TechBytes with Ilan Kasan, CEO and Co-Founder at Exceed.ai

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Exceed.ai

I’m the Co-Founder and CEO at Exceed.ai. Together with Yaron Ismah-Moshe, Chief Product Officer and my Co-Founder, we founded Exceed at the beginning of 2017. We are a group of 12 people within Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and Engineering with a mission to empower Sales and Marketing professionals with AI and Automation. Our vision is to create autonomous reps that will work alongside humans and empower them to make the right decisions and multiply their output.

How do you bring AI to the center of Sales and Marketing Technologies?

Exceed allows companies to convert more leads into opportunities with an AI Conversational Assistant that works alongside Sales and Marketing teams to identify new customers more efficiently by automatically engaging, following up, qualifying and booking meetings with leads using natural, authentic two-way conversations over email and chat.

Exceed.ai frees reps to focus on revenue-generating activities by offloading error-prone and repetitive tasks. Our clients experience up to an 80% increase in new opportunities and a 67% cost reduction to qualify leads. 

What is Exceed.AI’s current technology roadmap to build B2B Sales Assistant Solutions?

Our vision is a fully autonomous rep that works alongside human reps across various parts of the funnel and communication channels. We plan to support, in addition to email and chat, social media and phone (voice). While we recognize it will take time to realize that vision, we started with supporting Sales Development teams and Demand Generation teams with lead follow-up and qualification over chat and email. We are collecting data so we can train our AI engine. Exceed comes with pre-trained scenarios that are common across many companies. Each customer can easily customize it to match their playbook. As we collect more data, Exceed is becoming smarter, and we will start expanding to other channels and parts of the sales funnel.

How is the North American AI Sales market different from European and APAC markets? How do you plan to grow your customer base in the lagging markets?

Since our technology has a strong language component, we decided to focus on English speaking countries. It turns out that the U.S. and U.K. tend to be early adopters of new technology so this is working for us. In 2-3 years, we plan to expand to other non-English speaking geographies.

Tell us more about your AI and Machine Learning initiatives for Account Based Platforms? How do you ensure seamless integration with CRM, Marketing Automation, Contacts and Email, Customer Service and Personalization platforms?

We are building in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) capabilities into our product. For example, our AI Assistant can identify contacts and leads from the same company and adjust the message and communication based on their specific roles within their company and their communication history.

We have built seamless integrations with the leading CRM, Marketing Automation and Sales Engagement platforms such as Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and others. In essence, we can pull lead information from these systems, log all our interactions and change statuses of leads once we qualify them. Exceed also connects to GSuite and Office 365 email systems.

What is your prediction on the disruptive application of AI Sales Assistants for Mobile-centric businesses?

Any business, not necessarily a mobile-centric business, with a wide top of the funnel, a Digital Acquisition strategy, requires human reps to close business, will have to deploy an AI sales assistant to help their team scale. Lead follow-up, nurturing and qualification is a real problem companies are struggling with. The unit economies prohibit companies from scaling by throwing more skilled reps at the problem, and lead prioritization and scoring are not working out for most companies. Only a multiplier to the team will make a difference.

What message do you have for businesses that are yet to leverage AI capabilities for sales and marketing?

AI can be applied in various areas of the sales and marketing funnel. Like many new technologies, not everything works as advertised and there is no one size fits all. However, it is inevitable that AI will be part of every Sales and Marketing Technology stack. The winning companies will be those who embrace the technology and figure out how to get the most out of it. Used correctly, AI can be a multiplier for companies. I would recommend any company to start with a pain point or an area they feel they need to do better than find the right solution. AI in itself is not the goal but rather a means to an end.