AI Startups Still Staff Sales at Nearly the Same Share as Other Tech

The idea that AI is wiping out sales teams does not hold up well. New data from Pave, a pay-data company, shows sales is about 1 in 5 employees at fast-growing AI companies. That is only 2.3 points below the rest of tech. AI startups have fewer reps mostly because they are smaller companies overall.

What the data shows

Pave pulled its numbers from a pay database covering more than 10,000 companies. It measured what share of each company works in each job area. Sales at AI hypergrowth companies comes to roughly 89% of the share at a traditional tech company.

A separate survey fits the picture. ICONIQ, in a January 2026 survey of more than 150 business software executives, found AI-forward companies with $10M to $25M in annual recurring revenue (yearly subscription income) run about 20 sales and marketing staff. Their lower-adoption peers run 35, or 43% fewer people at the same revenue.

Where jobs are shrinking

The bigger gaps are elsewhere. Customer support is 1.8% of staff at AI hypergrowth companies, against 4.4% in the rest of tech. That is a 59% smaller share, the largest drop of any function.

• Rest of tech: about 4.7 salespeople for every support person.
• AI hypergrowth companies: about 10.2 salespeople per support person.
• Marketing, operations, finance, IT and similar roles: 8 points lower.

Support work is high volume, well documented and repetitive. That is the kind of work AI agents handle well today. Enterprise sales still involves security reviews, purchasing teams and several decision makers, and people mostly do that work.

Why engineering is bigger

Engineering is 47% of staff at AI hypergrowth companies, versus 33.9% elsewhere. Part of that is the product itself. Part is likely forward deployed engineers, who set up the product on a customer's own data. At traditional software firms, other roles often did that job. Some after-sale jobs moved to engineering rather than disappearing.

Sales reps are using AI too

ICONIQ found account executives, the reps who close deals, are among the heaviest AI users. In 57% of companies, more than half of them use AI daily, mostly for research, call prep, drafting and follow-up. AI-forward sales teams hit their quota 67% of the time, versus 59% for everyone else.

What to do

For a 2026 or 2027 hiring plan, 18% to 20% of staff in sales is still a reasonable benchmark for an AI-era business software company selling real contracts. Support is the first place agents reduce headcount, with back-office roles next. None of the AI hypergrowth companies in the data have planned around agents closing their big deals.

One caution. These are medians by function, so they do not add up to exactly 100%. The comparisons show direction, not a precise org chart.