Ashish Srimal, cofounder & CEO at Ratio, is a SaaS entrepreneur and executive who has built SaaS startups and led large SaaS businesses.
Just a year ago, AI vendors were closing enterprise deals in a single demo. Today, those same deals can take six months or longer (registration required), according to a vendor cited by the Wall Street Journal.
The single-demo close was never normal. It was a brief window when enterprise buyers suspended their usual discipline because the technology felt unmissable.
Now that window has closed. Business-to-business (B2B) tech companies are back to behaving like they always have: deliberately, skeptically and with finance in the room for every significant decision.
Meanwhile, organizations believe AI is more capable than ever. A 2026 Gartner survey found that 80% of CEOs believe AI will force operational overhauls in their organizations. As a Gartner analyst put it: “AI is not simply another layer of automation. It is a catalyst for rebuilding the enterprise itself.”
So if AI is so powerful, why isn’t it helping companies close faster?
The Gap That’s Breaking Your Sales Team
AI is likely already inside your sales workflow. Reps are using it to qualify leads, personalize outreach and coach themselves on calls. The investment is real, and the results at the initial sales stages are genuine.
But watch what happens the moment a deal crosses from conversation into closing.
Pricing is not straightforward: discount negotiations internally and externally have very little science behind them. The billing question, annual or monthly, bounces between teams for two weeks, not to mention the negotiation with the customer.
For larger deals, finance needs an ROI model built into their template. Procurement sends a vendor-onboarding form that nobody has seen before. The friction between how sellers want to get paid and how buyers need to pay has been building for years, as I’ve written about previously. What AI has done is make the cost of leaving it unresolved impossible to ignore.
There are many reasons deals slow down: budget pressure, skeptical CFOs, vendor fatigue. But those forces do not break deals on their own. They expose where deals were already broken, and it is almost always in the closing motion.
The Closing Motion: Built For People, Broken For Agents
The closing motion is everything that happens between a buyer’s yes and cash in your account. This includes proposals, payment terms, financing, contracts and collections. While AI has made real progress in the early stages of the sales process, the closing motion on the seller’s side is still manual and fragmented.
Traditionally, the best sales reps weighed risk in real time, read buyer psychology and structured payment terms. That judgment is what moved money from a buyer’s account into yours. Sales teams codified judgment constantly through playbooks, training, deal reviews and coaching.
But today, even shared judgment still has to be applied manually, one deal at a time. Which brings us to the real problem: the architecture.
Humans and AI agents are built for different environments. Human workflows are designed around intuitive interfaces and contextual understanding. AI agents require structured data, API-first architecture and high-throughput reliability.
Rethinking The Closing Motion With AI Agents
Imagine the closing motion rebuilt with that agentic AI architecture in mind.
When a buyer says yes, an AI agent can surface a proposal that already reflects the buyer’s risk profile, willingness to pay, payment preferences and contract history. It can connect pricing to payment terms in real time and flag the financing structure that works for both sides before anyone has to ask. It can also keep the contract moving by ensuring that collections and renewals are built into the same flow from the start, not bolted on later.
That is what building for agents actually means for your sales team. The exhausting coordination work gets handled by the system. The rep gets their energy back, and the money stops leaking out of the process. Leakage means three things: the discount given to win an annual upfront payment, the renewal or upsell nobody chased and the cost of capital while receivables age.
McKinsey’s April 2026 research on agentic AI in B2B pricing confirms that this shift is already underway. Pricing is moving from human-led processes to AI-orchestrated systems with humans remaining in oversight. I believe the same transition is coming for the entire closing motion.
I co-founded Ratio to run this closing motion as one connected flow instead of the disconnected tools most companies stitch together. So I’m not neutral about where the bottleneck sits. However, rebuilding isn’t the only route. Some teams get most of the way by consolidating the proposal, contract and billing systems they already own.
Either way, the harder problems that agents can’t solve are still yours, like reading a room or knowing when to push and when to wait. Those problems are not going away. They are just finally going to get the attention they deserve.
Is Your Closing Motion Ready?
The shift is coming. How prepared you are depends on the architecture you have today.
Start with the unglamorous part: Your pricing and terms have to exist somewhere other than your best rep’s judgment. An agent can only apply a rule someone has written down, and most companies improvise discounting and payment terms deal by deal. Then, you can decide who owns the motion end to end.
You’ll also have to expect trade-offs. Standardizing terms buys speed and consistency, but it can cost your best reps the improvisation that makes them strong. Finance will also want guardrails first: approval thresholds and audit trails.
In a growing B2B SaaS market, a broken closing motion is not a rounding error. It is revenue that exists on paper but not in the bank. How much of yours is still waiting to arrive?
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