As someone who spends A LOT of time connecting with our tech partners and exploring the latest solutions for our teams and our clients, I’m constantly amazed by the rapid advancements in AI. This year, I’ve seen firsthand how AI is transforming the way businesses engage with their customers. It’s no longer just a buzzword; it’s a powerful tool driving real results for a lot of organizations.

While there are a lot of great platforms out there beginning to ramp up their roadmaps with the latest AI-powered features, as SH/FT’s Partner Alliance’s Manager, I’ve put together my personal top 10 list of martech platforms that are truly leading the way in optimizing their platforms with AI. These are the solutions I’m most excited about and the ones I believe have the potential to truly revolutionize customer engagement.

My top picks, along with some of the AI capabilities that impressed me most

1. Braze (for omni-channel personalized messaging)
2. Chorus (powered by ZoomInfo) (for sales intelligence)
3. Scribe (for process documentation)
4. Canva (for design assistance)
5. Salesforce (for CRM, Marketing, and beyond)
6. Heap (for product and business analytics)
7. 6sense (for sales and marketing automation)
8. Palantir (for Market Intelligence, Data Aggregation & Augmentation)
9. Kustomer (for customer service)
10. ClickUp (for project management)
11. Adobe Experience Platform (for Customer Data and Journey Orchestration)

Let’s now dig into each one a little bit more, so you can see and hear about them more in action

Braze (for omni-channel personalized messaging)

BrazeAI™ allows for hyper-personalized messaging that truly resonates with customers. They have done a really great job continuing to evolve their platform as AI needs for marketers and technologists continue to rise. But beyond the technology itself, we love working with the Braze team. They are true partners who are always willing to go the extra mile to help us achieve our goals. In fact, we recently sponsored their Forge event and led a fantastic lunch-and-learn session with our client, FanDuel. It was a great opportunity to connect with our Braze clients, share best practices and showcase some of these features in action:

• Content and Creative Creation: BrazeAI™ assists in generating on-brand content and creative elements. As you use Braze, the AI learns your brand’s style and preferences, enabling it to suggest or create content aligned with your brand identity.
• Journey Personalization: Plays a role in personalizing customer journeys. This could involve tailoring the sequence of messages, content, and channel selection based on individual customer behaviors and preferences.
• Winning Strategy Identification: Identifies successful strategies and helps users “double down” on them to maximize returns through variant testing and optimizations. This could involve analyzing campaign performance data and highlighting strategies that are driving the best results.

Chorus (powered by ZoomInfo) (for sales intelligence)

SH/FT has been a long-time fangirl of Chorus, and once Chorus and ZoomInfo joined forces, it just got better and better. Chorus gives both our consulting and sales teams a superpower: the ability to truly understand their conversations. We use it for external and internal calls (when appropriate), and it makes coaching, re-listening so much easier to manage after key calls. Here’s how:

• Call transcription and analysis: If you know me, you know I’m a terrible note taker (I literally just transcribe a conversation, it’s tooooo much). But, with call transcription and analysis, there is no more frantic note-taking during calls! I can just be absolutely present and do my job diving deeper into the discussion. Chorus automatically transcribes and analyzes calls, highlighting key moments and insights. We have this pushed directly to our Slack channel, which has made summaries of key sessions incredibly easy to digest and talk about post call. This gives us VERY clear next steps and takeaways, so we don’t let meetings go by without making sure we’re held accountable for the work we set out to do after the call.
• Sentiment analysis: We also love its ability to gauge the emotional temperature of prospects. Chorus helps you really understand how customers truly feel, allowing you to adapt your approach accordingly.

Scribe (for process documentation)

As you can imagine, our teams create a lot of technical documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs), including “how-tos.” Scribe makes this process incredibly easy. Here’s why we love using it:

• Automatic process and screenshot capture: Simply go through your workflow, and Scribe automatically creates a step-by-step guide with screenshots and instructions. It’s like magic!
• AI-powered editing: The tool not only captures the “how to” it also helps you refine your guides, ensuring they are clear, concise, and easy to follow, all in real-time. Making the maintenance and optimizations of SOPs that much easier.

Salesforce (for CRM, Marketing, and beyond)

Salesforce is a CRM giant, and also has incredible marketing capabilities in Marketing Cloud, and the great news is, it just keeps getting better with their AI capabilities. Here are a few highlights that our team follows closely and has even presented on in multiple lunch and learn sessions and webinars, specifically focused on their Einstein AI features.

• Einstein AI: Einstein infuses AI across the entire Salesforce platform, providing intelligent predictions and recommendations for sales, service, and marketing.
• Marketing Cloud Capabilities: Users can tap into Einstein to segment audiences, create campaign briefs, thread in key branding elements, automatically tag content modules and imagery in the system’s DAM (digital asset management), build and automate marketing campaigns, and generate email copy.
• Predictive lead scoring in CRM: Focus your sales efforts on the hottest leads. Einstein helps you prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert.
• Agentforce: There is a lot of buzz around this right now. Agentforce enables users to build and customize autonomous AI agents that can support employees and customers 24/7. Their chat capabilities provide instant support and answer common questions with AI-powered chatbots, freeing up your human agents for more complex issues.
• Data Cloud: Creates a unified, real-time view of your customer data. This “golden record” provides a single source of truth for all customer interactions, enabling more personalized and effective engagement. AI is embedded through this solution where as it’s used to predict customer behavior, such as churn risk, purchase intent, and lifetime value.

Heap (powered by ContentSquare) (for product and business analytics)

Heap is an amazing tool, and it has evolved even further since its acquisition by ContentSquare (which we’re proud to say is a great client of ours!). This year, they launched AI Copilot, which allows you to answer questions about your data in plain English! It helps you truly understand how users interact with your digital experiences and where conversions are—and aren’t—happening. Here’s what makes it stand out:

• Data you can talk to: Simply ask questions in plain English, such as “How many users viewed the blog last week?” and AI Copilot will analyze your data and provide the answers. No need to worry about complex queries or event tracking setups.
• Auto-generated summaries: AI Copilot automatically generates clear and concise summaries of your charts and reports. This makes it easy to share insights with colleagues, stakeholders, leadership, and finance teams, ensuring everyone understands the data at a glance.
• Suggested follow-up questions: AI Copilot doesn’t just answer your initial questions; it also suggests relevant follow-up questions to help you dive deeper into your data. This makes iterative analysis a breeze and encourages more comprehensive exploration of user behavior.

Palantir (for Market Intelligence, Data Aggregation & Augmentation)

Palantir might not be the first name that comes to mind for marketing, but it’s a powerful platform that can truly transform your operations. Palantir’s data ingestion and insights solutions help organizations analyze and visualize large datasets from many many sources. Think of it as a central nervous system for your sales, marketing, business operations, supply chain, financial (and really anything in between) efforts, connecting all your data and providing AI-powered insights to drive better decisions. Below are a few ways Palantir is paving a massive path for innovation in AI:

• Unified Data Foundation: Foundry brings all your business data together – customer profiles, campaign performance, web analytics, social media trends, and more. This gives you a complete and accurate view of your marketing landscape. Foundry’s AI algorithms analyze your data to uncover hidden patterns, identify opportunities, and predict future outcomes. This helps you make smarter decisions about targeting, messaging, and campaign optimization.
• Predictive AI-Powered Insights: Foundry uses AI to forecast trends and behaviors, allowing you to predict potential risks and opportunities across various areas, from cybersecurity threats to operational inefficiencies.
  Advanced Security: Added onto the prevention of risks, Foundry is built with security at its core. It uses AI to monitor for potential data breaches and safeguard sensitive information. This is especially crucial for industries handling sensitive customer data, such as healthcare and finance.
• Collaborative Workflows: Last but not least Palantir uses AI to help organizations design and deploy efficient workflows, automating repetitive tasks and empowering users to focus on strategic actions. This level of customizable workflows can be applied from anything to how to manage and measure supply chain impacts to deploying programmatic campaigns based on insights. It’s the right level of real time push and pull many large scale, global enterprise businesses need today.
• Highly Configurable AI Models that Connect to Existing MarTech: Our tech services and business operations strategy teams love ❤️ how Palantir Foundry allows you to easily design, build, and deploy highly configurable AI models. It offers the perfect blend of out-of-the-box, low-code components with the ability to customize for your unique business needs. Best of all, Foundry seamlessly connects data and insights into your existing marketing tools, so you can leverage the power of AI without disrupting your current workflows.

6sense (for sales and marketing automation)

6sense takes sales and marketing automation to the next level with AI-powered predictions and personalization. It’s like having a crystal ball for your revenue pipeline! Here are a few of my favorite features:

• Predictive Lead Scoring: 6sense goes beyond basic demographics to identify your most promising leads. Their AI-powered scoring helps you prioritize your efforts and focus on the accounts most likely to convert.
• AI Email Assistant: Say goodbye to generic outreach! 6sense’s AI Email Assistant helps you craft compelling emails tailored to each prospect’s needs and interests, boosting your response rates and engagement.
• Next Best Action Recommendations: Never miss a beat! The platform also analyzes buyer behavior and provides recommendations for the next best action, whether it’s sending an email, making a call, or suggesting relevant content. This ensures you’re always engaging with buyers at the right time and in the right way.

Canva (for design assistance)

Canva proves that AI can be incredibly creative. Here’s what I love about their AI features:

• Magic Write (AI copywriter): Say goodbye to writer’s block! Magic Write generates compelling copy for anything you need, from social media posts to presentations.
• Text to Image: Turn your words into stunning visuals! This feature is a game-changer for anyone who needs to create eye-catching graphics quickly and easily.
• Background Remover: This simple feature is in a lot of tools but there has been none better than this one. We love to use this to add a client logo to a sales deck or their photo and in 1 click we can make it match the rest of the presentation nicely by simply removing the silly background color.
• Magic Media – Graphic & Image Creator: Our team has really leaned into AI images and a lot of our clients have too, this feature, like Adobe’s firefly, has significantly reduced speed to market in getting new imagery and helping designers and non-designer get assets out the door asap.

Kustomer (for customer service)

Kustomer is a GREAT tool for organizations with a large customer success or agent team that need automation and AI to improve productivity. We have a small set of clients using this tool and they are seeing some great benefits. One of the primary features is allowing customer success agents and call center teams to become more robust through their AI capabilities. But not only that, it really empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer service with a lot of help from AI. Here’s what sets them apart:

• KIQ AI Chatbots: This is one of the better chat experiences we’ve seen driven by AI for support centers. It helps resolve common customer issues instantly with chatbots. This improves response times and frees up your human agents for more complex issues, and also starts linking to a knowledge base that is getting automatically curated.
• KIQ Agent Assist: Kustomer’s AI Copilot for agents helps them write better, faster responses with AI-powered suggestions. It can even analyze customer sentiment in real-time, allowing agents to respond with empathy and address concerns effectively.
• Smart Routing: Ensure that customer inquiries reach the right agent every time with AI-powered ticket routing. This improves efficiency and ensures that customers get the help they need from the most qualified agent.

ClickUp (for project, product, process, and / or change management)

When I first saw ClickUp in action, I’ll admit I was a little overwhelmed, but once I saw its power, I was blown away. If you have a disorganized process, project, or product management system, this IS the tool to check out. ClickUp brings AI to project management, streamlining workflows and boosting team collaboration to an entirely new level. Here are a few features I’m impressed with:

• AI-powered task management: Automate task assignments and prioritization, ensuring that your team is always working on the most important tasks.
• AI-powered writing assistant: Write clear and concise task descriptions, comments, and updates with the help of ClickUp’s AI writing assistant. Whether you’re drafting requirements for a campaign or a technical implementation, this AI feature is incredibly helpful—and it’s right within the platform where you manage all your work.
• ClickUp Brain, aka “Search and Ask Anything”: These capabilities are far beyond what I’ve seen in its competitors. ClickUp Brain brings in everything in the system and provides summaries of what’s going on with key tasks, projects, escalations, team capacity, and more. It offers opinions and predictions based on what has happened before. What’s great is that the output is highly shareable with both ClickUp users and external individuals who need to know something about a project or initiative being managed there.

Adobe Experience Platform (for Customer Data)

We are an Adobe Gold Partner, and a Gold Partner for a reason-we love Adobe products, therefore, we of course couldn’t end this piece without talking about the Adobe Experience Platform and the powerful AI functionality Adobe has been innovating on. This enterprise ecosystem helps orgs centralize and activate customer data to deliver personalized experiences across digital touchpoints. Here’s how AI is enhancing its capabilities:

• Real-time Customer Profiles: AEP uses AI to unify customer data from various sources, creating a comprehensive view of each individual. This allows for more personalized and relevant interactions. This really helps digitize your customer personas and ICPs using real data and the way that data (those customers) have been engaging with your marketing.
• AI-Powered Segmentation: Go beyond basic demographics with AI-driven segmentation that identifies meaningful customer groups based on behavior, preferences, and predicted needs.

Final Takeaways

While this list doesn’t specifically call out well-known platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT (aka who I call “Chatty Cathy”) and Google’s Gemini (aka “Gemma”), I absolutely adore and use these platforms as well. In fact, Google’s latest NotebookLM capabilities (currently in beta) are a game-changer. This innovative tool is a seller’s dream, our team has already seen improvement in our own account/client research practices, allowing us to arm our staff with the best insights on our customers and industry trends!

These are just a few examples of the incredible ways SaaS platforms within marketing and sales are using AI to enhance their customer experiences. I’m incredibly excited to see how these technologies continue to evolve and create even more personalized, efficient, and delightful customer experiences.

Give an AI Pilot a Try

If you’re looking to leverage the power of AI for your business, I encourage you to explore these platforms and see how they can help you achieve your goals. As always, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want to discuss your specific needs.

We’d also love to explore an AI pilot with you! We can help you identify the right tools and features to test out first and help you build the case internally for utilizing AI in your business.