Top 12 AI Tools for Business Automation in Sales and Marketing

High-performing but affordable AI tools have made business automation mainstream for companies and departments of all sizes. 

Take sales for example. Numerous sales AI tools exist like AiSDR to help you rapidly reach out to prospects, respond to inbound requests, and nurture leads down your funnel without burning through your budget. 

But with so many options on the market, where does your best investment lie? 

To help you decide, here’s a quick rundown of the top AI tools for business automation and their key features, as well as what you need to consider when making a decision.

AI in business automation: Where are companies investing?

AI made its biggest splash on the business scene with the launch of ChatGPT and its generative AI capabilities. 

Since the moment it launched, businesses have embraced the technology. A massive 97% of business owners believe that generative AI will help their business, and one in three businesses intend to leverage ChatGPT to create website content. 

Businesses are also turning to AI for help in these areas:

• Customer service (56% of business owners)
• Cybersecurity and fraud management (51%)
• Customer relationship management (46%)
• Inventory management (40%) 
• Product recommendations (33%)
• Accounting (30%)
• Supply chain operations (30%)
• Recruitment and talent sourcing (26%) 
• Audience segmentation (24%)

In addition to the massive perceived payoff, there are many other benefits that businesses believe AI will bring: 

• Increased cost savings (59%) 
• Reduced response times (53%)
• Decreased instances of errors (48%)
• Improved decision-making (44% of business owners)
• Streamline workflows (42%)

With all of this at stake, the adoption of AI has transformed into the new space race. And – to put it quite simply – companies can’t afford to lag behind.

Top 12 AI tools for business automation in sales and marketing

The right AI business tools can automate tasks that are critical to your sales and marketing workflows. This includes content creation, prospecting, and customer sentiment analysis. 

Here are the 12 tools you should consider if you’re looking to automate your business:

AiSDR

AiSDR is an AI sales solution that’s designed to fill the role of a sales development representative (SDR) and automate your outreach. In addition to creating personalized outreach messages, AiSDR warms up inboxes, qualifies prospects, and corresponds with leads to get a demo booked. 

Key features

• Lead discovery – AiSDR’s built-in lead discovery engine provides unlimited access to the verified contact information of more than 35 million companies and 700 million professionals around the world.  
• Lead nurturing – AiSDR simplifies nurturing with personalization at scale (i.e. tailoring content for each lead and answering any questions).
• Data analytics – AiSDR’s performance dashboard gives you a “big picture” perspective across all your campaigns or analyze specific outreach efforts.
• Optimized booking – AiSDR books meetings with your warm leads on autopilot, speeding up their progress through your sales funnel.
• Automation of indirect tasks – AiSDR will build and maintain your sender reputation by warming up mailboxes and triple-checking leads for bounces.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT uses generative AI technology to create human-like content. Using text-based prompts and responses, users can ask it to generate creative copy, respond to emails, dig up insights about market trends, and more. 

Key features

• Content generation – Sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) allows ChatGPT to understand customer communications, decipher cultural context, and even detect sarcasm. What’s more, it can generate responses that are just as human-sounding and complex. 
• Rich text databases – ChatGPT boasts a breadth of vocabulary that allows it to communicate convincingly with audiences at all technical and learning levels.
• Multilingual capabilities – ChatGPT is language agnostic, which means it can run any language and product material in any language. 
• Creative flair – ChatGPT can infuse creativity into its content generation. You can use it to craft poems, song lyrics, video scripts, and other creative content. 

Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that provides the business intelligence you need to make better decisions and eliminate repetitive tasks. 

Key features

• Accelerator – User-friendly dashboards allow you to quickly and easily customize your analytics and reports for your specific needs and requirements.
• Catalog – An automated catalog centralizes and organizes your data to make discovery faster and easier. 
• Data stories – This NLP-driven feature lets you add narrative insights and explanations to your data. 

ClickUp

ClickUp is a work management tool that makes it easy to assign tasks, set deadlines, and communicate on a single platform. The AI-powered ClickUp Brain takes everything to the next level by interlinking all your docs, staff, and tasks, allowing you to leverage your company’s knowledge bank.

Key features

• Knowledge manager – Answers your questions by scouring your files, task histories, and project documentation for the right information. 
• Project manager – Acts as an auto-pilot for managing workflows, assigning tasks, setting alerts, etc.
• Writer – Crafts content and quickly replies to messages.

Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI writing assistant designed to review and correct grammar, spelling, and clarity. It can also detect plagiarism. 

Key features

• Corrections – Grammarly detects grammar and spelling mistakes as you type. It highlights the errors and suggests corrections. 
• Tone suggestions – It helps set the right tone for marketing messages and sales pitches.
• Sentence rewrite – Grammarly can also instantly rewrite long-winded sentences to improve clarity and brevity. 

Surfer

Surfer is an AI writing tool that helps you craft content that resonates with your audience and aligns with SEO requirements.

Key features

• SEO optimization – Surfer analyzes on-page elements such as keywords and meta tags to ensure they’re optimized for search engines. 
• Content analysis – Advanced natural language processing (NLP) analyzes user intent, making it easier to reach your target audience. 
• Backlink analysis – Surfer analyzes your backlinks and gives suggestions for making them stronger. 

Jasper

Jasper empowers enterprise marketing teams to instantly craft creative content in over 30 languages. 

Key features

• Content generation – Give Jasper just a few prompts, titles, or headings, and it will start generating your marketing copy. 
• Document editor – Jasper also has a document interface that allows you to improve the layout of your write-up by adding headings, bold texts, and images. 
• Sentence rewriting – You can count on the assistant to improve the tone, clarity, and grammar of your sentences. 

Pictory

Pictory is an AI tool that can turn written content like scripts and blog posts into videos. With minimal input, you can produce a video complete with captions and stock footage that’s perfect for website or social media sharing.

Key features

• Video editor – Pictory analyzes your text content, blog URL, or media to instantly create a video with subtitles and relevant images. 
• Voiceover – Add AI voices or upload your own voiceover to the video.
• Media library – Pictory allows you to use any of the 10M+ royalty-free videos, music, and images available in its library. 

Drift

Drift is a conversational AI tool designed to understand your customers, provide humanlike responses, and personalize customer experiences. 

Key features

• Conversational landing page development – Drift equips your landing page with a chatbot that engages users with conversational responses as they browse.
• Email integration – Drift keeps conversations going by automating and personalizing your email sequences.
• CRM interaction – You can integrate Drift into your existing CRM to automate customer service tasks and streamline workflows.

Zendesk

Zendesk’s AI suite comprises powerful tools designed to improve customer service operations. 

Key features

• Intelligent triage – This tool detects intent and sentiment to understand and classify user requests.
• Advanced bots – Zendesk bots leverage data and intent insights to deliver human-sounding messages and emails. 
• Macro suggestions – These improve the efficiency of agents with smart shortcuts and efficient workflows. 

Dall-E

Dall-E is an AI system capable of generating realistic images based on descriptions written in everyday language.

Key features

• Text-to-image translation – DALL-E can turn text descriptions into compelling, intricate visuals for blog posts and other content. 
• Image quality enhancement – DALL-E uses advanced deep-learning techniques to turn lower-quality input into hyper-realistic images. 
• Inpainting and retouching – Easily add or remove natural language captions, icons, shadows, and textures.

Zapier

Zapier is a business development tool that improves workflows by connecting different web services and apps such as Gmail and HubSpot.

Key features

• Connect with (almost) anything – Zapier integrates with thousands of applications, meaning your setup will usually be covered. 
• Interfaces templates – Equips business-critical workflows with forms, web pages, and basic apps.
• Triggers and actions – Zapier maintains a user-friendly platform with easy-to-follow triggers and instructions.

What to consider when choosing AI tools for business automation

Before you purchase a subscription to the latest, trendiest AI software, you need to take a step back and think about what you really need (and if you really need the latest, trendiest AI).

Business objectives

Your first step should be figuring out what you want to improve and answering the question “How can AI help?”

This might require a bit of internal research and discussions with colleagues. Based on their pain points, you can narrow down your search to a collection of tools that can alleviate those pains. 

For example, if your sales team plans on scaling its outbound but wants to fix red flags in its processes beforehand, you’ll need to start looking for a sales AI that can manage the job. You can further narrow your search using follow-up questions, such as the available budget.

Scalability

The AI business tools you choose should be able to grow alongside your company and customers. If it can’t scale at the same time you do, it might not be worth getting in the long run.

The last thing you want is to be locked into a contract that doesn’t let you meet the changing demands of your business.

Integrations

Good AI tools should seamlessly integrate with your current software. 

When you’re checking out a sales AI, see if it has any integrations for software for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), help desk, and others.

Any sales outreach AI should have (or plan on having) integrations for Gmail, Outlook, and HubSpot. You can also ask if a company will accept requests for custom solutions.

Return on investment

Your AI business tools should either directly increase your revenue or create cost savings.

When projecting the potential ROI of sales AI, you’ll need to estimate your expected benefits and divide the estimate by the cost of implementation. Then compare that result with your current cost of doing business.

If the ROI is positive, then the AI is worth potentially implementing. However, if it’s negative, you’ll need to discuss with stakeholders whether or not the growth in efficiency merits the additional costs.

For instance, while AiSDR has comparable results to a human SDR, it has a positive ROI since it gets a similar outcome for just 10% of the cost. 

Accelerate business growth with AI

Efficient workflows are key to boosting business growth. The good news is that with the right AI, you can streamline your processes and carry out business automation without overspending. 

But not all AI business tools are created equal. You’ll need a discerning eye before committing to one AI software over another. 

Book a demo to explore how AiSDR can automate your business.