Qualified.com Inc. today unveiled new capabilities for its artificial intelligence sales development representative that evolve it into a sales “superagent.”

The new features enable it to conduct face-to-face conversations via a digital human avatar and carry context over between website interactions and email responses. The company said the update expands the agent’s scope to cover every stage of the lead nurturing process from qualifying inbound leads to managing prospects across the sales funnel.

Qualified argues that for decades, the marketing funnel has remained stagnant, bogged down by manual processes, disconnected systems, limited human capacity and resulting lost sales opportunities.

Chief Marketing Officer Maura Rivera described the highlight of the new feature set as the video avatar called “Piper” (pictured) that “looks like a human and sounds like a human.”  The AI agent is now also able to engage prospects earlier in the sales cycle than previous versions, which were oriented mostly toward likely buyers.

Piper’s avatar is based on a Qualified staffer named Blake, who was the company’s highest-performing sales representative. Qualified recorded Blake in a studio and trained the underlying generative AI model on an assortment of sales material and best practices.

Customers can use Qualified’s default personas or create their own with a studio session and retrieval augmented generation training. The service currently integrates directly only with Salesforce Inc.’s customer relationship management system but has more than 30 connections to go-to-market systems and email-engagement tools such as those from Outreach Corp. and Salesloft Inc.

Qualified combines OpenAI’s commercial large-language-model inputs with its own training, orchestration and integrations. Customers can customize the agent with their collateral, website content, case studies and guardrails so it hews to approved messaging and avoids topics such as pricing unless configured otherwise.

Signs of intent

Rivera said new high-funnel features can monitor leads for signals of intent, such as attending a webcast or downloading collateral, and decide when and how to re-engage across channels. “She’s not going to be so aggressive about booking the meeting until she gets those signals that the person’s really ready,” Rivera said. The agent can generate personalized, preapproved email follow-ups based on a website conversation.

Piper can watch on-site behavior at scale and tailor outreach accordingly, Rivera said. The software-as-a-service offering can scale to monitor hundreds of thousands of simultaneous website visitors.

Rivera said Piper can run “pretty much fully autonomously,” generate bespoke emails per recipient based on data from marketing databases, with human overseers able to simulate campaigns before sending.  Pipe also supports direct human handoff at a visitor’s option and can be configured with triggers, such as pricing questions, that route conversations to a human representative.

Qualified said Piper complies with major privacy regulations and avoids personalizing communications with identifiable details until a visitor provides an email address. Rivera said more than 500 companies are using the platform and seeing pipeline growth of as much as fourfold.

Piper is a premium addition that will be available in the fall. Existing live-chat customers must upgrade to the company’s agentic marketing plans to access the full Piper feature set, and the video capability will carry an added cost. Qualified ties pricing to traffic levels and list sizes with prices corresponding to the cost of hiring a human representative.

Qualified has raised $163 million in funding, including a $95 million Series C three years ago. Investors include Sapphire Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

Image: Qualified.com