Photo Credit: Tung Nguyen from Pixabay

According to a Gartner report, by 2025, 70% of all B2B seller-buyer interactions will be recorded or analyzed to extract competitive, deal, and market insights using AI/ML and natural language processing (NLP). By 2025, 75% of B2B sales organizations are expected to replace traditional sales playbooks with AI-based guided selling solutions. Sales force automation platforms such as People.ai are helping drive these sales teams by building and leveraging AI/ML and NLP technologies.

People.ai’s Offerings

Founded in February 2016 by Oleg Rogynskyy, San Francisco-based People.ai uses its enterprise revenue intelligence platform to help teams speed up complex sales cycles by engaging relevant people.

The idea behind People.ai came to Oleg when he was working at Nstein, an early player in AI technology. In 2007, Oleg and the sales team at Nstein updated contacts for companies on their Salesforce platform. But within three weeks, the data was “back to being a mess”. As Nstein tried to fix the problem, Oleg learned the power of NLP as it applied to email and calendar data at a large scale. He gained a further understanding of ML when he worked at H20.ai, another AI player.

In 2016, he launched People.ai to leverage his past experience and offer an initial product for collecting activity data including telemetry of sales team, email, calendar, and Zoom. They would then transform that data into a coaching recommendation of what a sales manager should be coaching their team to do. The smart technology uses various integrations to understand the nature of every activity being conducted by the sales team, understand why it happens so that it can be attached to the right place.

Today, the company has built a successful solution that leverages AI to drive enterprise sales by providing them with access to relationship maps, opportunity management, engagement intelligence, and account planning capabilities.

It recently announced the launch of AccountGPT, an AI enhancement to its account planning application. The new feature allows go-to-market (GTM) teams to create strategic account plans quickly and easily by removing menial tasks and manual data entry. The service utilizes generative AI as well as large language models to auto-complete sections of account plans like market research, by populating data from publicly available sites such as company websites and quarterly earnings reports, allowing GTM teams to focus on more strategic, revenue-generative activities.

People.ai also announced a partnership with Zoom that focuses on Zoom IQ for Sales, the conversational intelligence solution for sales professionals from Zoom Video Communications, Inc. People.ai’s insights will be combined with the conversational intelligence of Zoom IQ for Sales to provide a unique, holistic view of buyer roles and engagement levels across all digital touchpoints, helping sellers grow pipeline, increase deal size, improve win rate and shorten sales cycles. GTM teams will benefit from a scalable, data-driven GTM motion.

People.ai’s Financials

People.ai remains privately held and does not disclose its financials. It operates on a subscription-based model with prices starting from $50 per user per month. Market reports estimate that the company earned $38 million in revenues in 2022. Profitability figures are not known.

People.ai has raised $200 million in nine rounds of funding led by Nimesh Kampani, Sand Hill Angels, Mubadala Capital Ventures, Akkadian Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Gaingels, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alezander Rugaev, UpVentures Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Its most recent round was held in August 2021, where it raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion from Mike Dinsdale of Akkadian Ventures and Abdulla AlBanna of Mubadala Capital, with participation from existing investors including ICONIQ Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

People.ai is not the only player in the space though. Companies like HubSpot, Revenue.io, Clari also offer similar capabilities.

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