CRM constitutes the largest market in software applications. Every business needs to sell and manage its customers, so it’s no surprise that massive spend and effort goes into this technology and workflow. To solve this, businesses rely on a sprawling landscape of software, from incumbent CRMs with complex workflows and integrations, to overloaded spreadsheets and contact databases. All of these solutions place human action at the center of delivering business results and require repetitive, manual tasks like data entry, status updates, follow-up notifications, and more.
The time has come for AI to take over the majority of CRM workflows, certainly all of the tactical or mundane work. AI is fundamentally changing work, and sales provides a particularly high-leverage function for AI augmentation. Business sales will always require human engagement, as it’s ultimately a human decision maker at the customer, but much of the work can be automated: including lead generation and nurturing, customer communication, contracting, onboarding, and sales performance management.
A new foundational CRM and underlying data architecture is essential to truly accelerate and advance sales efforts and deliver on AI’s opportunity. Portions of the workflow like contact enrichment, lead scoring, and call transcription each provide interesting accelerants, but these tools leave legacy CRMs, spreadsheets, CSVs and workflows in place, ultimately constraining the potential of a true end-to-end AI-first platform.
Clarify’s ambient intelligence works autonomously in the background - no prompting, no data transformations or entry, no management required. Sales people focus entirely on selling while Clarify eliminates the manual and mundane. A sales person gets active leads, refined outreach, key action items, pre-call briefings, live call insights, after-meeting follow-ups and recommendations delivered directly to their inbox, at any time. This orchestration of AI agents up-level the full sales cycle: from lead to close, from contract to onboarding, and from activation to renewal. Future sales teams will be radically more efficient, strategic, accurate, and dynamic as a result of AI, and Clarify is making this possible to B2B sales teams today.
This is the second time we at Gradient are excited to partner up with Patrick and Ondrej, after their last startup was acquired by Amplitude. We’re pleased they’ve added Austin’s sales and marketing experience to accelerate the ambitious goal of the future of CRM. This won't be the first time CRM has been reinvented, but it may be the largest opportunity in CRM advancement yet. Software may have eaten the world, but AI is about to eat software and substantially expand the value of technology in this category.