This CIO Magazine article talks about 4 different areas where generative AI has been successful. Two of these are sales and service and they give some examples.

Service solutions based on AI bots have been in use for a while, however successful sales solutions using bots are much newer and more complex. Spot solutions have been available for certain pieces of the sales process but now CRM software vendors have put together compelling descriptions of how software can be used during a lot more stages of the sales process. Although no one is saying that everything can be done by an AI sales bot, sophisticated parts of the process can be. Salesforce describes how their AI tools can be used to improve sales at small businesses. Zendesk, the service software provider, describes how ai bots can be used throughout the sales process in this article.

This Wall Street Journal interview with Bret Taylor co-founder and CEO of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI gives some perspective on whether AI chatbots are ready to talk to customers.

Test out your own views on the topic with the HBR case study about a fictitious company and their decision on whether to aggressively roll out the use of AI chatbots for their sales and service teams. There are interesting and somewhat opposing comments at the end of the case study from Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot and Jim Lecinski, professor of marketing at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.

I think it's time to try out some of the tools if you haven't already. Try out what your current CRM vendor has available. If they don't have anything available, maybe it's time to try a new CRM vendor.