WTF is an AI Agent & Why you need to know NOW: AI Agents in a Nutshell for Sales & GTM

Did you get the memo from Salesforce's Dreamforce 2024 and HubSpot's Inbound 2024 conferences??

There is one consistent, loud and clear message: AI Agents are here NOW!??

I've been geeking out on the keynotes from Marc Benioff, Founder of Salesforce and Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and now CTO of Hubspot. While both companies have their solution for AI agents, they agree that AI agents are the next step in the AI journey NOW.??

Dharmesh predicted that we would be using AI agents this year and building our own! What's more, he's called it that the new hybrid work is a hybrid of human team members and AI Agents.?

So, let's meet your new team member, the AI Agent.?

WTF is an AI Agent??

We'd all just wrapped our heads around AI tools like ChatGPT, and now we need to get up to speed pronto on the next wave of AI.??

Tools like ChatGPT are based on prompts; they complete a task when we prompt with instructions.???

AI Agents can execute a workflow and automated processes, making decisions based on predefined rules or machine learning models. The punchline is AI agents can autonomously take action!?

Dharmesh put it that AI Agents are the new Apps and will now be an extended member of your team. You can train an AI agent by role such as Competitor Analyst, Web page copy editor, or sales lead qualifier, and that's just for starters!??

Salesforce's answer to AI Agents is AgentForce, within the Salesforce ecosystem and, importantly, the trust layer for security.??

HubSpot's answer to AI Agents is Agent.AI, which is the world's first (and only!) marketplace for AI Agents. However, you can test Agent AI for free (100 credits) without being a Hubspot user. Agent.AI, before officially launching at the conference, already had 50,000 users signed up!??

There are currently two ways to use an AI Agent: use an existing agent that someone else has created and trained or build your own.??

What will they do for Sales & GTM teams??

Let's dive into some more user cases:??

Customer experience

Salesforce gave examples of AI Agents already live in production for Saks Fifth Avenue and Disneyland, both with customer experience-based user cases. What's even more mind-blowing is that the Saks user case only took one week to launch!??

Personalisation and research?

AI agents in sales & GTM content are helping to win the battle of efficient personalisation at scale.??

We know the highest performing sales professionals research and personalise every time. But this is time-consuming and one factor in why sellers, on average, only spend 30% of their time selling.? Dharmesh shared that the most popular AI Agent from Agent.AI is their research agent who will do the client research for you!??

The admin burden??

Another reason why sellers only spend 30% of their time selling is the endless admin and time-consuming tasks. AI Agents are set to take on the admin burden and free up sellers to increase their productivity and client-facing time.??

Conversion Rate Optimisation

One of my favourite examples was the conversion rate optimisation Agent which will analyse a web page and give recommendations on improving the conversion rate.

Customer support

AI agents can handle routine customer inquiries and provide 24/7 support, improving customer satisfaction.?

AI agents can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and buying patterns. This data-driven intelligence can inform sales strategies and improve decision-making.?

Sales Forecasting

AI agents can analyse historical data to predict future sales trends, helping businesses plan and allocate resources effectively. Marc Benioff gave his own examples of using AI agents for sales forecasting within Salesforce!??

Competitive Intelligence

AI agents can gather information on competitors, providing valuable insights into market trends and opportunities.

So, where on earth to start:??

1. You can watch the keynotes from Salesforce & Hubspot here.
2. If you want to test out Agent AI, you can do a free trial with 100 credits here.?You can build your own or test an existing AI agent here.
3. My two cents worth is identifying the biggest user case within your role, such as researching prospects. Start small by testing a single-user case.???

Your approach will likely depend on your CRM and the tech stack to integrate with.??

Note to remember:??

Whilst we're all excited (including me) about AI, security is still a real concern. I have been testing not using company data and using, for, e.g. gathering research publicly available from the internet, which is not internal SR confidential data.??

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