e-Social + AI DL IoT

Sales reps spend a lot of time doing repetitive, tedious tasks in their quest to make their quotas and boost revenue.

These often include manually following up with leads and closing new business.

Screen Shot 2018-09-18 at 12.54.26 PMBut what if your sales team could spend time only on the strategic, high-value tasks that really move the needle, instead of all these day-to-day chores?

That's the promise of Exceed.ai, an AI-powered sales assistant that claims to automate lead qualification and nurturing at scale, in the process offloading a lot of the chores that sales reps dread.

We spoke with Ilan Kasan, cofounder and CEO of Exceed.ai, to learn more about how the tool uses AI to improve marketing and sales.

1. In a single sentence or statement, describe Exceed.ai.

Lead qualification and nurturing at scale using AI and automation. Exceed.ai is an assistant to your sales team that engages leads in unlimited conversations, delivering timely, human-like, personalized nurturing and qualification.

2. How does Exceed.ai use artificial intelligence (i.e. machine learning, natural language generation, natural language processing, deep learning, etc.)?

We use AI to engage leads in two-way email conversations.

We use natural language understanding to read emails to understand what the lead is saying and their responses to our qualification questions. We use natural language generation to respond to leads: handle objections, answer questions and ask qualification questions.

We use machine learning and AI to optimize and personalize each conversation with each lead to ensure more leads are push through the pipeline.

The world has gone chatbot mad of late. Put the word into Google and you’ll be inundated with articles telling you which chatbots will best meet business needs, listing the best chatbots this month, or simply explaining what they are. For anyone unsure, these are the live chat services you’ll find on many customer-facing websites, where the helpful responses made not by a human customer service representative, but by a robot.

Banish from your minds all thoughts of the robot from movies such as Lost in Space. The chatty little robot behind the chatbot is a piece of software, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The chatbot-as-customer-care-rep has a database of questions, prompts, answers and responses to fall back on. These will have been written by a person, although give it time and chatbots will probably start writing their own material.

There’s plenty of scope for robots to help out in warehouses, as Ocado’s many investments in such technology clearly indicate. But what about AI and chatbots? One of the reasons for the popularity of chatbots, particularly on retail sites, is they can act as a frontline of customer care help, leaving your human staff to do more valuable work. But you probably don’t need a chatbot in your warehouse. There are other opportunities for AI to make meaningful inroads into delivery operations, however. Some of which your company may even be using already.