Pipedrive brings new AI-powered Pulse to its sales CRM

Even as customer relationship management (CRM) software juggernaut Salesforce ramps up its AI features and pivots the whole company toward agents, other, smaller CRM providers are seeking to win and retain users with their own AI innovations.

Take Pipedrive, a 10-year-old sales CRM platform provider headquartered in New York that counts 100,000 small business customers worldwide. Yesterday, the company announced the beta launch of its new AI-powered lead sorting and scoring tool: Pipedrive Pulse.

This AI-driven feature automatically identifies and surfaces high-potential leads, allowing sales professionals to focus on closing deals more quickly and with greater accuracy.

The tool simplifies lead management with an intuitive interface, making it easier for users to take timely and impactful actions, including sending leads and prospective deal prospects auto-generated AI emails. It further sorts all the recommended actions, leads, and deals-in-progress into a queue that tracks the user’s progress as they move through it in order of priority.

“We’ve moved from being a system of record to a trusted advisor,” explained Dominic Allon, CEO of Pipedrive, emphasized how AI is reshaping the company’s role in supporting sales teams in a video call interview with VentureBeat several days ago. “AI helps our users understand their next, best action.”

Pipedrive Pulse is currently in beta testing and is available through a waitlist. The parent company has not yet announced a full release date or specific pricing for the tool.

Time-saving through intelligent, automatic data sorting

Allon further explained that time-saving is a key focus for the tool.

“Salespeople need help saving time and spending more of it on what really matters,” he told VentureBeat.

Pulse, therefore, is designed to streamline the process of sorting the most valuable, engaged, and close-to-closing leads and deals, allowing sales teams to pinpoint their efforts there — while also providing the suggestion action the salesperson user should take.

Allon walked through a hypothetical use of the tool: “If you have 42 lead when you come in on a Monday morning, it recommends which one to prioritize based on highest potentiality and priority first — imagine it like a heat map index from kind of hot to cold.”

Users can see email drafts auto-generated by the platform, or take one-click actions like mining the web for additional data for contacts.

Then, users can move the lead right into Pipedrive’s deal management pipeline — putting everything the sales team member needs into one place.

Using open source tech to power specific features

In terms of the technology behind the new tool, Allon identified XGBoost, a popular open source machine learning library.

“We also use Copilot to empower our developers, but LLMs like GPT aren’t really suited for this specific purpose,” he added.

This underscores Pipedrive’s deliberate choice of technology tailored to the specific needs of its CRM solutions rather than adopting generalized AI tools where they don’t align.

Developing around customer requests and feedback

Pipedrive’s engineering team took customer feedback into account during the development of Pulse, aiming to create a solution that directly addresses common pain points for sales professionals.

“While many companies were slapping AI onto their products, we stopped and thought about how to create real value,” said Allon. “Our AI moment came this spring when we released features that genuinely help our customers.”

With the launch of Pipedrive Pulse, the company continues to strengthen its AI portfolio, positioning itself as a leader in sales technology innovation.

“We know that by using AI to help salespeople rank leads from unorganized to organized using engagement scores, we’re addressing a deep-seated need,” Allon stated.

For small and medium-sized businesses, Pipedrive Pulse represents another step toward more intelligent, AI-enhanced sales management.