The Insight Engine Will Bring AI to Membrain

For some time now, our sales teams have increasingly fielded questions about Membrain’s “AI capabilities.” Consistently, our answer has been: It does not have any. As AI tools became more and more common as enhancements to software applications, the questions became more insistent, and our answer remained the same: No, Membrain does not have AI capabilities yet.

Because of that and some of the posts I’ve made here about AI, people began to suspect that Membrain was anti-AI. There were many good reasons why we waited to join the dance, many of which I’ve written about already, but we were never anti-AI.

What we have always been, is against joining the bandwagon just to join it. We have always been a company that is unafraid to challenge the mainstream. We challenged the idea that adding more technology to your Frankenstack is always a good idea. We challenged the idea that more point solutions will make your team more effective. We challenge the idea of mindlessly automating email outreaches. And we challenged the idea that throwing AI tools into a platform without a plan and a reason, and a thoughtful strategy is the way to go.
Instead, we took a steady approach, studied AI's capabilities and impacts, and developed a strategic entry point to offer our customers tools that will actually help their teams sell.

How We Planned and Prepared for Our AI Rollout

We could have rolled out AI tools early. There are plenty of ways to add chat options, summarizing tools, and other bells and whistles relatively easily. But we wanted to create applications that add real value to the platform, that you can’t find somewhere else for cheap or free, and that will actually help your team become more effective.

We’re not anti-AI. We’re anti-mindless-automation and pro-human-effectiveness

So we analyzed what AI is good at and what it’s not so good at. It’s great at summarizing, repurposing content, finding answers within a data set, and iterating ideas. It’s not so great at strategy, context, or challenging the mainstream. It is terrible at cleaning up bad data and has a habit of proliferating it.

Then we used that information in our context to envision tools that avoid potential pitfalls and leverage the strengths of AI with the strengths of Membrain, as we are uniquely positioned to do so.

Introducing Membrain’s Insight Engine, Our Take on AI and Human Behaviors

Just as AI has very specific strengths, so does Membrain. We are great at strategically leveraging knowledge, structuring contextual information, and creating tools that actually help humans become better at sales. We are uniquely positioned to leverage the structure of the information you already have, external and internal, along with in-depth know-how on win/loss, process, methodology, and strategy, to create AI tools that do what they do best in concert with what we do best.

We are now building what we call The Insight Engine, which accesses the contextually structured data in Membrain (and outside of it) and uses it to generate insights and make intelligent suggestions to support and augment the work of your human sales team.

Your strategy, Membrain’s structure, cognitive science research about how humans make meaning and change behaviors, and your team’s expertise provide the context in which Insight Engine will reshape how B2B  organizations improve internal learning to engage with new and existing customers for increased sales effectiveness.

It’s a large undertaking and will take us some time to complete. Stay tuned for the announcement when it’s ready, and in the meantime, tell me what you hope Membrain’s Insight Engine will do.