Confer with potential customers regarding equipment needs, and advise customers on types of equipment to purchase.

“Confer with potential customers regarding equipment needs, and advise customers on types of equipment to purchase.” is a supplemental task performed by Sales Managers. Among the occupation's 17 rated tasks, workers place it 14th by importance (#4 most important). About 86% of workers say it is relevant to their job.

This is a single occupation-specific task statement from O*NET. The figures below describe how central the task is to the job and what independent studies measure about AI and this kind of work — not a prediction that the task will be automated.

Work activities this task rolls up to

O*NET groups concrete tasks into broader work activities shared across many occupations.

• Advise others on products or services. in Providing Consultation and Advice to Others

AI exposure

The OpenAI / Eloundou “GPTs are GPTs” study rates this task E2. Exposure with tools — software built on top of a language model (not the model alone) could cut the time by at least half.

Exposure measures whether a model could meaningfully speed the task up — it is an estimate of overlap with model capabilities, not a measure of whether the work will be done by software. The study's intermediate score (β) for this task is 0.50. Automation potential label: T1.

How AI is actually used on this kind of task

The Anthropic Economic Index observes how people actually use AI on tasks like this one across millions of real conversations.

• 100% of interactions still needed a human in the loop

Observed AI use describes people choosing to use AI as a tool on this kind of task today. It is augmentation and assistance, not a measure of jobs replaced.

Other tasks in this occupation

• Oversee regional and local sales managers and their staffs. · importance 4.7
• Resolve customer complaints regarding sales and service. · importance 4.3
• Monitor customer preferences to determine focus of sales efforts. · importance 4.3
• Review operational records and reports to project sales and determine profitability. · importance 4.2
• Plan and direct staffing, training, and performance evaluations to develop and control sales and service programs. · importance 4.2
• Direct and coordinate activities involving sales of manufactured products, services, commodities, real estate, or other subjects of sale. · importance 4.0
• Determine price schedules and discount rates. · importance 4.0
• Prepare budgets and approve budget expenditures. · importance 3.7
• Confer or consult with department heads to plan advertising services and to secure information on equipment and customer specifications. · importance 3.5
• Visit franchised dealers to stimulate interest in establishment or expansion of leasing programs. · importance 3.5
• Represent company at trade association meetings to promote products. · importance 3.3
• Advise dealers and distributors on policies and operating procedures to ensure functional effectiveness of business. · importance 3.3
• Assess marketing potential of new and existing store locations, considering statistics and expenditures. · importance 3.2
• Direct, coordinate, and review sales and service accounting and record-keeping, as well as receiving and shipping. · importance 3.1

See all tasks on the Sales Managers page.

Sources for this page

Every figure above traces to a named public dataset and the exact release below — not hand-written opinion. See the full methodology for what each measure does and does not mean.

• O*NET 30.3 U.S. Department of Labor / National Center for O*NET Development
• Anthropic Economic Index v4 (2026-01-15) + v2 (2025-03-27) Anthropic
• “GPTs are GPTs” (Eloundou et al.) arXiv 2303.10130 OpenAI / academic

Data compiled June 2, 2026. Figures are estimates, not advice.

@misc{singulariki-task-13,
  title  = {Confer with potential customers regarding equipment needs, and advise customers on types of equipment to purchase.},
  author = {{Singulariki}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {O*NET 30.3; Anthropic Economic Index v4 (2026-01-15) + v2 (2025-03-27); “GPTs are GPTs” (Eloundou et al.) arXiv 2303.10130. Accessed June 7, 2026},
  url    = {https://singulariki.com/tasks/task-13}
}