OpenAI secretly launched a sales agent — here are the details
By kflanagan@hubspot.com (Kieran Flanagan)
In February, OpenAI gave a two-minute demonstration at a private event in Tokyo. The demo didn’t stay quiet for long. It set off a firestorm in the sales industry.
The short demo, which isn’t available yet, was for an AI sales agent. This AI agent can perform autonomous tasks to help sales teams qualify, enrich, and follow up with leads. You can watch the full leaked demo here, but I’ll break down all the information you need — and what it means for everyone doing knowledge work — below.
OpenAI’s Entry Into Vertical Agents
First of all, OpenAI has mostly focused on consumer products to this point. They created their foundational model, which companies can build on with an API. This is really the first example of OpenAI building a vertical agent. They’ve built an agent that helps knowledge workers do their work, with use cases specific to certain verticals.
How It Will Work
According to the demo, here’s how OpenAI’s virtual sales agent will work:
- A customer fills out a Contact Sales form.
- That request comes into the OpenAI task pane as a lead.
- The sales agent calls up multiple tools to analyze the lead and take action. For example:
- OpenAI’s Deep Research tool analyzes the lead to fill in enriching information like role, sector, company size, etc.
- It calls up calendar availability to check time slots available to set a meeting.
- It drafts an email to schedule the meeting and sends calendar requests to both the sales rep and the potential customer.
These steps are fully automated, with no human intervention required.
What Makes It Different From Other AI Sales Tools
There are a lot of AI sales tools already on the market, including HubSpot’s own Breeze. So, what makes OpenAI’s sales agent different?
Deep Research Capabilities
At HubSpot, we know the power of enriched data to inform and enable sales conversations. When a lead comes in through OpenAI, the AI agent will call up deep research with live web results and reasoning capabilities to enrich that data. This is research a sales associate might do on their own, like industry, revenue, title, and so on. Deep research can be phenomenally powerful when it’s done in seconds.
Since it connects to various tools, the OpenAI sales agent can also pattern match against customers in your CRM to assess whether it’s a good fit compared to current customers. So, it may offer lead scoring and automated actions tailored to how good a fit the lead is.
Fits Within Your Existing Tech Stack and Workflows
The best value proposition of autonomous agents in the workforce is when they work within your workflow and tasks. Your tasks will be the starting point for the agent. If you have a good tech stack and workflows you like, you don’t have to change them.
Instead, these workflows will be streamlined and automated based on …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
