The Best Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI): The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Analyst firm IDC expects worldwide spending on artificial intelligence in general to more than double by 2028, when it is expected to reach $632 billion, growing at a compound annual rate of 29 percent. Of that amount, IDC expects generative AI spending to reach $202 billion, representing 32 percent of overall AI spending. It goes on to predict that genAI investments will enable the category to outpace the overall AI market with a five-year CAGR of 59.2 percent.

Among the top use cases for the technology, IDC found, are AI-enabled customer service and self-service. The use cases that will see the fastest spending growth will be augmented claims processing and digital commerce, it also found.

The Top Five

Claude is Anthropic’s large language model, which was first released in March 2023. Now available in version 3.5, which Anthropic released in June, Claude has demonstrated significantly improved performance, most notably in areas such as coding, multistep workflows, chart interpretation, and text extraction from images. And, working with Accenture and Amazon Web Services, Anthropic is providing key resources to help businesses take generative AI ideas from concept to production, especially in regulated sectors where accuracy, reliability, and data security are paramount.

Google’s Gemini is the result of the merger of Google’s Bard and Duet AI engines in February. Originally launched as Bard in March 2023, the product received lukewarm responses early on and even became the center of controversy earlier this year when it started generating false images of historical figures as people of color and other inaccuracies. Gemini was built from the ground up to be multimodal, able to work with different types of information, including text, code, audio, images, and videos. Gemini is being incorporated into many of Google’s other products, including as a virtual assistant on Android mobile phones and in its Search and Chrome browser, and it is available for developers via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Microsoft is a primary backer of OpenAI’s work with generative AI, but it also offers its own generative AI service in the form of Copilot, which it hails as an “everyday AI companion.” Launched in February 2023 as a replacement for Cortana, Copilot is a conversational chat interface that lets users search for specific information, generate text, and create images. Copilot, which uses Microsoft’s Prometheus AI model built on a foundation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can be used as an assistant in Microsoft’s business apps, including its Dynamics 365 CRM suite, and with specific Copilots for its sales and customer service modules, enhancing customer interactions with extended insights, recaps, and next-best-action recommendations. AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service also significantly uplevel customer self-service automation. Other Copilots support Microsoft’s Bing Search, Windows operating system, Edge browser, mobile apps, and 365 apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT got the ball rolling on generative AI when it was launched in November 2022. The first AI engine of its kind, ChatGPT is credited with starting the current AI boom, and in just two months became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining more than 100 million users. The OpenAI chatbot and virtual assistant, now available in version GPT 4.0, is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback to further train and refine the AI models. OpenAI’s models serve as the foundation for many CRM vendor’s generative AI capabilities.

Salesforce’s Einstein GPT, launched in March 2023, has been touted as the first and only generative AI designed specifically for CRM. Customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger automations and create personalized, AI-generated content across every Salesforce cloud, including those for sales, service, marketing, commerce, and developers. It infuses Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from Salesforce Data Cloud.