AI Sales Assistants are AI-driven software programs that assist sales teams in a host of tasks such as lead qualification, scheduling meetings, data-entry, pipeline management etc. They may be customer-facing or interact with internal-teams only.

Customer-facing assistants interact with customers to achieve simple tasks such as following up for inbound leads, answering basic questions or scheduling meetings.

Non-customer-facing assistants provide assistance to sales representatives and managers with tasks such as reminders, automated data entry, pipeline insights, forecasting etc. Interfacing with sales personnel happens over a chat interface, emails or push notifications.

Broadly AI sales assistants perform task in three broad areas:

1. Prediction and forecasting based on past data
2. Reminders and alerts to take action
3. Automated data entry and enforcing processes

They make use of AI capabilities such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

We take a look at some top AI Sales Assistants and the actual value they bring to their customers.

1. Conversica

Conversica specialises primarily in lead management. There are broadly three problem areas that Conversica tries to address:

1. Engaging inbound leads who showed interest but did not score high enough for the sales team to follow up.
2. Activating unresponsive leads – High-scoring leads that have been unresponsive
3. Pre-event – Drive attendance for webinars

2. Drift

You may have the Drift chat box on websites, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Drift AI bots can be used for lead collection and scheduling meetings. Drift makes the same as promise as others in this domain of “cloning your best sales people”.

Drift’s solution for Marketing teams includes Chat, Playbooks and automating repetitive marketing tasks such as managing email replies, routing them to the right reps and keeping contact details up to date.

Playbooks are predefined templates for the chat bot to try and accomplish specific goals such as booking a meeting, initiating a sales conversation on the pricing page, announcing product updates or nurturing blog subscribers.

3. X.ai

X.ai focuses on autonomous meeting scheduling. It follows up with unresponsive guests, negotiates and schedules meetings with multiple people. The X.ai assistant is available over email and slack.It targets managers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, recruiters, sales reps, product managers, developers. It also has a calendar where you can specify your availability slots.

4. Troops.ai

Troops.ai focuses on workflow automation, alerts and notifications. It helps in reporting and provides insights into the sales process for everyone. It helps automate management activities, integrate workflows and reports and improve sales performance.

5. Clari.com

Clari helps in forecasting, pipeline management and activity intelligence to get everyone on the same page. It helps sales teams to focus on the right deals by leverage opportunity scores, deal priority matrix, rep leaderboards and activity insights and accelerates deals and prevents slippage.

Working together with marketing and customer success it also helps to address pipeline gaps and win key accounts.

Markets are clearly heading towards more automation in repetitive, non-value adding tasks as well as employing Machine Learning to uncover insights from data-troves that had been hitherto ignored.

These are the early days of ML-powered bots. Existing players are promising that conversational bots will get better as they keep learning “on-the-job”. It will be interesting to see the kind of experience bots will be able to deliver in the future.