Quality CRM Leads That Turn Into DealsFull-service marketing programs from CRM Buyer deliver sales-ready leads. Segment by geography, industry, company size, job title, and more. Get Started Now.
This is the year everything CRM changes, thanks to AI.
The importance of CRM seems a settled matter. We need it and the data it captures to support our customer-facing businesses wall to wall. AI is another dimension, and it may take time to get up to speed.
CRM data has been essential to reducing the cost of doing business and increasing a company’s success rate. That data can be useful to managers with or without AI to help them understand how their businesses are operating. Call this the view through the rearview mirror.
But that same data is especially useful when trying to predict how customers are likely to act or respond to offers and assistance. You could call this the road ahead because AI works on the future.
So both views are needed, and while we’ve been trying to gain insights into business performance for a long time, the thought that you can understand and possibly influence near-future activity is still new, though much welcomed.
Decoding the User Perspective
Despite all the early generative AI solutions that seem to have sprung up recently, a new report from Salesforce’s research department has given me cause to ponder the rollout more skeptically. Some of my recent reading influences my thinking too.
The Salesforce research, which I alluded to last time, essentially documents a decent swath of the userbase as saying, “Great! How do we use this stuff?” On one hand, it’s a perennial question. Whenever a new technology is introduced, people on the bleeding edge ask the same question because the people who sign the checks usually seem to fail to ask it.
How do we use this stuff is the corollary of “What kind of training do you offer?” It’s a necessary question that buyers need to ask but rarely do. Decades into the high-tech revolution, we seem to be still mired in the assumption that tech somehow manages itself or that it’s so easy to use you don’t need documentation.
WEIRD-est People in the World
My recent research suggests the how do we use it question has a much more practical punch than you might think. We who use AI and other tech marvels of the last 50 years have been described by some as WEIRD — an acronym for Wealthy, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratized.
That pretty much sums up Western society, including most English speakers and allies such as the EU, Japan, Australia, and others.
According to Joseph Henrich, author of “The Weirdest People in the World,” an earlier tech revolution that began around 1500 CE changed our brains and made us much more likely to invent things like capitalism and modern democracy, but also internal combustion engines, nuclear reactions, and space telescopes, and all that go with them.
Post a Comment