Outreach Unveils New Enterprise Voice Assistant for Sales Platform
Sales platform Outreach debuted a new, voice-controlled virtual assistant this week. Outreach designed the digital assistant, named Kaia (Knowledge AI Assistant) as a way for Outreach clients to speed up and improve how they handle customer interactions as a way of improving sales. Kaia is the latest of the quickly multiplying options for applying voice tech and AI to enterprise services.
Selling Kaia
Outreach created Kaia as a way of shortening the sales process and smoothing out some of the bumps along the way. The assistant can integrate into Zoom and other conferencing platforms, recording and transcribing meetings and calls with customers, with action items flagged and summarized at the end of the discussion. also use the client’s database to quickly pull up relevant information about a potential customer as well as answers to questions the customer may have, such as price comparisons or product features. Kaia puts these people and content cards right on the user’s screen during the call.
Outreach unveiled Kaia at Unleash Virtual Summit, the company’s annual conference hosted online this year due to the current COVID-19 health crisis. The beta for Kaia is arriving this summer, with the final version expected in the fall. The pandemic and subsequent need to work from home actually makes Kaia even more helpful than it would be already, according to Outreach.
“I’ve been waiting five years for Outreach Kaia. This is the most powerful tool to be introduced in the sales industry in a long time, and we are very excited to be bringing the next generation of sales technology to life,” Outreach CEO Manny Medina said in a statement. “Now more than ever, sales teams need Outreach Kaia — especially when so many of them are working remotely. Outreach Kaia’s ability to surface real-time information exactly when a sales rep needs it during a live conversation is powerful.”
Enterprising AI
Kaia isn’t appearing in a vacuum. Outreach’s virtual assistant will help the company stay competitive even as enterprise AI in voice and chat becomes more common. The biggest name in the industry, Salesforce, began augmenting and providing customization options for the Einstein voice assistant platform last winter, after working with Apple to build a Siri Shortcut for its mobile app. Salesforce may be the best-known specifically for enterprise, but the same principle has led Microsoft to shift its Cortana voice assistant to that purpose, integrating it into Microsoft 365, while Oracle also set up a voice assistant platform for clients last year, and Cisco is now using AI to transcribe and analyze conference calls.
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