Those who work in sales, marketing, or even recruiting understand the grueling and monotonous work that goes into prospecting and closing leads. Hours upon hours are spent searching for, qualifying, and then planning how to campaign potential prospects before any contact is even made.
AI is on the verge of changing our workflows - with web agents leading the charge to fully automate once repetitive time-consuming tasks. Here’s everything you need to know about AI agents, process automation, and how it could impact your bottom line in a big way.
What is an AI web agent and what does it do?
In general terms, an agent is something that takes action autonomously to accomplish a goal. Many things fit this definition: a thermostat, a robot vacuum, or even human beings.
An AI web agent is similar, with its domain limited to the web (here most of today’s sales work is done). It navigates the internet, makes decisions, and performs tasks to accomplish goals set by you.
Thanks to AI web agents, grueling monotonous work can now become autonomous. Bardeen lets you combine our browser agents (because our extension automates your browser) with over 80 apps sales resps love, including HubSpot automations and Salesforce integrations. Here it is in action:
Sales use cases for AI agents
With constant growth in specialized apps used for work, came the need for process automation. First gen tools attempted to solve it, but over promised and under delivered on multiple fronts.
Luckily, the surge of technological advances this decade graced developments such as AI actions. Imagine reducing manual tasks to one click (or less).
It’s no wonder the majority of IT Industry leaders estimate huge time savings. 10% to 50% in the case of repetitive operational processes, according to Cflow’s workflow automation statistics.
So how can AI web agents multiply sales impact? When can they save time?
Sales prospecting
An AI web agent can analyze vast datasets while providing insight on preferences and behaviors. It can determine preferred social media channels and engagement KPIs. Such data empowers businesses to efficiently direct their sales efforts.
For example, you can ask questions and Bardeen’s browser agent will answer by navigating provided websites and if you want, you can save that into HubSpot. Give it a try!
Sales lead qualification
With machine learning algorithms, an AI agent can evaluate lead data to identify high-quality prospects (more likely to convert). In contrast to traditional lead scoring models, AI web agents can combine the act of retrieving information and analyzing the results into one.
For example, you can use AI to qualify leads from new emails and speed up your sales prospecting workflows:
Extracting contact details
Manual data entry takes a lot of time, so why not use an AI agent to pull contact information? It works with any source and can input data to any destination.
One of our most popular playbooks copies LinkedIn profile data to a Google Sheet. How much time can such an automation save you?
Preparing for sales calls
Talking to prospects is a vital part of the sales cycle. AI helps simplify that by highlighting important background and preference information of individual contacts, and you can push info with our Salesforce integrations whenever you need to.
This playbook is perfect if you’re looking to research someone’s company, job title, or other relevant information.
Personalized outreach insights
Not only can AI efficiently analyze customer data, it can generate personalized insights based on user goals. Now sales teams can save that precious bandwidth for customizing their communication strategies.
Recurring information update
Information is changing all the time. With an AI agent, sales teams can automate research updates by setting up recurring accuracy checks. This ensures everyone has the important details in real time.
Is competitor pricing important to your sales process? You can use this playbook to check for changes.
Sales task automation
As you can see, Bardeen takes into account each individual use case and offers a fully customizable step-by-step playbook. From prospecting qualified leads and data scraping, to outreach personalization, meeting synthesizing, and preparing for cold calls.
Are event reminders becoming a necessity, or do you just want to simplify event notifications?
Then, how about simplifying email outreach campaigns? Using the OpenAI integration, generating optimized email drafts just got a lot easier.
Bardeen integrates with many tools commonly used by salespeople, and some are probably already part of your workflow:
- Affinity - an AI-enabled relationship intelligence platform to build workflows that are triggered by the actions you define.
- Apollo.io - a lead prospecting solution that helps discover and qualify leads fast.
- Salesloft - helps teams with forecasting, tracking sales, performance data, and so much more.
- Salesforce - needs no description, the CRM for salespeople
- LinkedIn - optimize interactions with your professional network when utilizing Bardeen to harvest insights and opportunities within LinkedIn. Such AI web scraping tools help to extract data on profiles, company information, and search results at scale.
- Pipedrive - gather all important data from the applications you use and send it to Pipedrive or vice versa. This largely simplifies the manual task of adding updated data to individual applications.
- Google Sheets - automate data entry by connecting Bardeen applications to your Google Sheets workflow. Integrations allow for efficient automation between Google Sheets and Notion, plus many others.
- Hubspot - last but not least, the all in one tool all sales reps love
With the performance of sales teams top of mind, Bardeen can generate a variety of solutions to help clean up inefficient, repetitive processes.
FAQs about AI web agents
If you’ve still got questions about AI web agents, we’ve got you covered. Here are some common concerns people have surrounding the topic.
Who uses AI web agents?
The list of people that could benefit from an AI agent is vast. Some prime candidates include:
- Sales individuals
- Marketers
- Recruiters
- Project managers
- Product developers
- Anyone looking at personal organization
They typically use browser agents to perform tasks such as:
- automating recurring tasks
- providing project insights
- answering qualification questions on leads
- streamlining data collection
Workflow efficiency is improved by connecting apps you use day-to-day. There are plenty you can consider, you just have to download Bardeen and get started for free.
Which is the best AI agent?
Each AI agent on the market has pros and cons. In the end, the “best” AI agent depends on the user's specific use case, team size, and other variables.
What types of AI web agents are there?
Currently, three main types of AI web agents operate in the artificial intelligence landscape:
- Reactive agents - these types of AI respond to and act on real-time external stimuli.
- Proactive agents - as the name suggests, this category of AI uses its learning ability to use data for predicting future outcomes and creating an action plan to help users reach their KPIs.
- Multi-Agent systems - products that integrate with more than one third-party application to create a “one-stop shop” environment for users who have varying operations to automate. Bardeen is a multi-agent system.
What is a GPT agent?
Before we can tackle what a GPT agent is, we must first learn what ‘GPT’ is. Short for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformers’, it’s a family of neural network models. These models provide applications the function to create human-like text, content, and other media, and to use data available to improve on that function.
A GPT agent then, is a program that uses AI to write words or create media for you based on what you ask. The most popular is ChatGPT. Here, users input prompts that cause the interface to scour the internet for content that answers the users requests.
ChatGPT has several plugins users can use for content creation. Take a look at some of the best ChatGPT plugins available.
What is the difference between an AI web agent and a search engine?
Like AI web agents, a search engine (such as Google) needs input from the user in the form of a keyword, question, or phrase being typed into the search bar. Unlike an AI web agent, search engines are more limited.
Specifically, they only provide a results page, or an index with links to websites based on closed rules the user cannot create or modify. While agents are customizable and have a wide range of functions, such as:
- Making decisions
- Providing insight and action items
- Planning and acting on current environmental data
What is the difference between an AI web agent and ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a language model created by OpenAI that specializes in text-based interaction. Users input text prompts and it generates responses based on pre-programmed data. An AI agent is more broad in terms of functionality.
It can refer to any AI system or program that is designed to perform a task via the web. There are many use cases for ChatGPT and connections between OpenAI and tools such as LinkedIn, plus many others.
What is the difference between an AI web agent and a chat bot?
A chat bot has a limited script of responses that are very specific to the business. For example, a chat bot can help with pre-determined customer service questions. It can be assisting customers with using an e-commerce website to purchase goods, for example.
It’s important to consider that when a chat bot is connected to AI, it can be similar in functionality to ChatGPT. This is because it also learns and generates tailored responses based on user input.
However, the primary difference is that a chatbot’s range of accepted parameters is limited to one thing. Versus a more general application of an AI web agent like ChatGPT that can provide content on any query about any topic or brand.
Endnotes
Moral of the story: sales teams and individual salespeople can save precious time and resources. Whoever is weighed down with redundant and mundane tasks in their operational workflows can just apply the use of an AI web agent (or multiple).
When used as one of the tools for outreach, chances are it will result in a significant and measurable productivity boost your boss will definitely notice.
Yearning to automate your team’s workflows? Bardeen can help with that as soon as you download the Chrome extension. Our product is forever free and you’ll get a 14-day trial of premium features.
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