My Personal Experiment: small changes, surprising results
I haven’t implemented a massive AI overhaul in my B2B lead generation work. I haven’t rebuilt my processes from scratch or handed my prospecting over to an algorithm. What I have done is start experimenting, thoughtfully and incrementally, with a small number of tools and the results have been sufficiently encouraging that I want to share what I am learning.
This is a practitioner’s account, not a technology review. It is written from the perspective of someone who has spent twenty years believing that genuine human connection is the most durable competitive advantage in B2B lead generation, and who was, if honest, somewhat resistant to the idea that artificial intelligence had anything useful to contribute to that kind of work.
I was wrong about that. Not dramatically wrong, but wrong enough to think it worth recording.
Where I started #
My typical working day used to involve a significant amount of what I can only describe as manual grunt work. Hours spent researching prospects across LinkedIn, company websites, and industry directories. Crafting individual emails with whatever personalisation the available context would support. Managing follow-up schedules and tracking responses by hand. Making calls with minimal background on the person at the other end of the line beyond a name and a job title.
I wasn’t drowning. But I was spending a disproportionate amount of time on administrative and research tasks, and a disproportionately small amount of time on the work I believe in: building genuine relationships with the people I am trying to serve.
The research bears this out more broadly. Analysis of B2B sales teams consistently finds that sales development representatives spend over 60% of their time on research and list-building before ever making a meaningful conversation happen. That ratio has always felt like a waste of the most valuable resource in any relationship-first business: time with another human being.
What I changed #
The changes I made were deliberately modest. I wasn’t looking to transform my process overnight, I was looking to test whether specific, targeted uses of AI tools could give me back time without compromising the quality of the conversations that time was supposed to enable.
The three areas I focused on were prospect research, background intelligence, and communication management.
On the research side, AI tools now help me identify potential prospects by analysing company indicators, growth patterns, recent changes, sector signals, that would previously have taken most of a morning to compile manually. The time saving is meaningful.
On the intelligence side, automated systems compile prospect profiles including recent company news and relevant background on decision-makers before I make contact. The practical effect is that I arrive at conversations better prepared than I used to be, which means those conversations tend to go better.
On the communication side, I have experimented with automation-managed email sequences and follow-up timing based on engagement patterns, though this is the area where I remain most cautious, precisely because it is the area where the human element is most at risk of being eroded without anyone noticing.
What I discovered #
The transformation has been more significant than I anticipated, and it has manifested in ways I didn’t entirely expect.
I am handling more prospects without feeling overwhelmed. The quality of my initial conversations has improved because I am better prepared for them. I am spending more time on actual relationship building rather than the administrative infrastructure that surrounds it. I feel more strategic and less reactive in my approach to the working day.
McKinsey estimates that generative AI alone could unlock between $0.8 and $1.2 trillion in annual productivity across sales and marketing functions globally. B2B AI adoption has climbed from 39% in 2023 to somewhere between 78% and 81% in 2025. The scale of those numbers is striking, but what strikes me more is a more specific finding from the same body of research: the most immediate gains from AI in sales come not from increasing activity volume, but from reducing manual work and improving how effort is allocated. That finding matches my own experience precisely.
But here is what surprised me most, and what I think matters most for anyone who, like me, is instinctively cautious about what AI does to the human dimension of this work.
I am building stronger relationships with prospects now, not weaker ones.
The technology handles the pattern recognition and the repetitive tasks that used to consume the first half of my working day. I focus on understanding client challenges and building genuine connections. The division of labour, in practice, is a better one than I had before, not because the technology is impressive, but because it has given me more of the time I want to spend doing the work I believe in.
The key insight #
The technology is not replacing my expertise. It is amplifying it.
I am still the one building relationships, reading between the lines in conversations, and making the critical judgements about when to press forward and when to wait. Those remain stubbornly, reassuringly human activities that no tool I have encountered shows any sign of replicating.
What AI handles is the pattern recognition and the data-intensive groundwork that, if done by hand, would leave me with less capacity for those human activities rather than more.
That distinction; between tasks that AI can do adequately and judgements that only a human being with genuine relationship context can make well, is the subject of the next piece in this series: The Four Quadrant Framework
The links to all four parts are here:
The Human-AI Sweet Spot – https://www.newerafi.co.uk/docs/human-ai-sweet-spot-business-foundations/
Technology Transforms – https://www.newerafi.co.uk/docs/human-ai-sweet-spot-technology-transforms-mindset-and-perspective/
My Personal Experiment (this article) – https://www.newerafi.co.uk/docs/human-ai-sweet-spot-personal-experiment-lead-generation-and-sales/
The Four Quadrant Framework – https://www.newerafi.co.uk/docs/human-ai-sweet-spot-four-quadrant-framework-business-foundations/
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
