Why companies expanding globally still bet on human sales talent

The pattern tells us something specific about international expansion: when companies enter new markets, they prioritize roles that require local relationships and cultural fluency over roles that can be executed remotely or automated. The data suggests that sales work involving complex customer interactions and market-specific knowledge remains distinctly human, particularly when companies are navigating unfamiliar business environments.

Lauren Thomas, founding economist at Deel and author of the report, notes that companies hire in wealthy countries for reasons beyond just cost. “Companies won’t choose AI to do work just because they’re ‘cheaper’ than a human is,” she says. “Roles like these are not just pricing or providing information to customers – they are about building and maintaining relationships – something that an AI simply cannot do.”

What makes these roles automation-resistant

Among almost 100 startups that raised $100 million or more, ICT account managers and business developers ranked in the top cross-border hires. The companies hiring these roles are ones that recognize what technology simply can't replace when entering new markets.

The regional patterns reinforce this, as U.S. companies expanding abroad hire ICT account managers and customer experience managers. European companies are more likely to hire regulatory affairs managers and marketing assistants. In both cases, the emphasis is on people who understand local business cultures, customer expectations, and market dynamics.

Dave Gulas, a sales expert with more than 20 years of experience, sees this dynamic play out in practice. He's worked in pharmaceutical sales, held executive roles, and now runs his own company. He's watched automation transform operations, marketing, and customer service. But sales—particularly complex B2B sales—operates differently. “People buy because they know you, they like you, they trust you, and they understand how your product or service will benefit them,” Gulas says. “You're not going to outsource that with AI.”

The reason isn't that sales lacks data or process. It's that success depends on navigating complexity that resists automation. Things like reading social cues, building trust over months-long cycles, adapting to individual customer situations, and grasping cultural context that doesn't translate to prompts or algorithms.

Gulas describes a recent experience at a trade show in New York. The expo hall was chaotic, with hundreds of booths, constant noise, and rapid-fire conversations. He went booth to booth, having conversations, getting rejected, reading whether someone was genuinely interested or just being polite. “Within all that someone says, 'Actually I'm so glad I met you because we're actually looking for that solution right now' and you have a conversation, [and] it's a fit,” he says. “But could I have done that with some kind of AI spam message? No. Never would have happened.”

This contextual understanding of knowing when to push, when to wait, how to adapt based on what's happening in the customer's business is precisely what companies expanding into unfamiliar markets need. The cross-border hiring data suggests they're willing to pay for it. According to Deel’s report, sales managers, business developers, ICT account managers, and client relations managers all require a deep understanding of local business cultures, customer expectations, and market dynamics. That knowledge is nearly impossible to replicate from abroad.

The hiring patterns appear across company types. Small and medium businesses are more likely than enterprises to hire sales account managers and client relations managers for cross-border expansion. Top-funded startups hire more sales engineers than general SMBs. Regardless of size or industry, companies expanding globally invest in sales talent with local expertise.

Sustained demand and compensation growth

ICT account managers in the U.S. saw 15% salary growth in 2025, according to the report. These roles appeared consistently in cross-border hiring across regions, even as other technical roles faced automation pressure.

The compensation growth reflects sustained demand for technical sales expertise; people who can explain complex products, navigate customer technical requirements, and handle both the technology and the client relationship simultaneously. These roles combine technical knowledge with the cultural navigation that characterizes high-touch sales.

Gulas's company provides warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services. Customers sign minimum 12-month contracts and the sales cycle typically takes several months, sometimes up to a year. During that time, potential customers are evaluating not just the service but the relationship. Can they trust this company with a critical part of their operations?

While identifying leads is a big part of the role, an equally important element is navigating human complexity. Gulas describes sales cycles where customers go through crises, lose key employees, face unexpected challenges. “Life is happening,” he says. “You have to deal with real, human, serious issues and understand how that all works and be a human being about it.”

Thomas explains the economic logic behind the premium compensation. “A 10x salesperson is worth a hundred times their cost, especially in the brutally competitive B2B SaaS market,” she shares. “The fact that these are the roles that companies turn to first when they’re expanding abroad underscores their importance in tapping a new location’s market. And this will only continue to be true in an AI-first world.”

The reason, she argues, is trust. “People aren’t going to trust a generative AI’s word as much as they trust a human who has cultivated a relationship with them,” Thomas says. “There’s a reason why even today people prefer a human customer service agent – they’re seen as more reliable. While AI will likely continue to become more reliable in the future, enterprises aren’t likely to trust the word of an LLM over that of a person anytime soon.”

Thomas's analysis, naturally, aligns with the report's findings. The report notes that the emphasis on local sales and marketing talent may also serve as a hedge against automation. While AI can support many operational functions, the ground knowledge required for sales remains difficult to automate.

Where AI helps, and where it doesn't

Gulas is clear about where automation adds value: organization, follow-up, data capture, administrative tasks. At the trade show, he voice-noted conversation details into his phone with pictures of business cards, planning to organize everything later. “AI would make that easier, and I know there's tools that can do that,” he says. The CRM integration, the lead tracking, the follow-up scheduling – all of this benefits from automation.

He describes a conversation with a head of sales at a large enterprise company who showed him her AI-powered sales tool. Before approaching a contact at a trade show, she could pull up a complete history of her company's dealings with that person's organization, including previous conversations, near-deals that didn't close, and current status. The AI summarized it all within seconds. “That's such a great idea and that's powerful,” Gulas says. “But again, that's a tool that aids human interaction and enhances it and optimizes it, but you're never going to outsource that personal connection and that's ultimately what's going to be required to do business at a high level.”

His company is implementing AI for menial customer service tasks like filing claims with carriers, tracking orders, and responding to basic questions. The people who used to do that work are being repurposed to more meaningful business functions rather than being let go. But the proliferation of AI-generated outreach has created its own problem. Gulas, as a founder and public content creator, gets pitched constantly. “So many of these pitches are just AI slop and AI automated and it's just ridiculous and you can see it a mile away and it doesn't work,” he says.

He describes endless automated messages, generic pitches that clearly weren't written for him specifically, follow-ups that ignore previous responses. “The fact that companies think 'oh yeah I don't have to pay salespeople I'll just use this AI.’ It doesn't work.” The irony is that the proliferation of AI-generated outreach may be making human connection more valuable. “We're all drowning in this sea of AI noise,” Gulas says. “I think the pendulum [now] swings the other way where the human connection becomes even more important because, when you see so much fake, you crave the real.”

The competence question

When asked what he looks for in salespeople that AI couldn't provide, Gulas describes what he calls “critical competence,” the ability to filter through opportunities, understand the market, understand how the solution fits, understand what competitors are doing, and most importantly, understand what the customer's pain point is and how everything fits together.

That synthesis happens in real time during conversations. It requires adapting based on what the customer reveals, reading between the lines of what they're saying, and understanding the broader context of their business challenges. These are precisely the skills companies need when entering unfamiliar markets.

Implications and limitations

The cross-border hiring patterns show which roles companies prioritize when expanding into new markets, but they don't capture the full picture of automation's impact on sales work. Deel’s report focuses specifically on international expansion, where local knowledge and trust-building matter most. Domestic inside sales roles, transactional sales, or high-volume B2C sales may face different automation pressures. Companies might automate routine sales functions at home while still investing in client-facing talent abroad.

The distinction matters, and the data shows that when companies face the choice between automatable functions and relationship-dependent ones in unfamiliar markets, they choose humans for customer-facing work. The most complex, culturally dependent, relationship-intensive sales work remains distinctly human.

The hiring patterns show companies making a specific bet in an increasingly automated business environment. The ability to build genuine client relationships in local markets becomes more valuable when navigating international expansion. The salary growth for roles like ICT account managers reinforces that bet. As AI handles more operational functions, the human skills that can't be automated, like judgment, empathy, cultural fluency, and rapport-building, command premium compensation, particularly in markets where companies lack established presence.

Thomas sees this as part of a broader shift in what skills command value. “In an AI economy, ‘people’ and soft skills will probably grow in importance,” she says. “Expect to see ‘AI manager’ and ‘AI verifier’ become a core part of many people’s roles.” Beyond sales, Thomas sees this pattern extending to other human-intensive fields such as healthcare and education, which have proven exceedingly difficult to automate.

The cross-border data suggests that when companies expand globally, they automate what they can and hire humans for what they can't. Right now, complex sales, with its demands for cultural navigation, trust-building, and contextual judgment, falls firmly in the second category.