Thirty-one percent of chief sales officers say proving the ROI of AI-driven tools is a top challenge to their 2026 sales objectives. That figure comes from a Gartner survey of 227 CSOs, fielded August through September 2025, and it frames a problem that ZoomInfo's own data tracking independently surfaced: sales teams are adopting AI faster than they can prove it works.

ZoomInfo logged the pattern over a 13-month window, June 2025 through July 2026. In that period, it recorded 10 sales-department pain points that explicitly tied "measuring and proving ROI" or "tracking ROI and attribution" to an active AI initiative. Ten is a small number in absolute terms, but a specific one. These companies are not asking whether to adopt AI tooling. They are naming ROI measurement as the open problem.

Gartner's survey, released May 19, 2026, shows the same gap at scale. The 31% share is large enough, the analysis suggests, to indicate ZoomInfo's tracking is picking up an early read on a broader pattern rather than an isolated quirk.

Is this problem limited to a few laggards?

No. Based on the breadth of ZoomInfo's tracking, this is the default state for many sales organizations right now. Teams are moving fast on adoption—new AI tooling, new agent capability, new workflow changes—and moving much slower on the measurement infrastructure that would let them say, with confidence, which of those changes actually drove the result.

The failure mode is predictable, not mysterious. Attribution in sales was already hard before AI multiplied the number of touchpoints in a deal. Adding more tools without adding better measurement compounds the very problem the tools were supposed to solve.

Why does the gap matter beyond one survey?

The Gartner figure covers difficulty proving ROI broadly, not any single vendor or tool category. But the underlying problem is bigger than any one contract renewal.

A sales org that can't attribute results to specific AI investments can't make a confident case for where to invest next. It ends up making the same bet again the following quarter, on faith rather than evidence. That is a worse position than not having adopted the tooling at all—because at least not adopting would have been a conscious choice.

What should sales leaders do?

The fix isn't more AI tooling. It is measurement discipline applied to what is already in place. Before adding the next tool, leaders should build a clear before/after baseline for the ones already running:

• What changed in close rate?
• What changed in cycle length?
• What changed in rep productivity?
• Can that change be traced to the tool itself, rather than to seasonality, headcount changes, or a stronger pipeline that quarter?

The organizations that get ahead of this aren't necessarily the ones adopting AI fastest. They are the ones who can say, specifically, what the tools did—and based on what ZoomInfo is tracking across sales orgs right now, that group is much smaller than adoption numbers alone would suggest.