Revenue teams are the heart and soul of every product-based company since they bring in the money to actually run the business in the first place. However, as it is right now, sales is grunt work, with long meetings with no real communication, just two teams talking.
Companies, therefore, have tried to ease the grunt work that remains with the sales teams; the most promising of this is using assistive AI to augment and automate the entire sales process. However, a gap still exists, in terms of personalisation of the conversations during the deals.
To bring more of the ‘human’ factor in, Frrole AI founder Amarpreet Kalkat founded Humantic AI in 2019. A personality AI startup, Humantic primarily serves revenue teams.
The Palo Alto and Bengaluru-based startup has built prospect intelligence products for the revenue and human resource teams. Humantic AI provides salespeople with actionable insights into the personalities of the people they are selling to, something that Amarpreet called a ‘segment creation play’.
The startup has seen its products being deployed in large enterprises such as Paypal and McKinsey, along with startups such as SupportLogic and Appian.
The startup’s product combines AI, ML & NLP, along with neuroscience and computational linguistics to provide insights. To explain all that, it has posted a YouTube video describing how its product works.
Humantic AI claims to have recorded an average reduction of 36% in time taken for first engagement, a 30% increase in response rates, and a 6.2% increase in closed revenue.
It has recently raised $1.5 Mn, in its first round of institutional funding. The round saw participation from Gokul Rajaram, board member, Coinbase and Pinterest, John Donovan, ex-CEO, AT&T, and Amit Singh, board member, Asana. Along with them, Bradley Horowitz, VP Product, Google, and Binny Bansal, cofounder, Flipkart, also participated in the round.
Sharath Keshava Narayana, cofounder of Observe AI has joined Humantic AI’s board.
Narayana said, “The product is one that can be used by every company on this planet. Big, small, mid-sized, everybody needs a prospect intelligence tool.”
Prospect Intelligence – The Bread And Butter Of Humantic AI
Amarpreet said that using the company’s core product, Humantic is able to predict how the buyer thinks, how they decide, and what matters to them.
“We are calling this prospect intelligence where sales teams need more insights about exactly who the buyer is,” Amarpreet noted, summarising the startup’s core product, which it has used for two verticals, hiring and sales.
The startup’s product is an assistive AI one, that seeks to help salespeople convert leads with more efficiency with the help of personalised insights they receive from Humantic AI’s system.
The startup’s AI-based product also allows users API access, which allows for easy deployment across the system.
Incidentally, it had started providing prospect intelligence for hiring teams, during the early days of the startup. However, with Covid-19 coming in, hiring stopped, and as such, Amarpreet and his team made a sensible call to pivot to sales, as the hiring aspect was not doing well financially.
Currently, Humantic AI can boast of more than 100 customers. The sales vertical brings in 80% of the total revenue of the startup as well, and that has seen its revenue go up by 17 times over the last year alone.
The core product did not change much, Amarpreet added; Humantic AI tweaked the product’s abilities to allow it to supply insights into the buyers, rather than the talent.
Humantic AI, currently, is based on personalisation for selling more effectively. However, the startup’s long term goal is an ambitious one – humanising the internet.
Assistive AI In Sales – The Next Logical Step
Incidentally, assistive technology in sales is not a new phenomenon.
Startups such as Salesken, Outplay, and GTM Buddy use AI and related technologies to provide analytics, predictability, and financial planning and analysis, respectively, to sales teams to help them close more deals and increase efficiency and profitability.
Outplay sits on top of a CRM to help sales teams increase efficiency. The startup brings predictability to outbound sales and helps salespeople talk to the right prospect at the right time through the right channel.
On the other hand, Salesken provides an AI-powered in-call live sales intelligence platform by developing insights on gaps in customers’ sales calls and helping the sales representatives bridge gaps with real-time cues.
Lastly, GTM Buddy’s platform, which is powered by a contextual AI engine pre-processes all the sales enablement content available within the organisation’s content repositories, auto indexes and surfaces the most relevant information in the context of a conversation happening with a prospective buyer.
The global sales intelligence market was estimated to be worth $2 Bn in 2019 and is projected to grow to $3.4 Bn by 2024, at a CAGR of 11.4%. According to an estimate by IDC, India’s AI market will reach $7.8 Bn by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.2%, from a market value of $3.1 Bn in 2020.
IDC further predicted that the Indian AI software market will grow from $2.8 Bn in 2020 to $6.4 Bn in 2025, at a CAGR of 18.1%.
Humantic joins a competitive list of companies which are focused on assisting sales teams in closing deals, making them more efficient in the process to keep the liquidity flowing through a business.
Making People The Core
When asked where the money is going to go, Amarpreet informed us that a ‘large part’ of it is going to go to just the Humantics AI team.
He also noted that marketing would be somewhere where the startup will invest more disproportionately compared to other startups. Amarpreet explained that since what Humantic is doing is relatively new, that fact necessitates investing more in marketing than anything else.
The startup has said that it will diversify its product offerings to include all kinds of conversational scenarios so that everyone can have insights into the other party to make it a more worthwhile experience.
With personalised conversations, Humantic AI wants to make the internet a more humane place to be, where people have productive conversations. Even though it sounds a little idealistic, chances are high that with enough scale, an AI assistant might as well help us make better conversations.
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