By John Barrows | April 25, 2026 | 4 min read
What AI can’t do in sales is give a shit about your customer. It can write your emails, research your prospects, and build your call plans. But as AI floods the market with fast, cheap, competent outreach, empathy is the only truly durable competitive advantage left.
I was listening to David Senra’s interview with Marc Andreessen on the Founders podcast a few weeks ago. Andreessen says something that stopped me mid-run.
“I practice zero introspection.”
Zero. Not low. Not minimal. Zero.
This is a guy worth $2.1 billion, who co-founded Netscape and built one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, and he’s proudly telling anyone who will listen that he never looks inward.
So I went down the rabbit hole. I started looking for billionaires who actually lead with empathy. People at the absolute top who give a shit about the humans around them.
I found almost nobody.
What the Data Actually Says
UC Berkeley ran a study that found as wealth increases, empathy measurably decreases. People with more money literally become worse at reading others’ emotions. Scientific American published similar findings showing that higher social class predicts lower empathic accuracy.
That struck a nerve. I’ve spent my entire career in sales, and sales is fundamentally a human profession. Great sales professionals read people, listen, adapt, and actually care about solving someone’s problem, not shoving a product down their throat. And the people shaping the future of our industry, building the AI tools we’ll all be using, are telling us introspection is a waste of time.
That’s dangerous. And it matters more right now than ever.
The Give a Shit Factor: What AI Can’t Do in Sales
I’ve been talking about the Give a Shit factor for years. It’s the one thing that separates good salespeople from forgettable ones. It’s why a buyer picks up the phone when you call instead of letting it go to voicemail.
You can teach someone a framework. You can drill objection handling. You can optimize a sequence. But you cannot train someone to care.
And the best part? It’s the one thing AI cannot do. AI can write your emails. It can research your prospects. It can build your call plans and summarize your meetings. I use it for all of that. But AI cannot feel the weight of what’s at stake for the person sitting across the table from you. It can’t read the room when someone’s tone shifts and know that the real objection hasn’t been said out loud yet.
That means empathy isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s your competitive advantage against other reps and against the machines.
Empathetic Leadership at Every Level
Here’s what empathetic leadership actually looks like at each level of a sales organization, not a framework to pin on the wall, but real questions to ask yourself today.
If you’re a CEO or founder: When was the last time you changed a decision based on how it would affect your people, not your numbers? If you can’t remember, that’s your answer.
If you’re a VP or CRO: Do your directors tell you bad news fast, or do they hide it until it’s a crisis? The speed of bad news is the best measure of psychological safety on your team.
If you’re a Director: Can you name the biggest personal challenge each of your direct reports is dealing with right now? Not their quota attainment. Their life.
If you’re a Manager: When’s the last time you coached someone on something that wouldn’t show up in this quarter’s numbers but would change their career? If all your coaching is about pipeline, you’re managing, not leading.
If you’re an IC or SDR: Do you ask your prospects questions because you care about their answers, or because your playbook says to? Your buyers can tell the difference.
The Research Backs This Up
The Center for Creative Leadership surveyed over 6,700 leaders across 38 countries and found that empathy directly correlates to job performance. Not as a soft skill. As a performance metric. The more empathy, the better the results.
And when I look at the leaders I admire most, the ones who combine real results with real humanity, a disproportionate number of them are women. That’s not a coincidence. The data on empathetic leadership overwhelmingly points to women outperforming men in emotional intelligence, team trust, and employee retention.
Andreessen can keep his zero introspection. But I don’t want a generation of sales professionals and leaders thinking that’s the only path to success. Especially now, when the thing that makes us irreplaceable is the one thing these billionaires and their AI tools cannot replicate.
Give a shit. It’s your edge.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the one thing AI can’t do in sales?
Empathy. AI can research prospects, write personalized emails, summarize meetings, and build sequences. It cannot feel what’s at stake for your buyer, read the room when a conversation shifts, or genuinely care whether the person across from you succeeds.
Why is empathy a competitive advantage in AI-driven sales?
Because AI is raising the floor on outreach, making competent, structured communication available to everyone. The ceiling is still set by humans who can connect authentically, adapt in real time, and actually care about solving the buyer’s problem.
How do you develop empathy as a sales skill?
Practice the Give a Shit factor: ask questions you actually want the answers to. Listen to what isn’t being said. Learn about your buyers as people, not just as personas. And regularly ask yourself whether you’re doing this work because you care about the outcome for them, or just for yourself.
How does empathy affect sales performance?
Research from the Center for Creative Leadership, spanning over 6,700 leaders across 38 countries, found that empathy directly correlates to job performance. It’s not a soft skill. It’s a measurable driver of results.
If you want to go deeper on this topic, pick up Maria Ross’s book The Empathy Edge. She makes the strongest case I’ve seen for why empathy is strategic, not soft.
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