Tact brings intelligent sales assistant to new Slack enterprise edition

Tact, the AI-driven sales tool that uses software smarts to simplify sales tasks, today announced integration with the newly announced Slack enterprise product, Slack Enterprise Grid.

Tact, which currently has a mobile app and Amazon Echo integration (along with in-car integration in private Beta), sees messaging tools like Slack as a logical extension of the platform. It can help automate many of the typical sales activities, acting as a helper agent inside of Slack.

“For us, what that means is that a sales team, whether they are working on a deal or with a customer, they can now bring Tact into a Slack conversation,” Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi told TechCrunch.

Companies using Tact inside Slack can take advantage of the governance and security built into Slack’s enterprise edition to control access to programs, files and data. “As Slack expands and becomes the dominant messaging platform, we will be available with all of those controls in the same channels,” Ganapathi explained.

That’s important because using Tact (or any program) inside of Slack gives users the ability to access enterprise programs and data repositories without leaving the messaging platform. When customers set up Tact in Slack Enterprise Grid, they can decide which programs to connect to such as Salesforce, Zendesk or Sharepoint, and Tact picks up all of the underlying rules in Slack to ensure only authorized users can access a particular program or repository.

In practical terms, that means as the team works on a deal, they can call on Tact to help out. For example, suppose a salesperson wants to find out the newest information on a target company. Instead of leaving Slack and opening Salesforce to see the current status of the customer, then opening Zendesk to see if there are any open customer services issues, he or she can simply ask the Tact agent and, depending on the integrations set up by the customer and the individual’s clearance, get all of that data instantly.

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Photo: Tact

Team members can use the Tact agent in Slack in an active way by asking it to perform specific tasks such as finding a potential customer on LinkedIn, creating a customer record in Salesforce or setting up a task in Outlook. The Tact agent also listens for keywords, so it can also actively engage with team members if it is configured to do so. When it sees keywords such as “follow up,” it might ask you without prompting if you want to it to create a task in Outlook to follow up with the client on the date specified in the conversation.

Tact is part of a larger industry push to infuse the sales process with artificial intelligence to help salespeople be more efficient with their time. While today’s announcement specifically involved Slack Enterprise Grid, Tact has plans to expand to other enterprise message platforms over time.

Tact, which was founded in 2012, has raised $30 million, including a $15 million round last December.