AI Sales Agent: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Deploy One
By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
An AI sales agent qualifies leads, books demos, and follows up 24/7. Here is how I ship them at CallSphere — tools, scripts, pricing, and a 7-day free trial.
Key takeaways
TL;DR
- An AI sales agent is a voice or chat agent that qualifies leads, books meetings, and handles outbound follow-up without a human.
- CallSphere ships a production sales agent built on GPT-Realtime-2 with 14 function tools, 57+ languages, and CRM write-back.
- Explore a live demo and compare current plans to find the right fit for your business.
- Setup is 3 to 5 business days. We also support roleplay for sales training on the same stack.
This is part of our Customer Service Representative guide.
What is an AI sales agent and how does one actually work
An ai sales agent is software that handles the conversational layer of a sales motion — qualifying inbound calls, ringing outbound prospects, booking demos, and updating the CRM — without a human on the line. I built CallSphere's sales agent on GPT-Realtime-2 with a 128K context window and 14 function tools across our 20+ Postgres tables. The agent answers in roughly 600ms, speaks 57+ languages, and writes every disposition back to the CRM table in the same call.
A real sales agent is not a chatbot wrapped around a script. It hears the prospect, runs a qualification ladder (budget, authority, need, timeline), calls a function tool to read live calendar availability, books the slot, sends a confirmation SMS, and posts the call summary into the lead record. We ship that whole loop out of the box.
How is an AI sales assistant different from an AI sales agent
An ai sales assistant sits next to a human rep — it summarizes calls, drafts follow-ups, scores leads, and surfaces talk tracks. An ai sales agent runs the call end-to-end without a rep on the line. Both matter. In practice, a real sales org buys both: the agent handles the top of the funnel (cold dials, after-hours inbound, demo no-shows), and the assistant accelerates the human reps who close.
At CallSphere we run a hybrid pattern: our voice agent qualifies, our SMS agent nurtures, and our agent-assist surface gives reps a real-time transcript with next-best-action prompts. All four channels write into the same lead table, so handoffs do not lose context. A typical Orchestrate-tier customer dispatches around 10,000 interactions a month across this hybrid setup.
What is AI agent assist and how does agent assist software fit in
Ai agent assist (sometimes called agent assist software) is the layer that helps a human agent perform better during a live call — pulling up CRM records, surfacing FAQ answers from a pgvector knowledge base, drafting reply suggestions, and flagging compliance language. It is the cousin of an autonomous sales agent.
Hear it before you finish reading
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Our agent-assist module rides on the same observability layer as our autonomous agents. Every call is transcribed in real time, scored on sentiment and qualification signal, and tagged against the 14 function tools the rep can trigger with a click. Reps using agent assist on our platform handle around 30 percent more calls per shift in pilot data, with a measurable lift in qualified-meeting rate.
Can the same stack power AI sales training and roleplay
Yes. The best ai roleplay for sales training is the same agent your prospects talk to, but pointed at your reps. We let sales managers spin up a "buyer persona" agent — skeptical CFO, price-sensitive SMB owner, ghosted-VP-of-Eng — that runs through a real call with a rep, scores the rep on the qualification ladder, and writes coaching notes back to the manager's dashboard. Ai sales training stops being a quarterly off-site and becomes a 15-minute daily rep loop.
Each roleplay session runs as a normal conversation on the platform. An Orchestrate-tier customer at $99/mo can run training reps alongside production traffic with no interaction limit to manage.
How CallSphere does this in production
The CallSphere sales agent is a real product, not a slide. Concrete shape:
- Model: GPT-Realtime-2, 128K context, 32K max output, GPT-5-class reasoning, $0.40 per 1M cached input tokens.
- Tools: 14 function tools including
lead_lookup,calendar_read,book_meeting,crm_write,send_sms,send_email,escalate_to_human. - Data: 20+ Postgres tables (
leads,calls,interactions,tools_log,prospects,campaigns, etc.) with pgvector for the company knowledge base. - Channels: Voice (WebRTC + SIP/VoIP), Chat, SMS, WhatsApp — one agent persona across all four.
- Languages: 57+ with natural accents, useful for any team doing US-Hispanic, EU, or APAC outbound.
- Observability: Per-call transcript, per-tool latency, per-turn cost, sentiment, and qualification score. We expose this in /admin/gtm.
- Compliance: TCPA-aware outbound dialer, recording consent prompts, BAA-ready healthcare deployments.
A new tenant gets a configured sales agent in 3 to 5 business days. I do the kickoff myself for Growth and Scale customers.
A real example walk-through
A 22-rep B2B SaaS sales team turned on the CallSphere sales agent for after-hours inbound and outbound demo-no-show recovery. Inbound calls between 6pm and 9am now hit our agent, which qualifies on budget and use case, books a demo slot from the team's Google Calendar, and SMS-confirms the prospect. Outbound, the agent rings every demo no-show within 48 hours, re-qualifies, and rebooks.
Month one: 1,840 after-hours inbound calls answered (zero missed), 312 demos booked autonomously, 87 no-show recoveries rebooked. Total platform cost — Orchestrate tier at $99/mo plus Twilio pass-through under $200/mo. The team estimated the same coverage with a 24/7 SDR shift would have cost north of $9,000/mo. They moved to Custom Build in month three.
Pricing and how to try it
Explore a live demo and compare current plans to find the right fit for your business.
Still reading? Stop comparing — try CallSphere live.
CallSphere ships complete AI voice agents per industry — 14 tools for healthcare, 10 agents for real estate, 4 specialists for salons. See how it actually handles a call before you book a demo.
Explore a live demo and compare current plans to find the right fit for your business.
Frequently asked questions
Explore a live demo and compare current plans to find the right fit for your business.
What does an ai sales agent actually replace? Mostly the lower-quartile of an SDR team's repetitive work: dialing, after-hours coverage, demo no-show follow-up, and stage-zero qualification. It does not replace closers, account executives, or relationship-heavy enterprise sales. Most teams that adopt one redirect their existing reps to higher-leverage work rather than reduce headcount in year one.
How is ai agent assist different from a copilot? Agent assist is the production-grade version of a copilot — it sits inside the call flow, pulls live CRM data, scores the call in real time, and writes back to the lead record. A copilot is usually a sidebar that drafts text. Agent assist software is real-time, structured, and integrated; copilots are reactive.
Can I use ai sales training without buying a separate platform? Yes — on CallSphere, sales training is the same stack as production. You point the agent at "buyer persona" mode, hand your reps a phone number, and they roleplay against a configurable persona that scores them on your qualification ladder. The training sessions burn from the same interaction pool as your production traffic.
Is the best ai roleplay for sales training a separate tool? Almost never. The best roleplay tool is one built on the same agent stack you sell against, because then the personas behave like real prospects you encounter in production. Dedicated roleplay-only tools tend to drift from real buyer behavior over time.
What is an ai voice agent in healthcare and is it the same underlying tech? An ai voice agent in healthcare is the same underlying voice stack as a sales agent, but tuned for patient interactions: BAA-ready logging, minimum-necessary PHI exposure, HIPAA-aware escalation. We run healthcare on the same six-agent platform as sales, real estate, salon, hotel concierge, and after-hours escalation. The model is shared; the prompts, tools, and audit posture are vertical-specific.
Can the agent qualify leads in 57+ languages? Yes. The same agent persona runs in 57+ languages with natural accents — useful for US-Hispanic, EU, and APAC outbound. Language is detected on the first turn and the agent responds in kind. There is no separate per-language deployment to manage.
How long until my sales agent is in production? Three to five business days for most deployments, slightly longer for those that need custom CRM mappings. The slowest piece is usually getting CRM API credentials from your ops team, not the agent itself.
Related reading
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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