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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm Freshworks on Wednesday unveiled new generative artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements across product lines, leveraging its domain expertise in sales, marketing, customer support, and IT.

Its latest advancements in Freddy AI suite—which offers AI-powered CRM for actionable sales insights and predictions through Copilot, Self Service, and Insights—are designed to help support agents, sellers, marketers, IT teams, and leaders to boost workplace efficiency. These new AI capabilities not only streamline tasks but also simplify work processes, effectively eliminating time-consuming work, according to the company.

“Our goal at Freshworks is to put the power of generative AI in the hands of the Fortune five million, not just the Fortune 500 enterprise,” said Founder and CEO, Girish Mathrubootham. “We’ve been helping customers run more efficient businesses with AI for half a decade and know they don’t need a billion apps to do so.”

The company introduced Freddy Copilot at its Developer Summit in Bengaluru on Wednesday. In addition to developers, the tool is designed for support, sales, and marketing, providing users with the ability to streamline workflows through the utilisation of conversational prompts within Freshworks products, as well as build new applications to extend them. 

Freshworks said beta deployments of Copilot have been adopted by 390 companies, resulting in reductions in the effort of up to 83%.

Meanwhile, Freddy Self Service enables companies to achieve large-scale personalised automation by leveraging the Freshworks platform and a large language model (LLM). This can boost agent productivity and allow customer support and IT personnel to focus on high-value projects and tasks.

The other advancement in Freddy AI suite—Insights—uses advanced analytics to analyse support data to identify areas for improvement. It also evaluates marketing and sales effectiveness, providing optimisation recommendations. 

The SaaS firm said it has incorporated Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service into its Freddy AI solutions for the privacy and security of customer data within the Freshworks ecosystem.

“Microsoft and Freshworks are working together to bring the power of generative AI with enterprise-level security and compliance into the workplace for companies of all sizes,” John Montgomery, Corporate Vice President of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, said.

Freshworks launched Freddy, an Omnibot AI engine for businesses of all sizes, in 2018. It said it will build out proprietary language models and incorporate general-purpose LLMs to address customer-specific needs. 

Freshworks’ announcement comes a week after SaaS provider Zoho said it was developing an LLM for generative AI applications. It will possess conversational skills, summarisation, paraphrasing, and adaptive capabilities.

According to a recent Gartner poll involving over 2,500 executive leaders, 45% indicated that the visibility of ChatGPT, which is based on the proprietary Generative Pre-trained Transformer series of large language models, has motivated them to boost their investments in AI. The poll also revealed that 70% of executives are exploring and investigating generative AI, while 19% have already progressed to the pilot or production stages.

Freshworks Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy noted that the company “has a unique opportunity to bring greater productivity and proactive insights to businesses of all sizes and help our customers turn generative AI into business momentum”.

Freshworks’ AI advancements are available for beta testing and will be demonstrated for the first time at its Q2 ’23 launch event, the company said.