News Analysis
The Gist
- Enhanced understanding. AI-powered CRM systems enable brands to gain actionable insights and better understand customer needs and preferences.
- Competitive advancements. Major CRM vendors like Salesforce, HubSpot and One AI are integrating AI capabilities into their platforms to stay competitive.
- Streamlined processes. AI integration in CRM platforms automates routine tasks, improves customer experience and provides valuable, data-driven guidance for marketing and sales teams.
AI is making a seismic impact on how business gets done, and CRM has been no exception to its influence. For some time, AI has been making waves in the customer relationship management (CRM) industry, and now things are really starting to cook. By leveraging AI algorithms, modern CRM systems can provide actionable insights and predictive analytics allowing brands to understand their customers better than ever before. Some AI-enhanced CRMs will go further with sentiment analysis of customer feelings about your brand and products, along with automation capabilities to free marketers up from all that grind work.
Today, the global AI market is valued at $142.3 billion. To give you an idea of how fast it is growing, from 2020 to 2022, the total yearly corporate global investments in AI startups increased by $5 billion.
As more CRM vendors add AI capabilities into their software to differentiate themselves and stay competitive, each vendor is tailoring to different needs and applications. It’s important to understand what the different vendors are doing with AI to grasp the true impact organizations will see in their CRM platforms.
Salesforce and Einstein GPT: OpenAI's ChatGPT Enters Mix
On March 7, 2023, Salesforce launched its own generative AI CRM technology called Einstein GPT. According to the company, Einstein GPT will integrate real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud with OpenAI's ChatGPT technology, also combining Salesforce’s proprietary AI algorithms to allow for natural-language prompts in the software. We are just steps away from Star Trek CRM reality!
Salesforce is no Johnny-come-lately to AI. The company has been investing in AI and incorporating it into their products and strategy for some time. Salesforce began incorporating Einstein as part of its service cloud in 2017. In 2019, the company announced it would partner with OpenAI to collaborate on AI research, development and the integration of OpenAI’s models into its products and services. In December 2020, Salesforce acquired Slack, a popular enterprise communication and collaboration platform, which uses advanced AI models for advanced messaging and conversation capabilities.
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalized ways,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce in a statement. "Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch."
Related Article: 4 Ways AI, Analytics and Machine Learning Are Improving Customer Service and Support
HubSpot CRM: AI-Powered Content Assistant
Just one day before Salesforce announced its CRM AI technology, CRM vendor Hubspot announced its new AI-powered tools intended to enhance its software — a content assistant and ChatSpot.ai, both intended to help CRM customers save time while creating more valuable connections to customers and audiences.
HubSpot’s new content assistance tool is intended to help marketing and sales teams ideate, create and share content. It also provides generative AI capabilities, like suggesting blog titles, or full blog outlines, content creation for blogs, landing pages, websites, emails and other types of content. The objective of ChatSpot.ai is to help HubSpot customers complete tasks using a natural-language chat-based experience.
Just like Salesforce, Hubspot has already been investing in AI for things like conversation intelligence, data quality tooling, data enrichment, predictive AI and content optimization.
“Our new AI-powered content assistant helps companies create quality content faster and easier, to better serve their customers,” said Andy Pitre, executive vice president of product at HubSpot in a press release. “Advances in AI also have the potential to change the way people use and interact with software. We’re excited to launch ChatSpot.ai to experiment with how we can make our software even easier to use, and we’re inviting our customers to come along with us as we learn together.”
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One AI Generative AI for CRMs: Multilingual AI Capabilities
On March 22, 2023, One AI announced its AI solution for CRM companies and enterprise customers. One AI claims its multilingual AI capabilities can be tuned to meet specific customer needs and integrated into any existing CRM system in just a matter of days. The company says its solution will help organizations maximize lead conversion, enhance customer engagement and increase their revenue.
One AI says its solution can enable CRM companies and their customers to add capabilities like topics and action items extraction, follow-up reminders, summarizing conversations and detecting customer sentiment and emotion.
A major benefit of integrating One AI's solution into your CRM is it will allow organizations to have a more complete overview of each customer across their buying journey. The algorithm summarizes and extracts information from every customer interaction to provide a more personalized experience and help identify trending issues, new competitors and feature requests. One AI said its solution helps enhance the overall customer experience through faster response times and improved overall communication.
"Through our collaboration with One AI we are able to not only summarize customer calls and extract emotions and insights, but also analyze multiple calls as a group for a more meaningful understanding and a more personalized experience," said Vlad Papancea, founder and CTO, NLX, a no-code platform.
"With One AI's CRM solution, the 'Voice of the Customer' is elevated to a whole new level as businesses now have an in-depth understanding of their customer needs, preferences, and behaviors by summarizing and extracting data from customer conversations, clustering input from transcripts, chat and emails," said Amit Ben, co-founder and CEO, One AI.
AI-Powered CRM Platforms: Looking Forward
CRM has come a long way from Excel spreadsheets being ported into a central database so sales could keep track of contacts and leads. Now CRM systems, being infused with cutting-edge AI technology, are helping brands to not just understand their customers better as fully rounded people, but to improve the overall customer experience and generate valuable content to engage those audiences.
With an AI-powered CRM platform, brands can help overworked marketers and sales automate routine and laborious tasks, provide deep sentiment analysis of customers’ feelings, leverage predictive analytics and provide your team's actionable guidance for next best steps.
