Did You Know Your AI Agent Could Be a Fineable Offense?

Last Updated:Wednesday, February 11, 2026

This week on Funnel Frontier: If your bots don’t disclose they’re bots, you might be breaking the law. Find out more.

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This week:

  • Did you know your AI agent could be a fineable offense?
  • State of Sales 2026: Your next top seller might not be human

Stat of the Week

Workers who use AI daily prove to be 64% more productive than colleagues not using AI. (Salesforce)

 

Did you know your AI agent could be a fineable offense?

The year of AI hype is over. 2026 is the year the rules kick in.

With the EU AI Act now in enforcement mode, companies don’t just need smarter AI, they need compliant AI. 

And if you think this doesn’t affect you because your company is in the U.S.? Read on.

CX leaders are in for a full-stack audit: which agents are talking to customers, what data they’re using, and whether they can explain their own decisions.

The catch? Most can’t. And regulators won’t wait for your next roadmap review.

🌍 It’s not just the EU. Compliance is going global

The EU AI Act drops a hard deadline in August 2026 for any “high-risk” AI systems—including voicebots, customer-facing agents, and anything that touches personal data. Under the law, these systems must:

  • Clearly disclose they’re AI (no more stealth bots)
  • Explain how decisions are made
  • Prove the data used is accurate, lawful, and auditable

And here’s the kicker: even if your company isn’t based in Europe, the Act still applies if your systems interact with EU customers.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is following suit, just less formally. 

California’s SB 53 kicked in on January 1, requiring AI developers to publish safety frameworks, risk disclosures, and catastrophic risk response plans. That makes it the first state-level law targeting frontier AI systems, and a warning shot for others to come.

📉 Goodbye cool pilots, hello compliance triage

Gartner warned this was coming: companies are already abandoning AI pilots they can’t govern. Sentiment detectors, black-box summarizers, tools trained on untraceable data—it’s all getting scrapped. Not because it’s unethical, but because it’s too expensive to clean up.

Even the big names are scrambling to stay clean. Salesforce is publishing deep transparency guides for Agentforce. Genesys just locked down ISO/IEC 42001 certification, baking compliance into their core product. If your vendor isn’t doing the same? That’s your risk to carry.

✅ What to do next?

Start simple. Audit your AI stack.

  • Which tools talk to customers?
  • What data are they using?
  • Can you explain what they do and why?

If your vendor can’t show compliance receipts, move on.

If your agent can’t explain its own decisions, pull the plug.

And if your team’s still pasting customer info into ChatGPT? That’s Shadow AI. And yes, it’s a fineable breach.

 

The Week @ CRM.org

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🌸 Weekly Bloom 🌸 

The Internet Wasn’t Born Yesterday: A Brief History. Remember dial-up? Yeah, the internet’s come a long way since those screechy tones. Buckle up for a quick tour through the wild ride that got us here.

 

State of Sales 2026: Your next top seller might not be human

Salesforce’s State of Sales 2026 report says AI agents are in and admin work is out.

Salesforce’s State of Sales 2026 report just dropped, and the takeaway is crystal clear: sellers don’t want dashboards, but fewer distractions. And AI agents? They’re stepping in to help.

89% of reps say AI is improving their customer understanding. 87% say they’re already using AI across the sales cycle. 

As Salesforce EVP of Sales Adam Alfano put it:

“We want to kill the busywork so our teams can focus on what actually moves deals forward.”

📉 Goodbye gruntwork, hello growth (for real this time)

Teams using AI agents report a 33% drop in research and admin time, with some expecting to cut prospecting time by 34% and email drafting by 36% once fully rolled out.

Agents now handle onboarding, quote creation, lead scoring, and cold outreach (because nobody wants to spend Tuesday calling 40 strangers who ghost). 

They’re also sweeping up untouched leads and turning sawdust into pipeline gold. At Salesforce, that meant 3,200 new opportunities from 130,000 leads in just four months.

And they don’t take PTO. Agents run 24/7, flagging cold deals, drafting first touches, and stitching insights from marketing, service, and CRM data into something actually usable.

🧹 But first: clean your data, or nothing works

Here’s the catch: 51% of sales leaders say disconnected systems are slowing their AI rollouts. And the gap between high- and low-performers is growing.

Top teams are 1.7x more likely to use prospecting agents, and 79% of them prioritize data hygiene, compared to just 54% of laggards.

So yeah, AI agents are magic. But only if your CRM isn’t a landfill of duplicates, typos, and cold leads from 2019. If you want your agents to be smart, you have to stop feeding them junk.

🧠 Gen Z is losing hours and patience

Not all reps are drowning in admin equally. Gen Z sellers spend just 35% of their time actually selling, losing nearly two extra hours a week to manual data entry compared to senior peers.

They’re also flying blind:

  • 46% rarely get feedback on sales calls
  • 47% don’t get enough roleplay practice before talking to customers
  • And when asked what’s holding them back? It’s not lack of ambition—it’s lack of manager time.

Add it up, and you’ve got a generation that’s more likely to leave their job than any other. Not because they can’t sell, but because the systems around them don’t support learning, speed, or growth.

This is where AI agents can flip the script, if you use them right.

But if your idea of onboarding is “just watch how Steve does it,” don’t expect the next gen of sellers to stick around.

💡 What this means for your team

AI isn’t replacing sellers. It’s replacing the busywork that keeps them from selling.

The teams pulling ahead are not just running faster; they’re running smarter. Agents aren’t writing emails for fun. They’re spotting patterns, flagging deals, and feeding reps intel before the kickoff call even starts.

But that only works if your CRM isn’t a digital junk drawer. And if your reps don’t treat AI like Clippy with a glow-up.

Before you post another SDR job, ask:

  • Are your reps still spending Monday mornings writing follow-ups?
  • Do they know how to steer an agent or just hope it spits something useful out?
  • Is your data clean enough for an AI to make a decent guess?

Because the reps who embrace this shift? They’ll be selling while everyone else is still formatting emails.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

ANZ Debuts Agentic AI CRM with Salesforce. ANZ is the first APAC bank to launch Salesforce’s Agentforce at scale, streamlining 20 systems into one smart CRM. The AI-powered platform cuts banker admin and boosts productivity.

Oracle Launches 16 AI Agents for Marketing, Sales, and Service. Oracle has launched AI agents embedded in sales, marketing, and service workflows. Built on unified data, the agents automate tasks, generate insights, and boost team productivity.

Canva Integrates with ChatGPT. Canva’s new ChatGPT integration lets users create visuals that match their Brand Kit. Designs stay on-brand from the first prompt, turning AI chats into polished pitch decks, posts, and more.

 

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