Looking at the "AI for CRM" announcements from Microsoft and Salesforce

I couldn’t tell anymore whether these press releases have been hallucinated by ChatGPT or written by real people in corporations.

Looking at the “AI for CRM” announcements from #Microsoft and #Salesforce , I just find it hard to get truly excited about the features. Obviously it’s a mad rush to be the first to announce things. You don’t even need to have the products available for use yet.

Ironically, MS got their #Dynamics365 Copilot announcements out one day before SFDC. Even though the latter claims #EinsteinGPT to be “the world’s first generative AI CRM technology”. Still, that’s totally on brand for Salesforce. It’s exactly what what you’d get if asking Bing Chat to write a press release for them.

Browsing through the raw feature list, if you took away the product brands from the text, you couldn’t tell whether you’re reading about a Microsoft or Salesforce feature. It’s pretty much what everyone would expect to see as AI features in business applications, after 3 months of browsing through a LinkedIn feed that consists of easily 50% ChatGPT related posts.

In fact, I’m 99% sure that the product teams in both companies have been leveraging a GPT-3 based service to help them write the specs for these features. These AI powered #CRM systems therefore feel like the first steps of Skynet.

Only this time AI didn’t decide to destroy the human kind through nuclear war. Instead, it decided to torture us with SaaS apps that will make it easier for companies to bombard us with mindless sales emails, generate meaningless marketing content to paralyze our cognitive processes, and finally keep us forever hanging in customer service chats where a bot pretends like there’s someone on the other side who actually gives a damn.

It’s potentially far worse than what The Terminator lead us to believe.

The good news is, were only getting started. During this year you can be sure that any technology vendor announcement will include a mighty does of AI. ChatGPT is now the most effective substance known to man for sucking the oxygene out of the room and leaving all the previous features on the product roadmap gasping for air. Everything is better with a little AI sprinkled on top- including AI itself.

OK, so it’s not all so terrible in reality. Yet the sense of AI fatigue is very real. Product capabilities that would have seemed revolutionary one year ago are now turning my brain into a mush. When the LLMs are infused into absolutely everything, where does one go to truly focus on experimenting with this technology and using it for something meaningful and exciting? When will the AI announcements be done with, so that we can get to truly try it out and verifying if (and how) it works in practice?

AI is now so ubiquitous that it has become incredibly boring.