SugarCRM has announced two new generative AI features with its latest release, focused on driving user productivity and making text data generated by customer interactions more useful to sellers and customer service agents. These new Gen AI capabilities build upon existing predictive AI tools previously released.
The new features focus on summarization of interaction data and text from sales opportunities and support cases:
- Opportunity Summarization provides a snapshot of strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities to support improved sales outcomes. It includes expected outcomes, key contacts, and perceived risks. It also suggests next-best actions and helps create sales copy.
- Case Summarization identifies potential blockers, issues, or risks. It suggests next-best actions and helps agents understand the context for more personalized service.
For both features, language translation is available. For global businesses this is not only a solid addition for managing multi-language business units but can also increase the pace of issue resolution for single location support teams serving a global customer base.
These new capabilities are powered by a native integration with OpenAI. As with most other Gen AI tools embedded into CRM systems, SugarCRM has done the work to ensure all outputs are grounded to reduce toxicity and hallucinations as well as masking sensitive information.
SugarCRM has also published pricing for the new feature set. Adding the Gen AI capabilities is a $20 per user/per month surcharge on top of its core Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve sales and support product offerings. The base pricing includes 500,000 tokens, which given the use cases and SugarCRM’s midmarket customer focus, most customers would probably remain under the usage limits of the base pricing. (Some info on how OpenAI meters tokens here.) SugarCRM also notes that they cache all the results from all summaries in the system, so any subsequent views of the summary in Sugar Sell or Serve will not affect token usage, unless a change is made to that summary.
For users of Sugar, this is an easy path to add some useful tools without any heavy lifting. Embedded in the CRM, this allows for more contextual, grounded and “safe” usage of Ai tools in the workflow of deal and case management. However, from a cost perspective, it is a significant additional fee, as other CRM providers in the SMB and midmarket space seem to be adding a lot of these features with no explicit additional fees (at least at this time). If users of Sugar do not see the need to augment their Gen AI outside of the offered use cases, this is not a huge cost addition, but if firms are also adding proprietary ChatGPT licenses for marketing teams, other AI tools for RevOps, etc. – costs can creep. It is best to take a wider view and analyze the cost/benefits and wider use cases when selecting AI tools as either add-on features or as point SaaS products on their own.
