Gartner Puts Generative AI at the Peak of Inflated Expectations

Research firm Gartner included generative artificial intelligence among the five innovative revenue and sales technologies that are improving customer experience (CX) through coordinated efforts to support digital and physical selling.

The Gartner 2023 Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology identifies genAI, digital twin of a customer (DToC), process mining, self-integrating applications and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for sales as transformational innovations.

"These technologies remove friction in business processes, propel growth, and help leaders mitigate external influences that create unforeseen uncertainty," said Melissa Hilbert, senior director analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. "We expect each to have high or transformational impact within the decade."

Generative AI for Sales

Generative AI, at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, has profound business impacts on content discovery, creation, authenticity and regulations, as well as customer and employee experiences, the firm said, noting that for sales, it can produce content in the form of emails, customer facing content, meeting summaries, training content and role plays.

Because of these use cases, Gartner predicts that B2B sales organizations using generative-AI-embedded sales technologies will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and customer-meeting prep by more than 50 percent by 2026.

DToC

The DToC is appearing on the Gartner Hype Cycle as an Innovation Trigger, the phase where a breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch, or other event generates significant media and industry interest.

Gartner defines a DToC as a dynamic virtual mirror representation of a customer that can be used to simulate and to emulate and anticipate behavior. DToCs increase efficiency and provide a personalized, empathetic service to customers, many of whose buying habits have changed during periods of disruption and change, it said.

Gartner predicts that by 2027 20 percent of B2B sales organizations will employ digital twins of customers to improve revenue outcomes and improve customer experience.

Process Mining

Process mining is farther along at Gartner's Innovation Trigger phase. Process mining is designed to discover, monitor, and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today's information systems, it said.

Process mining provides visibility, analysis, and understanding about business operations by providing near-real-time information to all end users about how they are currently performing, whether their processes are compliant, and what could be improved, it said further.

"In showing which process improvements are necessary to meet and exceed customer expectations, process mining helps organizations in addressing how they can actively impact CX and customer retention through internal operational improvements," Hilbert explained.

Self-Integrating Applications

Self-integrating applications use a combination of automated service discovery, metadata extraction and mapping, automated process definition, and automated dependency mapping to enable applications and services to integrate themselves into an existing application portfolio with minimal human interaction, according to Gartner.

Requiring only minimal human intervention, self-integrating applications remove the need to manually integrate new apps into sales tech stacks by enabling applications to integrate themselves into an existing application portfolio via tools such as machine learning, it said further.

AR and VR for Sales

Gartner notes that AR adds value to sales by providing real-time information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects. VR, it said further, provides a computer-generated 3D environment that surrounds the user and responds to a buyer's actions in a natural way. Both can offset and complement the on-site selling and physical product demonstrations that sellers perform.

"Early adopters of AR and VR will complement on-site selling and physical product demonstrations currently performed," Hilbert said. "Take digital sales rooms as one example: By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of all enterprise B2B sales technology implementations will include digital sales rooms, so it is imperative for sales leaders to prepare now."