At Aptivio, we see the same trends emerge in the space of Autonomous Sales Development, a $5 Billion White Space. By applying our proprietary Intelligent Automation Platform across thousands of Market Data and Sales Engagement APIs, we auto-generate sales-ready leads and mitigate sales pipeline risk. By contrast, today's incumbents in Marketing Automation, Sales Intelligence, and Sales Acceleration deliver siloed insights and workflows, that then require a lot of manual effort to bring together into a coherent, orchestrated, and systematic sales development process and narrative.
These emerging "Self-Driving Enterprise" technologies will undoubtedly redefine work as we know it. The main impact we are seeing is the shift from low-value to high-value tasks in the same person, freeing them from tedious repetitive tasks. It sounds "cliche", but it is a profound statement.
In sales prospecting, for example, you need to be a very good Salesperson, with lots of experience in driving opportunities to close to truly and deeply understand your market. You can then immediately assess if an incoming lead will yield results. Intelligent automation is able to mimic, not replace that sales intuition, freeing that sales expert of manual research, outreach. Building trusted relationships and closing a deal remain a very human-only activity in its level of empathy and interpersonal skills required.
Learn More From an In-Depth Exploration
These reflections raise important topics about AI, automation, and the future of work. We think these are key ideas that require in-depth exploration, so we've included some additional thoughts for the topics. First an overview of AI, some examples of its adoption applications, and then more about what the future of work may hold for all of us.
RPA and Process Mining Are Leading in AI Adoption
Guy brings up a relevant post from Philippe Botteri in which different types of AI are mentioned as leading the adoption curve. Robotic process automation and process mining use intelligent management techniques to make the best use of a company's resources. Out of these fields comes soon to be invaluable tools for businesses looking to maximize their CRM investments. Features like opportunity identification and buyer influence maps packaged in impactful action cards take advantage of these new technological advancements.
The rate of AI adoption was described as being on the cusp of an explosion before. As the technology becomes mainstream, more platforms are integrating automation and machine learning into its features. Salesforce is a great example. As a CRM, Salesforce offers several tools for automation and with Salesforce Einstein, AI is foundational to the product.
Sales AI Means Better Work
One way to understand the rise of the bots and the future of work is to breakdown the ways AI can be adopted in different areas of business. From sales to marketing to finance, there are specific ways in which AI can improve standard processes and streamline daily work. For example, AI for sales can help with analysis and task management processes that usually consume salespeople for hours a week. Intelligent market monitors can optimize performance by creating simple dynamic digital sales playbooks from billions of buying signals that can best equip salespeople to succeed.
AI for Marketing Improves Engagement
In terms of AI for marketing, bot technology can help with client engagement and account-based marketing for tackling new strategic growth markets. Consider a business that is struggling with high unsubscribe rates and low engagement in their email campaigns. With the right AI tools, the business can use their previous campaign data to analyze what exact strategies tended to yield more positive results. The tech tools can do the work of seeing what works and offer the best suggestions on what the business can do next.
Help Finance Teams With AI
Beyond sales and marketing, AI also improves workflows and increased productivity for finance teams concerned with forecasting. Think of a business having a challenging time predicting budgets for the next quarter. AI tools that can track and make sense of the right information can offer data-driven suggestions to help them build their predictive models. Regardless of department, intelligent tools can maximize your CRM investment and ensure that teams are best equipped to accomplish their most successful work.
How to Prepare for the Future of Work
Just as AI is always on our mind here, so is the future of work. That's because they go hand in hand. We've written other articles about preparing for AI and what's to come as business teams perfect working from home in uncertain times. Even before global pandemics, we recognized the potential of these technologies, and now more than ever can they be used to decide what the next decade of work looks like.
Refocus the Value of Tasks
Part of these profound changes will include a refocusing of low-value to high-value tasks accomplished by sales teams, as mentioned before in Guy's reflections. This transformation can be done with AI tools like intelligent market monitors that provide salespeople with all of the resources they may need to succeed in their best well informed selling and building positive client relationships.
Automation will also be key to this low-value to high-value transformation. Specifically, in terms of sales automation, there is a lot to be gained by streamlining workflows and efficiently performing tasks like research and qualification. For a deeper exploration into every important to the topic, check out our Ultimate Guide to Sales Automation.
Humans Are Important to AI and Automation
With talk of AI and automation comes a fear of job loss for some. Robot apocalypse movies have taught us well that bots are a bad thing. If they don't mean the end of the world, then they must mean the end of jobs. This storyline may make a good film, but in terms of reality, these kinds of intelligent tools are just that—tools that help the very human salespeople accomplish more of their work (without replacing the human themselves).
