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.