Amazon Alexa Fund, Comcast Ventures and Salesforce Ventures back human-friendly Conversational AI Sales Platform
Tact.ai, a conversational AI sales platform, announced the completion of its $27 million Series C fundraiser, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $57 million. New investors include Amazon Alexa Fund, Comcast Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, with existing investors Accel Partners, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures all participating in the oversubscribed round.
Customer Momentum Primes Company for Next Stage of Growth
Fresh off the heels of accelerated traction with Cisco, Dell, Honeywell and other large enterprises, the new financing will be used to expand the company’s operations into new products and markets. In fact, Tact.ai recently opened a new EMEA headquarters in the United Kingdom, as well as a new development center in Bengaluru, India.
David Zilberman, Managing Director at Comcast Ventures, who led the Series C funding investment, said, “Today, there’s a massive shift happening from the Cloud to the Intelligent Edge. We were impressed with Tact.ai’s success in harnessing this shift to redefine CRM and sales technology strategies for large global customers. We’re thrilled to join Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce in backing Tact.ai.”
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A New System of Workflow for Sellers
Over the last 30 years, enterprise software has centered around digitizing systems of record but has always put the burden of data entry and consumption on the user. By leveraging AI running on edge devices, companies now have an opportunity to digitize human workflows and remove friction created by enterprise applications. Tact.ai delivers a new system of workflow for sellers to remove friction from their day-to-day sales activities. With the AI-powered Tact Assistant, sellers can manage their deal flow and customer interactions in a more conversational way, just as naturally as playing songs using Alexa.
“Sales professionals can no longer afford to get stuck shuffling between different apps looking for the right combination of data and insights,” said Luca Felli, Digital Experience and Analytics Leader at Cisco Systems.
Luca added, “Tact.ai’s ability to meet sellers within their daily workflow of activities delivers a frictionless, 360-degree experience when most needed – at the ‘edge’ of customer interactions.”
Sales teams at Fortune 500 customers are using the Tact AI Assistant as their single pane of glass over customer data scattered across multiple enterprise applications such as CRM, email, calendar, and legacy databases. Tact AI Assistant is currently available on iOS and Android, voice services like Cortana and Alexa, and messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams, WebEx Teams and Slack.
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Now, Tact.ai is unveiling two new capabilities to its platform: Voice Intelligence and an Intelligent Workspace.
Voice Intelligence Ushers in the Conversational Enterprise
Moving beyond traditional speech transcription and commands, Voice Intelligence delivers conversation-driven workflows that allow sellers to control their enterprise applications with natural language in-car. At the core of the new Voice Intelligence engine are five unique features:
- Adaptive Organizational Ontologies: unlike general purpose digital assistants that cater to a wide range of consumer interest, Tact is specialized: trained to support discussions tailored to the sales domain, seller persona, and enterprise terminology.
- Nonlinear Dialog Flows: allows the assistant to adapt to the user’s conversation flow in a more dynamic way, even when the user switches topics.
- Situational Context: ensures the highest rate of accuracy by incorporating knowledge about the user, their preferences, and past conversation history to better understand and predict what they mean.
- Dynamic Narratives: allows the assistant to avoid monotonous answers by providing more human-sounding responses in natural language, instead of mechanical readouts of database fields.
- System-Initiated Conversations: like a human assistant tapping you on the shoulder, the digital assistant can now proactively initiate a dialog with the user to push insights and enable the user to take action.
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“Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,” said Paul Bernard, Director of the Alexa Fund. “Tact was one of the first services to launch alongside Alexa for Business last fall, and we’re excited to support them as they work toward their vision for a more natural, productive enterprise sales environment.”
The Intelligent Workspace Removes People Friction Throughout the Seller’s Journey
The shift from the Cloud to the Intelligent Edge represents an opportunity to remove friction not just with application data, but all throughout the seller’s journey. Today, the revenue cycle is riddled with different systems and numerous customers, partners, and colleagues. From responding to requests to negotiating and finalizing contracts, sellers encounter several steps in order to deliver for the customer. The challenge is doing this — often when in the field away from the office — in a productive and well-sequenced way that aligns the sales experience with the customer’s expectations. Failure to do so jeopardizes not only the organization’s relationship with the buyer but also the expected revenue sales teams are forecasting.
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Tact.ai’s new Intelligent Workspace offering for sales connects the dots across the people, processes, insights and deliverables associated with providing an ideal sales experience for the customer. The Intelligent Workspace acts as a deal room controlled by the seller, blending: persistent messaging, document collaboration, approvals, e-signature functionality, live meeting services and an AI assistant that connects to their application data. They can also rely on voice to coordinate with the people and information they need to productively navigate the seller’s journey. “Building a shared understanding inside your company and with customers and partners while traveling can be difficult. Traditional office tools such as email and phone calls can be cumbersome,” said Cate Gutowski, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Service at Panasonic Avionics Corporation. “You need to be able to quickly review multiple data sets, identify problems, agree on modifications and coordinate with multiple departments to get deals done — all while on the go. Tact.ai’s Voice Intelligence capabilities deliver this type of experience better than most.”
With increased headcount, expanded locations, new investor-support and a product portfolio built for the Intelligent Edge, Tact.ai is poised to meet the growing demand among Fortune 500 enterprises for its Voice Intelligence capabilities. “Sales professionals need a way to control their data and coordinate with people, whether on phone, smart speaker, or in-car,” said Chuck Ganapathi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tact.ai. “We’re pleased to work with world-class investors and global companies like Comcast, Amazon, and Salesforce to execute on our vision of a conversational and voice-driven enterprise for sales teams.”
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