Creatio today added a set of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to its namesake customer relationship management (CRM) platform that are being made available at no additional cost.
Version 8.3 of the Creatio platform, also known as the Twin Release, adds a natural language interface to the low-code tools the company provides, in addition to now making a natural language interface the default option for the core CRM application.
The overall goal is to embed AI capabilities into the core of the platform rather than simply making them available as a set of add-on capabilities that organizations need to license separately, says Burley Kawasaki, global vice president of product marketing and strategy for Creatio.
The AI agents being added to the platform have been trained to automate a range of workflows across sales, marketing and customer service functions. There is also an AI agent that has been embedded into the low-code tool the company provides. Additionally, organizations can also use the Creatio low-code tool to build their own AU agents. “AI needs to be at the core of the platform itself,” says Kawasaki.
Those agents have been trained using a mix of large language models (LLMs) that Creatio will continue to mix and match as new capabilities are added to its agent portfolio, he adds. In addition, the company plans to also enable organizations to use any LLM they might have developed on their own, notes Kawaskai. Each AI assistant then makes use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to surface accurate responses based on customer data.
In general, it’s only a matter of time before AI is deeply embedded within every application. Less clear is how AI capabilities will be funded. Many providers of commercial applications have opted to create add-ons that are licensed for an additional cost above and beyond the fees charged for their core platform. That approach, however, doesn’t encourage widespread adoption of AI, especially at a time when many organizations are much more sensitive to the total cost of IT, says Kawasaki.
There is little doubt that providers of applications seeking to gain market share at the expense of incumbent rivals will increasingly add AI capabilities at no extra cost. Less clear is how long it might be before incumbents are forced to respond to a potential competitive threat by similarly making AI agents available at no extra cost. In effect, the cost of invoking the AI will simply be embedded into the core license, with many providers of applications already enjoying healthy profit margins.
The one certain thing is that many organizations will soon be making the AI capabilities being provided a key feature upon which they base purchasing decisions. In fact, a recent Futurum Group report projects that AI agents over the next three years will drive $6 trillion worth of economic value by 2028. The next major challenge, of course, will be determining which tasks can be reliably performed by a truly autonomous agent versus one that still requires a significant amount of supervision.
