From acquiring leads to following up with cold accounts to handling customer queries, sales teams have a lot to do. Like shooting guards coming off a pick on the perimeter, sometimes they need an assist to close the deal. (Don't check my basketball theory—I haven't played since eighth grade.)

AI sales assistant software uses machine learning, predictive analytics, generative AI, and smart automation to do all the above and more, helping sales teams reach goals quicker than a small forward on a fast break. 

Ready to add AI to your sales workflow? I tested dozens of AI sales tools to come up with the best options. Here are my picks.

The best AI sales assistant software

• Regie.ai for an AI sales tool suite

• My AI Front Desk for a dedicated AI receptionist

• Avoma for sales meetings

• Postaga for outreach sequencing

• Clay for scraping lead data

• Lavender for email coaching

• FastOutreach.ai for cold emails

What makes the best AI sales assistant software?

At a basic level, AI sales assistant software should enhance some element of the sales process using artificial intelligence. But with such a broad definition, you could make a case for just about any AI tool to be considered a sales tool since salespeople use more than just sales-specific tools. So, to narrow the scope, I selected software that ticks all the following boxes:

• Core AI features: First and foremost, AI should be the driving feature. I found that a lot of apps marketed as being "AI" solutions are really just automation tools. That means they don't apply machine learning to make decisions without user input but instead automatically execute actions based on triggers predetermined by the user.

• Sales process assistance: These tools should use AI to handle some specific element of common sales processes. That tends to play out into a few general fields: lead acquisition, outreach, and communication.

• Standalone functionality: AI features are now practically an expectation for software suites like CRMs, ERPs, and project management platforms. The AI sales tools I picked stand on their own without a parent platform. That's not to say you shouldn't use the AI tools in your other apps—you should. It's just that this list is showing off some more niche options for the rest of your sales processes.

• Integration capabilities: Lastly, these apps should be able to integrate with other software to fit seamlessly into existing sales workflows.

Before getting into the paint (last ill-informed basketball reference, I promise) with my picks, one last caveat. Even with this narrowed scope, there are still thousands of AI tools that could fit the bill. With new AI apps and features being released every day, I couldn't test every single option—but I did my best. 

The best AI sales assistant software at a glance

Best AI sales tool suite

Regie.ai (Web)

Regie.ai pros:

• Huge suite of generative and analytical AI tools geared toward sales

• Handles every phase of outreach management and automation

• Reasonable price

Regie.ai cons:

• Only nine integrations

The most dynamic tool on this list, Regie.ai is basically an all-inclusive hub for using AI to manage outreach. Think of it like a mini AI CRM.

Like Postaga, Regie.ai can execute entire outreach campaigns; like Lavender, it can use AI insights to help you improve your writing; and like Clay, it can enrich lead data. It's got scheduling features, email sequencing, generative AI for writing emails for said emails, and so much more. Here are a few of my favorite Regie.ai tools:

• Email verification for checking lead contact information

• Call script generation

• Automatic social media posts generated by feeding it links you want to share

• Icebreaker suggestions that find connections between a casual conversation topic and a business topic

• Images generated by text prompts

• Personalization for adapting email copy to individual prospects

Regie.ai packs more unique AI sales features than any other tool I tested into a very simple dashboard. You can use it to handle campaigns from top to bottom, from automated prospecting to copywriting to sequencing, all the way to web content creation. It even handles inbound emails, while most other AI emailers start and end with outbound.

There are some advanced AI capabilities Regie.ai doesn't offer, like chatbot or virtual receptionist deployment, but I wouldn't expect it to. Regie.ai wraps a lot of features covered by separate tools on this list into one tool for a surprisingly reasonable price, so if you're looking for one product with a lot of AI sales utility, this is the one for you.

Regie.ai pricing: Free, Pro ($59/month), Small Business ($89/month), Enterprise (by request)

Best AI sales assistant for a dedicated AI receptionist

My AI Front Desk (Web)

My AI Front Desk pros:

• True AI receptionist

• Simple to deploy

• Includes routing automation and chatbot

My AI Front Desk cons:

• Interface is a little shoddy

• Customization of voice and tone is limited

When most people think of AI sales assistants, they probably think of a tool like My AI Front Desk—an AI-powered virtual receptionist that can lighten the customer load for sales teams.

The cumbersomely named My AI Front Desk isn't the only virtual receptionist tool out there—or even the most dynamic one—but I give it the nod here because I like how streamlined it is to the essential function of AI virtual receptionist-ism. For complex technology, it's deceptively simple: you set up a business phone line, fill out a business profile, feed the AI with information about your business, add some Q's and A's, and set preferences for elements like chattiness. (I personally like a virtual receptionist who's as chatty as a doorknob.)

Unlike other virtual assistant tools, My AI Front Desk is a true AI receptionist, not an AI call transcriber or automated call router. You describe the way you want your bot to interact and feed it data, and the platform deploys a pleasantly voiced bot assistant that has real-time conversations over the phone. When I talked to the one I built, it fed me responses that differed from the text I fed it, so it doesn't just spit back data verbatim. This receptionist makes decisions and provides original responses (virtually) the way a human would.

Will this still be the best AI receptionist in five years? Probably not. I do think better-designed tools that are just as accessible will come along, and there are more robust tools that do what My AI Front Desk does for more money. But if you want a straightforward virtual receptionist with a real AI voice (kind of like saying "real imitation crab," I realize) for a low price, this is a great option.

My AI Front Desk pricing: $34.99/month

Best AI sales assistant for sales meetings

Avoma (Web, iOS, Android)

Avoma pros:

• AI-powered meeting performance scoring

• Intelligent topic detection, live bookmarking, and keyword tracking

• Lots of integrations

Avoma cons:

• Some key AI features are only available with the Advanced tier and up

• AI Scorecards are available only at the highest tiers

There are a ton of AI meeting assistants out there, but Avoma stands out as one of the best-suited options for sales use cases. 

Avoma's basic utility is to streamline virtual meeting collaboration. To do this, it offers a suite of AI-powered tools for scheduling, contact management, CRM integration, transcriptions, post-meeting summaries, topic detection, and keyword-based bookmarking. These features alone are handy, but Avoma combines them with intelligent analytics based on user activity and conversions, which can then link to your CRM of choice to update sales data.

As a sales tool, Avoma is especially useful by providing insights into sales meetings with its Coaching Scorecards and Performance Dashboard features (available with Business and Enterprise plans). Using machine learning, it shows you how agents perform during calls based on your own criteria for success. You can see if agents do things like inquire about the prospect's current software setup, the prospect's role, or how much they spend on their tools. 

Users should find Avoma's dashboard pretty familiar and easy to navigate. It's got a clean interface, and I like how well it integrates interactive charts and embedded video feeds. There are a lot of AI meeting assistants out there that can help with scheduling and transcripts, but not a lot of them have the kind of AI intelligence utility Avoma offers for sales teams.

Avoma pricing: Basic ($0), Starter ($24/month), Plus ($59/month), Business ($79/month), Enterprise ($129/month)

Best AI sales assistant for outreach sequencing

Postaga (Web)

Postaga pros:

• Start-to-finish outreach campaign generation

• Analyzes existing domain to suggest campaigns

Postaga cons:

• Interface isn't the cleanest

• Lead capturing isn't as robust as AI tools designed for scraping

Outreach may be the most popular sales application for AI tools, and I tested quite a few of them to find that Postaga was my favorite one for automating the entire outreach process.

When you create a campaign, Postaga walks you through campaign types based on your goals, which separate into three categories, like cold outreach, product/service promotion, or content promotion. You can then sort through campaign presets for outcomes like gaining guest posting gigs, suggesting skyscraper content, generating leads, soliciting reviews, and offering tools. 

The wizard then walks you through more details like competitor examples, information about your offering, and your location, then scrapes the web for viable contacts and suggests an email sequence with timelines. Postaga then generates email copy with custom fields based on profiles and data from your dashboard, which you can edit in a decent native text editing widget. 

You can also start your campaign in the Content Hub, which begins with a domain analysis that suggests outreach concepts. After analysis, it offers suggestions for content-related variables like content partners, post titles, and related questions. If you want to develop content from here, Postaga combines data from your analysis with a quick survey to suggest outreach campaigns for your existing webpages, which then trigger the above campaign creation wizard.

I'm not overly impressed with Postaga's interface, which is intuitive but less polished than higher-end tools. I also found that its lead capturing functionality isn't as strong as AI scraping tools that specialize in finding leads, but it's still functional and integrated well into the workflow. But even despite these drawbacks, you could easily use Postaga to develop, execute, and automate a wide variety of outreach campaigns without actually leaving the dashboard.

Postaga pricing: Pro ($99/month), Agency ($299/month)

Best AI sales assistant for scraping lead data

Clay (Web)

Clay pros:

• Quickly crawls LinkedIn for custom lead reporting

• Tons of data enrichment features

• Integrated OpenAI bot

Clay cons:

• Limited number of sources to scrape data from

• Accuracy may be subject to the quality of databases

Prospecting can be one of the most time-consuming, monotonous tasks for sales teams that do cold outreach, but Clay uses AI to make all that manual Googling a thing of the past.

Clay integrates with LinkedIn to compile spreadsheet-style lead lists customized to meet your data needs. When you start a new list, you're prompted to enter details about your target leads, like job title, experience level, bio/headline keywords, and education. With your parameters set, you can select the depth of information you want to pull. Basic profiles with no contact info are free, but you'll need credits to import complete LinkedIn profiles or have Clay search for email addresses using a "waterfall" tactic of cycling through multiple data enrichment services in succession.

I haven't actually tested the emails (sorry, I won't be cold emailing Microsoft's Product Manager), but Clay's success rate of getting even personal email addresses was pretty high. (For my contact, it found one I no longer use, so the accuracy of the results may be suspect.) And once you have your table, you can even enrich it by using scrape and search commands like "Find recent posts by user" and "Find company competitors," allowing you to present a really wide range of data in your spreadsheet.

Clay even has its own built-in OpenAI bot, which you can use to interact with and improve your data. You can select columns in your spreadsheet and ask it to do things like tell you if X company is B2B or generate outreach email copy based on personas. 

I found Clay to be one of the most robust tools for building prospect data, with a really impressive array of data enrichment tools. It is somewhat limited in the sources of this data, as it depends mostly on LinkedIn or imports from a few other sources like HubSpot and GitHub. As long as you're looking to prospect the types of people who tend to be on LinkedIn, you can use Clay to create dynamic prospect profiles.

Another huge bonus: you can integrate Clay with Zapier, which lets you connect it to thousands of other apps. That way, you can do things like create or update records in Clay when you take actions in the other apps you use most. Here are some examples to get you started.

Clay pricing: Starter ($149/month), Explorer ($349/month), Pro ($800/month), Enterprise (by request)

Best AI sales assistant for email coaching

Lavender (Web)

Lavender pros:

• Tracks email performance data and offers coaching insights

• Syncs with a browser-based dashboard

• Integrates generative AI and engagement suggestions into your blank email

Lavender cons:

• May slow down your browser slightly

• Somewhat distracting presence in inbox

If you're a sales agent and your inbox is essentially your digital cubicle, Lavender could become your new best (work) friend. AI email assistants are a dime a dozen, but for sales purposes, Lavender is a pretty unique offering.

Operating as a browser extension, Lavender syncs with your inbox to feed a suite of sweet AI email tools. Premium users can use the Start My Email feature to turn bullet points into new messages, and even free plan users can tap the integrated ChatGPT bot to compose them on the fly. Lavender even offers suggestions for the output copy within the bot's conversation feed, which you can apply with the click of a button and have it regenerated.

Once you've got a message in your email, Lavender's Email Coach feature shows you detailed scoring metrics, so you can see how to make it more likely to engage your leads. It's even got a personalization assistant to help you give it that (pseudo) human touch. And with more and more users engaging with email on mobile devices, Lavender's mobile preview window is a handy way to ensure your message renders well on all devices. Because I love spending too much time finding just the right GIF, I also love the little GIF finder, but that's really more of a bonus perk.

What makes Lavender especially useful on a team level is its dashboard. As long as the extension is activated, Lavender tracks your email activity, which feeds data into your profile. When you log in on a browser, you can see performance metrics like writing clarity, common readability issues, open rate, and reply rate. From there, the coaching interface helps you find ways to improve your email writing skills and hit KPIs.

Even though I don't work in sales, I use Lavender sometimes. This is one of my favorite tools on this list and my pick for the top AI email companion for sales teams. 

Lavender pricing: Basic ($0), Starter ($29/month), Individual Pro ($49/month), Teams ($69/month)

Best AI sales assistant for cold emails

FastOutreach.ai (Web)

FastOutreach pros:

• Trains on your emails to sound like you

• Learns from your email copy over time

• Extremely simple

FastOutreach cons:

• Functionality is limited to just emailing

• Limited integrations

Among a bevy of similar AI email tools, FastOutreach.ai stands out as the most scalable and reliable cold emailer. 

My favorite thing about FastOutreach is that, unlike similar tools that use generative AI to write campaigns based on generic personas, it prompts you to feed it your own email copy so it sounds like you. Overall, I found it pretty fluent in Bryce Email Voice, though to be fair, most people sound relatively generic in their cold outreach emails. 

Once your profile is set up, you begin campaigns with contact lists. I found this somewhat annoying, since it bottlenecks its workflow with a required CSV upload with specific column formatting needs (rather than integrating with another database to transfer directly), but that's easy enough to work around. 

From there, you tell FastOutreach what you want to accomplish with your campaign (I chose "Convince people to watch 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives' starring Guy Fieri"). It then generates three variations, which you can edit to your liking. You can link with Gmail or Outlook clients to send those messages directly or download them as CSVs and boom: your leads are halfway to Flavortown.

FastOutreach is an admittedly simple tool—what I just described is basically all it does. This is a focused product with a clearly defined utility executed really well, all with a simple pricing structure (one flat fee per seat for unlimited use). If all you want to do is use AI to write cold emails with no frills like reporting or lead scraping, this is the product for you.

FastOutreach pricing: Unlimited ($99/seat), Enterprise (by request)

Bonus AI sales tools

Since there are just way, way too many applicable AI tools I could conceivably test (without using AI to do it for me), I've rounded up some of the more popular products that didn't quite fit my list but are definitely worth a look.

• ChatBot: A bot builder that mostly relies on automation but now features AI you can train to include in bot responses

• ChatSpot: Chatbot with convenient templates designed specifically for sales workflows

• Dialpad: A virtual receptionist that mostly relies on automation but has begun integrating convenient AI features

• BHuman: AI video tool for creating presentations, quote requests, and demos

• Vidyard AI Script Generator: Convenient tool from Vidyard that creates sales scripts you can use during meetings

• Demodesk: Creates product demos for leads and includes an AI coaching assistant

General AI tools that can help sales teams

In addition to AI sales assistants, there are virtually infinite general AI products out there that can be useful to sales teams, even if they aren't expressly designed for sales. Most of these tools fit into a handful of more general AI tool classes that could also have useful applications for sales processes:

• AI writing generators that create original copy, content, messages, and other text

• AI chatbots that use AI to respond to user prompts and do things like answer questions, generate text, and paraphrase copy

• AI meeting assistants that enhance meetings by generating transcripts, annotating recordings, and providing insights

• AI video generators that create and edit videos using AI

Automate your AI sales assistant software

I've said it twice in this post, and I'll close by going for three (sorry, actual final basketball reference): you can use just about any AI tool for some portion of the sales process. If there's a tool you'd expect to see on this list that isn't, I either tested it and didn't think it was the best in its class or it just isn't a pure AI sales assistant by my criteria.

No matter which products you pick from (or not from) this list, you can make them do even more by automating them to work with other tools in your workflows. Zapier helps sales teams create flexible workflows that do more with less effort, especially when combined with AI applications like these.

Related reading:

• The top AI text generators

• AI at Zapier: How we use artificial intelligence to streamline work

• What is AI marketing—and how can you leverage it?

• The top AI art generators