Can you give me any insight as to how AI may play a roll in LACRM’s future?
Hey Tom! Here’s a rundown of how we’re thinking about AI right now.
AI in the product
You’re probably most interested in how we might incorporate AI into the LACRM product so that you can use it. To be honest, we’re still in a bit of a “wait and see” in terms of how to integrate it into our product. The industry is moving so fast, and while I have no doubt that AI will end up being useful, there’s also a major problem of companies over-promising and under-delivering right now. We don’t want to hurt our trust with users, so we want to make sure we can actually provide real value before we invest heavily in this.
Additionally, AI is this first technological advance in my 15+ years running this company where the marginal costs are non-trivial. Our price is a big part of why our customers choose us (not just that it’s a low price, but that there’s a single price that includes everything), and it would be difficult to maintain our current approach to pricing if we offered significant AI functionality. I expect costs to go way down over time, so this shouldn’t be a long-term problem, but it’s a hurdle right now.
But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing what we can to prepare. We’ve been exploring some use cases that wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive, especially around setting up and customizing LACRM accounts (e.g. AI could be useful for building pipelines and automations, helping with imports, etc.). That strikes me as the most likely place we first use AI in the product partially because I think it would be a really good fit (it would actually work well) and because it wouldn’t get run so often that it would require us to charge extra.
AI for internal use
Even though we’re being cautious about adding AI into our product prematurely, we’re not shy about using it to improve our productivity internally. There are a bunch of examples including:
- Eunice wrote this post about how the customer service team is using AI (but don’t worry, you’re always talking to a human).
- One of our CRM Coaches built a tool to help generate pipeline ideas for customers in unique industries. If a customer asks us for advice but we aren’t very familiar with their industry, this tool can help us give smart recommendations.
- Our team of developers uses AI to help with the coding side of things. We’ve especially found it useful for reviewing our code (instead of only having a human review, we now have a human plus the AI review, and it does a good job of catching things that a human might not catch). It’s still pretty unreliable for writing code, but occasionally it’s helpful depending on the specific project.
Let me know if you have any questions or ideas! I’m always happy to talk shop.
1 Like
Price is a HUGE part of why I use LACRM, I appreciate advancements, but I like your go-slow approach when it comes to increasing your spending.
1 Like
Thanks, that’s good feedback to hear! As you may know, we raised prices once in our 16 year history, and we’re really committed to not doing that again for a long time.
It’s possible that with things like AI, we might need to have a second pricing tier so that people who want to use it can opt in to the increased costs, but even that is something we really want to avoid if possible. Partially because we don’t want to charge more, and partially because having multiple pricing tiers is complicated. I can’t rule it out entirely, but we just had our 6-month company meeting and one of the big themes is that we’re going to do everything we can to grow the company just with a single $15 price point.
This does limit the types of features we can build. Some features are basically free aside from the R&D costs, while others like AI and file storage have meaningful marginal costs. Luckily, I think most of our customers want the features with low marginal costs anyway.
I am super happy with the fixed low cost pricing and I don’t need to have AI in the CRM.
1 Like