companies to want to do more sales and hire more salespeople to do the work.

The myth is that automation makes the worker superfluous. In reality, the opposite is true because it’s an opportunity for the ambitious to do more. Marketing automation is a great example. Facebook Ads can effectively run highly targeted, comprehensive marketing campaigns, in theory reducing the need for digital marketers. When, in fact, those platforms made marketing cheaper, which led to major increases in the need for more digital marketers to manage these programs and to do more marketing. The same will be true with AI in sales.

When something gets cheaper, we tend to do more of it.