Otter’s new AI agents are built to boost sales and streamline meetings

Otter, the AI-powered meeting assistant and transcription service, is introducing a new AI agent capable of answering spoken questions from meeting participants in real time.

The AI can also perform tasks like scheduling follow-up meetings and assigning action items to the meeting record stored on Otter’s platform. When responding to questions, it can draw on both publicly available information for quick research queries and knowledge gained from previous company meetings. The AI will only provide answers based on meeting records that all current participants have permission to view, ensuring confidential information remains protected.

The tool can also be connected to other sources of information, like company knowledge bases or customer-relationship management (CRM) software, and its abilities will only grow over time. 

“It’s some simple tasks, but pretty soon, it can do more and more complicated tasks,” Otter CEO Sam Liang says.

Currently, the AI agent must be activated with a phrase like “Hey Otter,” similar to Alexa or Siri. In the future, though, it may also be able to chime in automatically—answering questions and offering information proactively, much like a human meeting participant would. The agent is being rolled out to all Otter users and is currently compatible with Zoom, with support for Microsoft Teams and Google Meet expected in the coming weeks.

Otter, which recently announced it has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, is also rolling out other AI agents aimed at supporting sales teams. One of them, dubbed the Otter Sales Agent, can provide real-time guidance to salespeople during virtual meetings with customers, and can surface answers to product-related questions and suggest responses to customer objections on the fly.

Once the meeting is done, the Sales Agent can assist with drafting follow-up emails to customers or entering data from the call into CRM tools. The tool is now available to Otter enterprise sales customers, with Otter’s team helping configure the agent using relevant product information from previous meetings and other data sources, Liang says.

“Initially, we’ll provide white glove service to help them build the model,” he adds. “Gradually, it can become self-serve as well.”

A third new AI agent—called the Otter SDR Agent (short for sales development representative)—can be embedded into websites to conduct interactive live demos of products. The goal is to give potential customers a glimpse at how products work and ask basic questions at any time, without waiting for a human sales rep (though the agent gathers user contact information for a follow-up call). 

The SDR Agent is already live on Otter’s website, demonstrating the company’s own features. Upon request, Otter can help set it up for customers to use to sell their own products. 

Otter, which first launched a chat-based AI assistant in 2023 to answer meeting-related questions and perform basic tasks, is likely to launch other AI agents geared at helping with other types of calls, including customer service, recruiting, marketing, and user research, perhaps with more launches as soon as this year, Liang says. 

And while plenty of other companies are building AI agents and assistants, Liang believes Otter has an advantage in meeting-focused domains, thanks to customers who’ve let the company use their meeting data for training.

“A lot of users actually contribute some data to us, allowing us to use that to train,” he says. “We actually have the advantage to build the best conversational AI agent that can participate in meetings compared to some of the other AI [companies].”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91304763/otters-new-ai-agents-are-built-to-boost-sales-and-streamline-meetings?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss