Webinar: AI + Product Update

Melinda: Hello and welcome to our live webinar today.

It’s great to see so many people here. We’re excited to be able to share more information about how
Anthony and the Insightly team will deploy AI to help you all do more with Insightly.
Everything that Anthony will go over today is future state for Insightly. This is not currently built into the product, but our product teams and engineers are collaborating on everything that Anthony will discuss today and in the coming months, will be working together on the best way to bring this to life. We’re really excited to give you a flavor of what’s to come and how it’s going to benefit you.

We’re going to record this webinar and send it out to every single webinar guest and registrant, so be sure to look for that email in the next couple of days

And finally, this briefing from Anthony is just the start of this conversation. If you are a current Insightly customer and have a CSM, please connect with that person over the coming months to stay in tune with our progress. If you’re not a current Insightly customer, please reach out to sales@insightly.com. You can also check the What’s New section of our Help Center on our website, where we post monthly product updates. And finally, our marketing team will share updates via LinkedIn, so be sure to follow us there.

So, Insightly customers have probably been on webinars with us before, but for those of you who are new to Insightly, Anthony Smith is Insightly’s Founder and CEO. Anthony built the first version of Insightly in six months after he identified a market need for a CRM focused on small businesses and their growth. He has led Insightly for over twelve years. Anthony is still closely involved in the product development process here at Insightly and he’ll be sharing his vision for the future of AI and Insightly.

I’m Melinda Prescher, and I lead product, customer, and partner marketing here at Insightly. I’ll be host for today’s webinar.

To tee this up for Anthony today, here are the topics of conversation we’ll cover today.

Anthony will do a very short overview of the Insightly platform

Next, he’ll spend some time laying the groundwork on AI – what’s the current state of affairs, what trends he’s seeing, what it’s all about. We’re all obviously hearing a lot about AI now but it’s important to get specific on what it is, how it works, and where it’s headed

Then, he’ll get into the specifics of each of the Insightly products across the platform and how he and the team will build AI into each product – and along with that, how these efforts will help you and your business.

The thing to keep in mind is that we plan to integrate AI into the Insightly platform to drive efficiency and productivity across your business, so that you can move faster and grow.

I’m going to remind everyone again that you’ll get a recording of this event in your email inbox, so please look for it and feel free to share with anyone who might be interested.

Let’s get started – Anthony, I”ll hand it off to you.

Anthony: Thanks Melinda.

Artificial Intelligence is definitely having its moment in the spotlight this year. It was invented in the 1960’s but in the past half a decade the capabilities of artificial intelligence algorithms has accelerated in leaps and bounds.

One area of AI that has got a lot of press and attention is Generative artificial intelligence.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) refers to models or algorithms that create brand-new output, such as text, photos, videos, code, data, or 3D renderings, from the huge amount of data they are trained on. The models ‘generate’ new content by referring to the data they have been trained on, making new predictions.

The purpose of generative AI is to create content, as opposed to other forms of AI, which suit different purposes, such as analyzing data, making ad recommendations, parsing through applications, helping to control a self-driving car, etc.

What is an example of generative AI?

Generative AI is simply a subsection of AI that uses its training data to ‘generate’ or produce a new output. AI chatbots or AI image generators are quintessential examples of generative AI models. These tools use vast amounts of materials they were trained on to create new text or images.

The term generative AI is causing a buzz because of the increasing popularity of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s conversational chatbot ChatGPT and its AI image generator DALL-E 3.

These and similar tools use generative AI to produce new content, including computer code, essays, emails, social media captions, images, poems, Excel formulas, and more, within seconds, which has the potential to boost peoples’ workflows significantly.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT became extremely popular quickly, accumulating over one million users a week after launching. Many other companies saw that success and rushed to compete in the generative AI marketplace, including Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Anthropic. These companies quickly developed their own generative AI models.

The buzz around generative AI will keep growing as more companies enter the market and find new use cases to help the technology integrate into everyday processes. For example, there has been a recent surge of new generative AI models for video and audio.

As you can imagine, generative AI lends itself well to marketing use cases. We’re building generative AI capability into Insightly Marketing in a number of areas, and partnering with the leader in Generative AI, OpenAI, to do so.

What we’re currently building as the basis of this integration is an extension of our email and landing page editor with an AI assistant built right into the editing experience. You will be able to chat with our AI assistant inside the email and landing page editor, and with a few simple text prompts you can generate new text content for your emails or landing pages, or update and refresh existing content.

What this allows is for you to be able to use AI to write content for emails and landing pages without leaving the editor. This solves that dreaded blank page problem you have when starting a new blog article, landing page, or marketing email. Give the AI assistant some direction with a few prompts, and it will generate paragraphs of really well written content for emails and landing pages that you can then use, edit, and modify to your needs.

Our new AI assistant can also be used to come up with some catchy titles for emails or headers for landing pages. It’s like having a fantastically creative assistant sitting right beside you to help you get started.

Another useful task for our AI Assistant is to come up with variations of content you have already written, or to rewrite existing content which is perfect for use in A/B testing of emails or multivariate tests of emails which we already support.

Our new AI assistant can also be used to check spelling and grammar. Just give it the text you wish to check, and ask it to check for spelling and grammar and it will take a look over what you have written and provide edits or suggestions of how to better phrase passages.

You will also be able to use our Ai Editor to be able to change the character length of an email. Maybe you have some existing content from a blog post or a web page that you want to use, but it is a bit too long for what you would like to include in a short email. You can get our AI Assistant to write an abbreviated version that’s a lot shorter and gets the main points across that you can easily use in an email.

If you’ve got a small marketing team this feature can be wonderful at helping you quickly repurpose content across different channels and step up your marketing activity quickly and easily. It’s like adding a new staff member to your team. AI allows you to take something you’ve created for a blog post for instance, and quickly rewrite it for social posts or slides.

Similarly you can change the tone of your existing content and copy. If a team member has written some content you would like to repurpose, but you would like it rewritten in a more business oriented style, our AI Editor can do that for you too in just a few keystrokes.

The new Insightly AI Editor can really speed up the email creation and landing page authoring process right there in the editor, and it allows you to do so without having to switch apps and change contexts.

We’re bringing the power of AI to our Android and iOS mobile apps soon too. We have a brilliant free feature shipping soon in our mobile apps that allows you to bring in contacts into Insightly from business cards you receive from clients. You can use the camera on your phone and the Insightly mobile app to take a picture of a business card and Insightly will automatically bring that into Insightly as a contact by recognising all the text on the business card and sorting out the name, company title, addresses, phone and fax numbers and email and website addresses on the business card and then saving them directly to Insightly.

We’re launching a new version of the business card scanner that is infused with AI. Using the power of artificial intelligence, the new scanner system in our testing is much more accurate at recognising contact titles and roles than the previous version and categorizing and importing all the relevant information from a business card without human intervention.

Insightly Service is a great application for capturing and resolving customer issues and queries via our tickets feature. Customer Service agents can be assigned incoming tickets or input new tickets themselves and Insightly will capture all the correspondence between your customers and customer service agents.

One of the huge advantages of using Insightly’s unified platform of CRM, Marketing and Service is that your staff can see those valuable customer service tickets and Insightly marketing data right inside CRM contact and lead records. The integration between the three products and their data is built right into Insightly.

Sometimes resolving customer service tickets with customers involves a number of interactions or the back and forth correspondence between customers and your staff can result in some lengthy exchanges.

Rather than staff members in CRM or Marketing having to read and review all those interactions back and forth between the customer and staff to understand a ticket and what it is about, we’re bringing the power of AI to save you time.

Our AI system in the near future will neatly read through all the interactions and back and forth in a ticket and then generate a summary of a few short sentences of each ticket – that succinctly summarizes the nature of the ticket correspondence and the resolution provided.

This allows your staff to be able to review all the tickets linked to customers very quickly without having to wade through the entirety of the correspondence for each one, saving you time and giving you a fuller picture of all the customer interactions and the state of the relationship.

Generative AI is not only awesome at creating and generating text for you, it’s also really good at writing code too. We’re utilizing this superpower-like capability our AI has to generate code to help you create new calculated fields in Insightly.

Calculated fields are new fields you can add to any record in Insightly that calculate something and save the result, a little like a spreadsheet. Calculations can include math operators like division and subtraction, text operators like concatenation, logical operators like true false assertions and branching, date time functions etc.

Our customers use it for things like calculating discounts or commissions on sales, for working out the tax on items, calculating scores or working out if a field has certain text within it, or for combining and calculating the total of several other fields.

Calculated field formulas in Insightly are written in computer code a little like Excel formulas, and you need a certain level of experience and understanding to be able to write one correctly. We’re making it a lot easier for just about anyone to create one of these calculated fields by using the power of AI to write the formula for you. Just describe in plain English in a few words what you’re trying to do or accomplish, and our AI assistant will automatically generate and write the complete calculated field formula field for you so you don’t have to know or understand any computer code to make it work. Just describe what you want and we can do the rest for you automatically and seamlessly using the power of AI.

We’re bringing the power of generative AI across our whole suite of applications in Insightly. In the near future Insightly will be using generative AI to write and rewrite text and headlines right inside Insightly Marketing. We will use generative AIO to automatically recognise and import contact information from pictures of business cards in Insightly Mobile. We’re using generative AI to automatically succinctly summarize long customer service interactions inside tickets in Insightly Service, and we’re using generative Ai to automatically write code for you in calculated fields in Insightly CRM.

We’re trialing these features and look to see them coming soon to Insightly depending on which plan you’re on. I think you’ll be impressed with the productivity improvements and the enhancements we’re bringing around generative AI and Insightly.

And with that, I’ll hand it back to you, Melinda.

Melinda: OK. That was great. Thanks so much Anthony and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Again, we’ll stay in touch. If you are an Insightly customer, reach out to your CSM. If not, send us an email at sales@insightly.com. We’re updating you every month on our help center. Also follow us on LinkedIn. See you soon!

Anthony: Thanks!