With the explosion of AI business intelligence (AI BI) products on the market and the accompanying AI hype cycle, it can be hard to decide what — if anything — you should add to your tech stack. From a communication perspective, conversation intelligence, offered by many AI‑powered business intelligence solutions, is one of the most impactful AI technologies as it simplifies the workloads of customer-facing workers, provides transparency on ongoing sales deals and customer support cases and extracts valuable insights that drive business innovation and efficiency. However, determining which AI and business intelligence platforms offer high-quality conversation intelligence can be confusing, since many providers describe their solutions in different ways or combine more than one service on a single platform, making it hard to know what exactly are their strengths and weaknesses.
So, to help you make sense of this landscape, let’s take a closer look at what conversation and business intelligence AI is, who it’s for and break down some of the top solutions on the market to make it easier for you to discover the best fit for your business and your budget.
What Is Conversation and AI Business Intelligence?
Put simply, AI BI is a way of analyzing and managing business data with the help of artificial intelligence. This can manifest as traditional dashboards or reports, but more excitingly, the inclusion of AI in business intelligence means that insights can now also be automated and delivered directly to employees on the frontlines, speeding up vital revenue-generating activities such as sales and increasing training opportunities. With conversation intelligence in particular, this means users can benefit from both live or post-call features such as:
- Transcriptions
- Sentiment analysis
- Summaries
- Keyword detection and summaries
- Talk time ratios
- Call tagging
These capabilities make it easier to catch up on missed meetings, jump in to help a colleague with a case, pinpoint where employees struggle in conversations and provide them with practical feedback on how to improve.
The catch is that companies that offer these business intelligence AI features, rarely simply describe their solution as a conversation intelligence platform. Instead, you’re more likely to see products described as sales engagement platforms, revenue operations and intelligence solutions or even AI assistants providing conversation intelligence, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for the features listed above.
Who’s it for?
While AI BI software can benefit any business, solutions that utilize conversation intelligence and focus on revenue-generating or customer-facing activities are vital to sales-led companies or any business focused on customer service and return sales. Why? Because to really move the needle and improve employee effectiveness they need data-driven feedback and suggestions in real time, not in a shared report or in coaching meetings that are few and far between.
For example, conversation intelligence analyzes chat, video conference, audio calls and even email conversations and produces both post-call summaries and transcriptions as well as live prompts and insights. This means that the AI and BI features are immediately available to employees, helping them to adjust their tone and content to better engage with the person on the end of the line. It also means that when they return from vacation or take over a client, they can quickly get up to date and provide the best customer experience.
Managers also benefit from this kind of software as they can see where employees are struggling and if there are any recurring questions or issues that can be addressed through targeted training. Depending on the solution, managers can also see the progress of calls or sales opportunities, allowing them to see at a glance what progress is being made by their team.
Of course, many of these programs also offer traditional dashboards and reports but also offer predictive analytics, making them just as useful to data analysts and executives, helping them identify issues, develop business plans and make data-driven strategic decisions.
Top AI‑Powered Business Intelligence Platforms With Conversation Intelligence
While we’ve given a quick overview of what conversation intelligence, AI and business intelligence can do, the reality is that each platform has different features and capabilities. To really understand which solution can bring the most value to your business, we need to take a closer look at some of the top offerings on the market.
Gong
Described as a leader in revenue intelligence, Gong is renowned for its use of AI in business intelligence, especially the effectiveness of its conversation intelligence software. Like many of its competitors, Gong runs in the background and gathers data from integrations with third-party systems, allowing it to analyze all customer interactions even if they happen over multiple platforms.
Strengths
Gong claims that its AI‑produced insights are two times more accurate than other platforms because it tracks content instead of keywords — and its customers generally do praise the accuracy of its transcription and insights. Additionally, Gong’s focus on revenue generation means it is also designed to optimize workflows by providing customer scoring, lead qualification and forecasting.
Considerations
Gong is very effective at analyzing conversations regardless of the source, but it is the most expensive solution on this list. Why? Besides the accuracy of its AI, Gong also reportedly adds +100 new features each year. And while it’s exciting that the solution is continually evolving, it has so many functionalities that most businesses would never use them. So for the majority, it’s not worth the hefty investment.
Outreach
Following behind the market leader Gong is Outreach. Outreach offers many of the same AI business intelligence tools as Gong, but goes a step further by also offering sales engagement, revenue intelligence and revenue operations features.
Strengths
As a sales engagement platform, Outreach outshines Gong with not only a deal health score but also the ability to run marketing sequences, including automating email cadences and calls. Thus some of its unique features include identifying when prospects are out of office and offering smart email assists to help users draft emails faster. The platform also prioritizes sales tasks and sends alerts to keep salespeople focused, making it extremely useful for sales‑led companies.
Considerations
Since it’s a unified platform, Outreach also comes at a high price. Some of its functionalities overlap with other sales solutions, which can lead to redundancies, depending on a company’s tech stack. So if a company is just looking to add conversation intelligence to its systems, Outreach offers a bit more than needed.
Salesloft
Another sales-focused solution, Salesloft is a revenue workflow platform powered by conversation intelligence, AI and BI. Like Outreach, it prioritizes cadence and other tasks, helping to make sales agents more efficient.
Strengths
Salesloft claims to uniquely focus on the full customer lifecycle, not just the initial sale. It has a specific tool called Rhythm that prompts users to take action when the AI notices certain customer signals, helping sales teams close deals, upsell and cross-sell when customers are, at least in theory, most receptible to these activities.
Considerations
Salesloft doesn’t offer all of its AI business intelligence capabilities at just one price. There are also a few features that have to be bought separately, which can quickly raise the price of the overall solution. So make sure to uncover how much it would cost to have everything your business needs before you compare it to competitors. Otherwise, you may find yourself spending more than you thought you would.
Avoma
Unlike its competitors, Avoma doesn’t position itself as a revenue or sales solution. Instead, it describes itself as an AI meeting assistant for customer-facing teams. Although, as you can probably guess, its focus within business intelligence and AI is firmly on conversation intelligence.
Strengths
Avoma’s AI assistant delivers the same conversation intelligence features as the other competitors on this list but its users rave about how easy it is to send snippets of conversations so colleagues can hear what customers are saying in their own words. It’s wonderful to have a transcript of conversations, but sometimes being able to hear the tone and inflection of the speaker is more impactful than the words on their own.
Avoma is also known to be more user-friendly than Gong and has wonderful customer support — something many of its competitors lack.
Considerations
Unlike Outreach or Salesloft, Avoma is a stand-alone product, only offering conversation intelligence and an AI assistant. This can be a perfect solution if you are happy with your current tech stack and just need to add AI capabilities. But it can also add to your costs, as it is no use on its own — it’s just one of many product licenses you have to have to get its full value.
x‑bees
The newest unified communication as a service (UCaaS) solution from Wildix, x‑bees brings together AI business intelligence, including conversation intelligence, with its unique “sticky” communications, uniting some of the most important customer-facing tools into one platform.
Strengths
Unlike all the other products on this list, x‑bees doesn’t just offer business intelligence and AI — it’s first and foremost a communication system with these tools built in. Thus, there’s no setup or integration to worry about as conversation intelligence tools work out of the box, according to your settings and preferences.
The other major advantage of x‑bees is cost savings as you can get all the benefits of conversation intelligence — including live transcription, sentiment analysis, summaries, call recording playback, talk time ratios, real-time insights and AI‑powered suggestions — without having to pay for or integrate with a separate system.
And finally, x‑bees, like all Wildix products, also has open APIs and over 250 ready-to-go integrations, making it easy to add it to a company’s tech stack. In particular, it has an immersive Salesforce integration that goes beyond automatic call logging, allowing you to see the complete status of an opportunity as well as update it within the x‑bees platform itself. This saves sales agents precious time as they only need to be familiar with one platform to get the benefit of all the tools at their disposal.
Considerations
Unfortunately, one of x‑bees strengths is also its biggest weakness. Since it is a communication platform, it’s designed to analyze and provide insights on calls, meetings and chats made on its own system. In its analysis, it also forgets emails, as they are not a service offered by the system, something nearly all the other companies on this list include.
Which AI Business Intelligence Platform Is the Best?
To put it simply, Gong is the leader in conversation intelligence for a reason. Its accuracy and ability to pull insights from many different sources, along with its other revenue-predicting features, means it can provide insights that could be vital to growing your business.
But, let’s be honest — Gong has a lot of features and, depending on your company, you may not need all of them or some might already be covered by another solution. And there’s nothing more frustrating to a cost-conscious business than having multiple redundancies in its tech stack.
And it monitors conversations, it doesn’t host them. So regardless of whether or not you choose Gong — or any AI business intelligence platform on this list, you still need a solid communication solution behind it to power your conversations.
That’s why we think x‑bees is a powerful choice. With AI business intelligence built into its communication platform, x‑bees can give you all the benefits of a 100% secure-by-design communication system and conversation intelligence for the price of one. It also seamlessly integrates with Gong, so if there are features you can’t live without or you simply prefer how Gong works, you can seamlessly use the two together. In fact, since x‑bees has open APIs, even if there isn’t already a ready-to-go integration for your AI BI solution of choice, you can integrate it. It’s that simple.
But whatever you choose, just make sure you have a clear view of the value you want to get out of all the solutions that make up your tech stack and pick accordingly. Because at the end of the day, if the combination of your software solutions isn’t intuitive or producing value, then you’re not getting the simplicity and efficiency you were promised — regardless of how interesting those insights or features may be.
Want to learn about voice analytics? Check out our previous post.
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