AI Profoundly Influenced Our Awards This Year
Destination CRM, Friday, September 1,2023
CRM vendors have been toying with artificial intelligence for years, embedding it into a few apps here and there, seemingly generating more controversy than successes. Issues of privacy, inherent biases, flawed data being used to train the models, and generalized fear about giving machines too much power to make decisions surfaced quickly, slowing the pace of adoption and further development. Then along came ChatGPT late last year, and it completely upended the entire industry almost overnight.
Suddenly everyone was talking about generative AI and how it could be used in sales, marketing, customer service, e-commerce, and many other business functions to automate processes; develop more personalized communications with customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders; provide customers with the most helpful answers to whatever types of questions they might have; create content; predict business outcomes; forecast sales and revenue; and ensure that every opportunity to grow the business is seized.
Not surprisingly, ChatGPT collected more than 1 million signups within its first five days alone, and now, less than a year after its release, it would appear that just about every CRM vendor in the world has either worked ChatGPT into its solutions somehow or developed its own generative AI large language models to run within its software portfolios.