In all the AI excitement, there are background patterns. As agentic technology finds its footing, it’s settling into specific areas where it does best. For example, AI tools for SMBs tend to outperform when they meet criteria such as automating rote and dreaded tasks, as we examined in our SMB AI checklist.
But to show rather than tell, we’ve tracked recent product launches and integrations meant to empower SMBs to do more with less – the holy grail for local businesses. These AI integrations span operational functions but have a few common threads, such as agentic task completion and automation.
Here are five such products that have launched in the past month…
1. Thryv’s AI Lead Flow
Thryv’s AI Lead Flow launched this month to unify marketing and sales automation into one tool. With the goal of freeing up SMBs to spend time on higher-value tasks, it connects functions such as online visibility, lead management, and sales follow-ups. Unifying these functions isn’t just for convenience over a broader surface area, but also a data play. With deeper reach into SMBs’ operational backbone, AI Lead flow can have a greater pool of data on which to train itself. This comes in handy when responding autonomously to inbound leads with knowledge of available appointments, and the ability to speak in the genuine “voice” of the business.
2. Vendasta’s AI Sales Assistant
Vendasta’s AI sales assistant is the latest in its ongoing rollout of AI employees. The latest addition to the roster is designed to offload the onerous tasks of recording and tracking insights from customer and prospect interactions. The is not just to free up valuable time for sales professionals – a common thread for all the tools on this list – but also to make CRM systems more effective. CRM processes today are often mired in human error, such as the bias inherent in manual note entry, and letting follow-up actions linger. By bringing automation into the mix, it will fill some of these longstanding gaps – a welcome proposition to sales pros that universally dread all of the CRM logging that slows them down.
3. WordPress.Com’s Agentic Website Builder
Launched just last week, WordPress.com’s new agentic website builder can create and maintain WordPress pages, posts and metadata given user prompts. This is meant to boil down the art of website building to a conversational UX. But rather than reinvent the wheel, this isn’t a native AI tool but a mechanism to integrate your AI engine of choice, such as Claude. Altogether, it works on two levels. On one level, users speak commands to accomplish things like creating pages or managing comments, tags and categories. On another level, users can deploy agents that carry out commands autonomously on an ongoing basis, such as tagging new posts in a specific way. This represents a broader evolution from prompt-driven AI to agentic AI that can operate on a longer leash… provided there’s trust to let it do so.
4. Base44’s Superagents
Similar in some ways to WordPress.com’s agentic moves, Wix-owned Base44 has launched what it calls Superagents. These prompt-defined agents work proactively across a range of functions for businesses. For example, if a business is launching a new SEO initiative, superagents can be deployed to do things like add image alt-tags and page meta descriptions to existing or new/ongoing web pages that are created. The goal, as with all of the tools on this list, is to save SMBs time and tech headaches.
Base44’s Superagents Push the Rise of the AI “Agentic Employee”
5. Precisely’s Street Pro Discover
Switching gears from websites and general business functions, Precisely has brought conversational AI to where it lives: location intelligence. For those unfamiliar, location intelligence involves data about places, such as store foot-traffic levels. It can be used in targeted marketing, campaign attribution, and strategic planning for multi-location brands. Bringing AI into the mix, Precisely’s new StreetPro Discover can help operators unearth place insights through conversational prompts. Utilizing LLM’s trained on vast location data sets, a coffee chain operator can ask things like “show me all the street corners in suburban LA that have properties for rent and in areas unserved served by coffee shops within a mile radius.” Given high stakes, dynamic real-estate markets and other shifting conditions that compel quick decisions, StreetPro Discover lets marketers make big decisions at the speed of AI.
Precisely’s StreetPro Discover Unlocks Conversational Location Intelligence
Moving Target
So there you have it. These are just a representative sample of a larger trend we’re tracking. We’ll keep our radar up for other notable examples, and return with more roundups as they reach critical mass. Meanwhile, Join us at Localogy’s L26, where Precisely and Vendasta will join us on stage.
Header image credit: Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
