Artificial intelligence is slowly infiltrating every aspect of our world from our homes, to business, security & intelligence and science. With the internet in its infancy, only corporations and governments with supercomputers could leverage the power of machine learning. Today, businesses are gaining huge momentum on leveraging the data they collect to go far beyond standard reporting and traditional trend analysis and predictions.
Node.io is one of the first companies to offer an AI platform with their deep learning models as a service. With SugarCRM’s recent acquisition of Node.io, SugarCRM’s customers will be able to surface impressive predictability to deliver a high definition view of your customers, leads, pipeline, and other key indicators of which drive real decisions.
I’ve seen so many marketing departments really stretching the definition of AI within their tools (you know who you are!), to the point where I have to laugh sometimes. So i’m naturally sckeptical about these kinds of claims. However, after speaking personally to individuals inside of SugarCRM who have seen what Node.io can do, i’m genuinly excited for us at Sugabyte and our customers.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better.
Here’s their press release: (source)
CUPERTINO, California – August 24, 2020 – SugarCRM Inc., the innovator of time-aware customer experience (CX), today announced the acquisition of Node Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that leverages CRM data and vast external sources to deliver an unparalleled level of predictability across a whole array of different business use cases. The acquisition fuels Sugar’s time-aware CX platform by automatically forecasting expected outcomes and highlighting previously unforeseen challenges and opportunities.
Making sense of data is a perennial issue for companies. Deep learning models are limited by the quality and quantity of input data, which historically has been inaccurate or incomplete in real-life CRM implementations. Node’s deep learning models identify signals with up to 81% greater accuracy than heuristic-based approaches to deliver the tangible benefits of heightened performance and true predictability.
“Sugar has been a fantastic platform at its heart,” said Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. “Adding Node has the potential to bring impressive predictive accuracy to Sugar’s platform and products. And now more than ever it is critical to leverage all available data and signals to work towards better outcomes for both customers and the business alike.”
Today’s acquisition is the latest in a series of innovations supporting Sugar’s vision for the next frontier of high-definition customer experience (HD-CX) which began last year with the launch of Sugar’s time-based, no touch CX solutions for sales, marketing and service teams.
“Obtaining a high definition view of your business and customers, from pipeline to forecasting, is all about replacing a fragmented, dated, and distorted picture with one that is sharply focused and rich in breadth and depth,” said Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM. “Sugar is democratizing AI, ushering in a new frontier in CX with its powerful combination of AI, time-aware and data enrichment, to drive business performance and enable predictability for companies of all sizes.”
Extending Sugar’s time-aware CX platform, Node’s AI technology adds the most coveted element of time—the future. The combined solution offers wide-ranging capabilities for sales, marketing and service teams and include (but are in no way limited to):
- – Identifying customers most likely to churn, giving precious runway to remediate and engage with customers in the most strategic way possible
- – Predicting likelihood to convert from lead scoring models
- – Insight-driven forecasting and prescriptive guidance for higher quota attainment and sale close monitoring
- – Seamless recommendations for add-on products during the right phase of the customer journey increasing average sale size
- – Ascertaining marketing attribution and contribution to closed business
- – Improving customer engagement models through predictive case routing and contextual data in real time to empower customer service professionals
