Category: Technology

AI meeting note taking as part of a business strategy is gaining momentum. Learn how AI note takers transform team meetings and how your business can take a competitive edge with AI note taking assistants copiloting your workflows. 

Takeaways

• AI note takers are evolving from lightweight speech-to-text apps to full-featured AI meeting assistants that let enterprise teams boost team productivity and customer interactions. 

• Apart from sales and customer meetings, AI meeting note taking finds its application in education, support, and financial services, where capturing conversations and transforming them into action is crucial for business success.

• AI note-takers are more than just voice transcribers. They’re intelligent meeting assistants, saving hours for teams through automation and insights. For example, SUMO’s AI Note Taking assistant for Salesforce tires meeting notes directly to CRM and turns your calls into usable data like follow-ups, next steps, and lead insights. 

• CRM based note-taking allows for queryable meeting notes and insights that can be used to drive sales and better serve customers. This way, your team always gains full context on engagement, closes deals faster, and delivers better customer outcomes.

The Landscape of AI Note Takers: From Solo to Team Use

First speech-to-text apps made for meeting note taking started appearing in the mid-2010s, and their benefit was clear instantly. Having AI to transcribe and write down your conversations is such an immense time- and effort-saver that it was only a matter of time before teams started to adopt it on a larger scale. 

Now, AI note-taking is stepping into the next level of adoption. Businesses integrate it into their workflows and not just for internal use but as part of a customer service. 

The AI note-taking market is expected to grow from USD 450.7 million in 2023 to about USD 2.5 billion by 2033. This means it’s projected to grow at an average rate of 18.9% per year between 2024 and 2033.

Even though AI meeting apps share the same speech-to-text technology, their functionality, integration, and compliance differ significantly depending on a use case. Let’s explore in detail.

How Teams AI Note Taking Differ From Individual Apps

The following factors are always decisive in enterprise and business application.

Factor #1. CRM Integration Tuns Notes Into Actions

For business use, AI note-takers provide seamless integration with CRM, while solo apps store notes in isolation. The former is a definite advantage for teams—you don’t need to manually input data or toggle between different apps.

Case in Point: SUMO’s AI meeting note-taker for Salesforce

SUMO’s AI meeting note-taker integrates natively with Salesforce. It transcribes and logs your call notes, turning them into Salesforce data. You can further generate smart email follow-ups, meeting agendas, and next steps based on your conversation. AI meeting notes are synced to the correct CRM records, giving you a full picture of your agenda.

Factor #2. Teams Need to Collaborate

Team-purpose AI note-takers let you share notes, manage roles and permissions. Notes are searchable, categorized, and structured around business workflows. These features are absent or limited in most single-user AI note-takers.

Factor #3. AI Note-Taking For Workflows

Enterprise-grade AI meeting note takers like SUMO go beyond basic voice transcription. Instead, AI note-taking becomes part of the entire customer engagement strategy—where your meeting notes are not just stored but help you take a next step whether it’s to close a deal, onboard a new user or serve your customers better.

Factor #4. Features

Teams AI note takers often come with expended functionality such as:

• Automatic transcription and summaries – Transcribe conversations and generate clear summaries with action items.
• Searchable and organized notes – Sort past conversations using keywords, tags, or filters.
• Collaboration tools – Share notes, comments, and editable agendas for better teamwork.
• Follow-up and task generation – Auto-generate email follow-ups, next steps, or task lists based on your notes.
• Multi-language support and speaker recognition – Handle meetings in different languages and identify individual speakers.

Factor #5. Security & Compliance

Last but not least, enterprise AI note-takers meet industry-grade standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR). You can adjust user access controls, track audit trails, and store data in encrypted environments. Personal tools provide only basic data security and should not be used to process sensitive customer, financial, or healthcare data at the enterprise level.

Why AI Meeting Note-Taking Matters For Business More Than Ever

Productivity Increases Through Automation

According to Salesforce research, reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks. Among the biggest time-eaters is personalizing communication.That’s where AI helps. 

AI meeting note takers like SUMO can automatically capture key points from meetings and turn them into ready-to-use follow-ups, so you can focus on building relationships instead of writing notes.

Conversation Intelligence Drives Revenue

AI note taking helps sales reps and customer success teams prioritize high-value opportunities and flag at-risk deals before they derail.

An example, summarized call insights enables better deal execution and coaching delivering a 481% ROI for Gong. Another study by Nucleus shows a 38% increase in sales rep capacity, an 8% lift in win rates, and 4% more revenue—all thanks to features like call summaries and recommended next steps.

Automated Data Capture Eliminate Follow-Up Gaps

AI note taking assistants can spot action items during meetings and sync them to your Asana or GitHub. This automation cuts manual hand-offs and ensures decisions turn into actions—without email ping-pong or forgotten to-dos.

AI Improves CRM Data Quality & Forecasting

Enterprise AI note-takers log all meeting details, decision points, and next steps directly into CRMs like Salesforce. This leads to cleaner, more actionable data that strengthens forecasting. 

When notes go missing or are manually typed post-meeting, critical details slip through the cracks—impacting pipeline health and executive decision-making.

Better Customer Experience & Service

By capturing accurate, structured notes from client conversations, businesses ensure every follow-up is informed and timely which contributes to customer engagement. For example:

• Tebra reports, AI Note Assist cuts clinical documentation time by 30–50%, enabling healthcare providers to spend more time face-to-face with patients.
  
• Inspire Veterinary Partners are saving about 6 hours per veterinarian per week and improving patient engagement with AI note taking and automated meetings followups.

Industries Where AI Note-Takers Are Becoming a Must-Have

Now, let’s see where AI note-takers are becoming indispensable, and how they’re changing the way people work and communicate.

AI Note Taking for Sales Meetings

In sales, every conversation is an opportunity. An AI Note-taker assistant can automatically record, transcribe, and summarize sales calls. Moreover, you can capture buyer signals, blockers, or objections and you approach with the right action items to close deals faster.

AI Note-Taking for Service Providers

Professionals like engineers, real estate agents, and consultants can speak naturally during client calls while the AI listens in and generates structured notes tied to the project or client record. Whatever key details, tasks, and decisions you discuss, they are accurately captured and easy to find later.

AI Note Taking for Support Calls

Support agents juggle call handling and documentation. An AI meeting assistant can capture the full conversation, then generate accurate summaries with key customer issues, resolutions, and followups. Advanced AI note-taking assistants like SUMO provide meeting summaries, next steps, and scheduling as a call to action to customers after the call.

AI Note Taking for Financial Advisors

Advisors meet clients regularly, discussing life goals, investments, and risks. AI note-takers ensure these details are captured properly. You can summarize calls, flag compliance terms, and prep review-ready meeting notes.

AI Note-Taking for Students

In remote learning, AI helps to transcribe and summarize lectures automatically. It benefits both students and lecturers. By having your lectures AI recorded and processed with AI, you can improve lectures and plan your curricular better, not to mention the sharing capabilities that lets everyone stay on track. 

How SUMO’s AI Note-Taker Turns Meetings Into Actionable Outcomes

SUMO offers more than just an AI note-taker — but a powerful AI meeting assistant native to Salesforce for sales and customer-facing teams. It joins your calls automatically, whether you’re using Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. 

During the meeting, it takes notes, creates transcripts, and summarizes key points. Afterward, it helps you send follow-up emails that pull directly from the meeting notes, so you always move conversation forward till the desired action.

Key features:

• Auto-joins meetings (Google Meet, Teams, and Zoom)
• Generate AI meeting notes with transcripts and summaries
• Searchable notes by context via an AI chat
• Syncs natively with Salesforce or other systems through API
• Automated follow-up generation based on meeting content 
• Works with SUMO’s booking, planning, and inbox tools to simplify your workflow
• Built for secure, compliant use in healthcare, government, education, and other regulated industries.

See how SUMO’s AI assistant helps your team stay prepared, follow up faster, and keep engagement moving forward.

How to Bring AI Meeting Note-Taking Into Your Business

Before you roll out AI note-taking across your team, here’s a down-to-earth checklist to help you make the right call:

1.Is It a Good Fit for Your Workflow?

• What kinds of meetings will it cover—sales calls, support tickets, team standups?
• Who actually needs the notes, and what happens to them afterward? 

2. Does It Play Nice With Your Tools?

Make sure it works smoothly with your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot). Double-check it connects with your calendars, video calls, and email tools—no one wants to deal with disconnected systems.

3. Is It Secure and Compliant?

Look for compliance with SOC 2, HIPAA (if you’re in healthcare), or GDPR. Built-in encryption, user permissions, and activity logs keep things tight.

4. How Smart Is the AI, Really?

• Can it accurately transcribe your meetings—even when people talk fast or talk over each other? 
• Does it pick up action items, key decisions, and next steps? 
• Bonus points if you can use templates or automate follow-up tasks.

5. Can You Actually Find the Notes Later?

Notes should be easy to search, filter, and link to related projects or deals. It helps if you can tag things or sort by topic, person, or meeting type—so nothing gets lost.

6. Can Your Team Work With It?

Your teams should be able to share notes, add comments, and make edits (with the right permissions). Look for features like shared agendas and collaborative follow-up planning.

Finally, start with a pilot team or a few key meetings. Set goals (like time saved or CRM accuracy) and offer training so your team actually uses it—and sees the value fast.

Summing Up [Off Topic]

On my first job (that’s 15 years ago, shh!), I had to e-interview a developer for a case study. Me: a fresh graduate, 100% humanitarian. Him: a senior developer who spoke tech like was born with it. All I had was the recorder on my phone. 

So, I didn’t make notes — I’ll recap the details later, I thought. I didn’t understand half of what he said — I’ll transcribe it later, I thought. You can guess how that went.

Mid-conversation, I see my recorder is NOT recording. I panic but keep a poker face, desperately scribbling down whatever I can. Needless to say, the case study turned out terrible. 

Now, with every meeting transcribed and organized with AI automatically, I often wonder how many conversations were lost to moments like that. In business, missed or wrongfully captured data may cost your thousands or lost revenue and clients.

Luckily, AI note-takers are now part of every conversation and it’s exciting to see how AI takes them further, opening new use cases and delivering measurable impact.

If you’re considering making AI note taking part of your team’s workflow, consider SUMO. Book a call with us so we’ll guide you on how SUMO can power your business.

When Salesforce launched Agentforce in October 2024, it marked the beginning of the AI-first CRM era, powered by intelligent assistants designed to support users in their daily work. While the buzz around Salesforce AI has only grown since, many businesses are still struggling to turn that promise into real, measurable daily impact.

In this post, we’ll walk you through practical ways AI can automate your key CRM tasks, and highlight the best Salesforce AI assistants that are already proving their value in real-world workflows.

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce AI assistants are made to work with humans, not in their place. They become part of your workflows, helping you automate routine tasks, access data fast, and build smarter processes.
• Factors driving Salesforce AI Assistant adoption are fragmented CRM experience, complex admin across different user roles, and manual tasks that eat up team productivity and impact the entire organization’s efficiency.
• By type, AI assistants in Salesforce can be embedded out-of-the-box, natively built in Salesforce, or integrated third-party tools for specific AI tasks. By use cases, they cater to sales and marketing teams, customer support, e-commerce, analytics specialists, and admins.
• SUMO’s Customer Engagement Platform provides AI-powered engagement tools that assist sales, support and service professionals to book meetings, proceed with next-best actions, generate conversation summaries, and engage with contextual follow-ups—all native in Salesforce.

What are Salesforce AI Assistants?

Salesforce AI assistants, also known as Agentforce Agents, are like helpful coworkers built right into your CRM. They use natural language models and machine learning to support your team with everyday tasks like booking meetings, following up with customers, writing emails, and keeping records organized.

In a nutshell, Salesforce AI assistants:

• Work alongside sales, support and service professionals 
• Make your Salesforce CRM smarter so you accomplish things faster & easier
• Adapt to your role without excessive training
• Live inside your Salesforce workflow so you don’t need to jump between apps. 

Why Salesforce Teams Adopt AI Assistants At Scale

Salesforce teams are embracing AI assistants not just for the hype—but for real results. With 83% of AI-powered sales teams seeing revenue growth and 4 out of 5 users reporting higher productivity, it’s clear that AI isn’t just a trend. Rather, it’s a competitive edge for Salesforce. Among the factors driving adoption are the following.

Salesforce CRM Landscape is Highly Fragmented

Salesforce is packed with features. Its versatility has made it a universal CRM for organizations across industries—from education and healthcare to government and nonprofits. Still, this very strength can also be a drawback. Developers, sales reps, and marketing managers all are using it differently. 

A fragmented CRM experience complicates communication among users, management and teams. Salesforce AI assistants solve this by providing contextual support for each user’s role. They work through a simple chat interface and easily embed directly into your workflow, no matter your Salesforce role.

AI Gets Things Done Faster

Salesforce reports that 81% of teams are now testing or actively using AI for their daily routines in support, marketing, customer relationship management, and admin.

Instead of forcing your way through endless objects and tabs, you can simply ask an AI chat, “Show me my meeting notes for this client” or “Draft a response to this customer request.” AI frees up your time for the next action that matters in your daily work. 

Data Management in Salesforce is Limited

Traditional Salesforce CRM search is limited to strings, forcing users to rely upon exact or partial text matches to surface results from pre-defined fields. While you can apply filters, they still require your manual configuration or navigation. 

AI agents step on the next level allowing you to manage and process data based on contextual search.

For example, SUMO’s AI meeting assistant lets you pull your Salesforce meeting notes for a particular client or time frame. It returns a human-like summary, links to communication history, and associated records, so you don’t need to click into each record to piece together a full picture. What’s more, you can take your next action, e.g. book a meeting or write a follow up right from an AI chat or email. That’s way less toggling and more convenience with data handing. 

How Businesses Benefit

Salesforce AI tools do more than speed up tasks — they transform how teams think and operate, unlocking real value across the entire business.

• Sales Teams Do Selling, not CRMing: AI helps reps focus on deals that are actually likely to close and spend less time chasing dead ends or managing CRM.
• Customers Feel Like You’re There When They Need You: You can analyze data at scale and jump on problems before they snowball into negative reviews or lost clients.
• Marketers Finally Know What Works: Instead of a tiresome dashboard wondering which email or ad campaign performed best, marketers using Salesforce AI get insights fast, on-the-spot, and adapt messages to actually drive conversions. 
• Service Teams Don’t Burn Out: AI handles simple questions and routes incoming support tickets based on priority and topic. So, service agents handle more complex issues—and fewer repetitive ones.
• Tech Teams Work Smarter, Not Harder: Admins can auto-generate logic, test variations, and roll out changes confidently.
• Leaders Make Decisions with Confidence: Executives now use predictive dashboards that highlight not just what is happening—but what will happen next. They can plan smarter for growth.

Types of Salesforce AI Assistants

By type, Salesforce AI assistants can be

• Salesforce’s out-of-the-box (embedded into the CRM),
• Native (built on top of Salesforce), and
• Integrated (third-party tools connected to Salesforce). 

The primary difference between all three is how deeply each type integrates into your Salesforce org and the features you can access. Let’s explore each type in detail.

AI Built by Salesforce

Examples: Agentforce, Salesforce Einstein Copilot, Einstein Search, Einstein GPT

Salesforce includes several AI-powered tools out of the box, which you might know under the Einstein brand. These AI assistants (aka Agentforce) are developed by Salesforce and already embedded across different Salesforce Clouds—Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc. 

If your edition and license type support them, you can enable them via Salesforce Setup. Once enabled, these tools become a part of your CRM experience living natively in your dashboards, record views, and search bars.

How AI assistants by Salesforce are different:

• Made by Salesforce
• No external integrations needed, only configuration
• Based on Salesforce metadata and CRM context
• Accessed via natural language inside Salesforce UI
• Secure and aligned with Salesforce’s permission model

Salesforce-native AI Assistants 

Examples: SUMO’s Customer Engagement Platform

Native AI assistants for Salesforce like SUMO’s Agentforce Engagement Assistants are built on top of Salesforce using its native tools like Apex, Flows, and Einstein APIs. Compared to the Einstein tools, they provide extended functionality, e.g. conversational AI for appointment scheduling, call notetaking, meeting planner based on AI scraping web information, etc. 

They combine the deepest level of integration and Salesforce-grade security which is an ideal choice for enterprise and large scale teams or those that operate in 

How native Salesforce AI assistants are different:

• Built with native Salesforce tools
• Provide deep integration level along with more powerful functionality
• Custom logic and automation
• Full access to Salesforce data model
• Data is managed and stored at Salesforce meaning highest security and full compliance

Integrated Tools

Examples: ChatGPT, Conversica, Notion AI integrated with Salesforce

AI revolves around a variety of use cases that can enhance the CRM experience, especially considering how much users hate toggling between the apps. To address this, many external AI tools provide APIs or extensions to connect to Salesforce. 

While these tools aren’t as seamless as native Salesforce ones, they can still fill in a certain gap with your Salesforce CRM. An example, you can automatically collect and consolidate leads from various industry-specific sources into a single CRM view. 

However, since these AI tools operate outside the Salesforce environment, they raise concerns around data security and compliance. Additionally, their integration and set up is often way more complicated than native ones.

How integrated Salesforce AI assistants are different:

• AI outside Salesforce but pushes/pulls data into/from it
• Requires data access and permission setup
• Useful for specialized tasks that aren’t possible in Salesforce out of the box

AI Assistants by Use Case: Salesforce Tasks You Can Automate

While Salesforce AI assistants are a broad notion, in practice, the use case defines their functionality and capabilities. Most of them fall under one of the following categories, yet some functionality may overlap.

1. AI Sales Assistants 

AI Sales Assistants help sales reps engage with leads, prepare for meetings, write follow-up emails, and close deals faster while syncing and processing all data in Salesforce.

Use cases:

• Prepare for meetings using AI which researches and summarizes public information about a company, contact or lead and summarizes notes from previous customer interactions.
• Auto-capture meeting notes and highlights directly on a specified  Salesforce object
• Write meeting follow-ups based on context and next step actions
• Mine data like meeting notes or conversations and auto-prompt the next action (e.g. schedule a demo call)
• Score and prioritize leads based on likelihood to convert (Einstein Lead Scoring)
• Offer a consultant or a demo meeting as a sales call to action

2. AI Marketing Assistants

The prime goal of Salesforce AI assistants for marketing is automation of email sequences and workflows. Marketing teams can support campaign creation, email content generation, and performance analysis with AI.

Use cases:

• Suggest routes for email campaigns based on specific goals (e.g., nudge X contacts to webinar) and build sequences with variations (e.g., split tests).
• Write subject lines and email copy with generative AI
• Analyze email bounce or open rates and suggest improvements
• Recommend customer segments for targeted campaigns
• A/B test automation paths (e.g., for webinar follow-ups)
• Offer meetings with a sales rep or an invite to a marketing event as a call to action
• Define high-performing content assets

3. Customer Service Agents

Customer support agents powered by AI automate responses to frequently asked customer questions and help human agents work faster.

Use cases:

• Handle support tickets with chatbots (Einstein Bots)
• Summarize case history for a support rep before they respond
• Recommend help articles during a live chat
• Suggest resolutions based on past similar cases
• Triage incoming tickets by urgency or topic
• Offer one on one support meetings for tier two cases

4. Ecommerce Agents

AI ecommerce agents embedded into Salesforce assist customers on retail or digital storefronts by answering questions and suggesting products.

Use cases:

• Recommend products based on browsing or purchase history
• Answer questions about order status or return policies
• Offer upsell suggestions during checkout
• Personalize promotions in real time based on behavior
• Offer exclusive events or personal shopper meetings for VIP customers

5. Collaboration Agents

Make team communication and planning easier by summarizing conversations and assisting with workflows.

Use cases:

• Summarize threads relevant to a deal or campaign
• Capture action items from meetings and log them in Salesforce
• Help team members stay aligned on shared accounts or tasks
• Generate daily or weekly briefings on customer activity

6. AI Analytics Assistants

Sales leaders use AI to understand how reps allocate time across tasks like calls, emails, or follow-ups. AI can support Salesforce analysts and managers with data queries, reporting, and workflow creation. 

Use cases:

• Answer natural-language questions like “How many leads converted this month?”
• Create reports and dashboards automatically
• Suggest workflow automations (e.g., follow-ups after form fills)
• Detect data anomalies or incomplete records
• Help configure rules or permission sets 

7. AI For Devs and Admin 

AI in Salesforce isn’t just for frontline users—it also lets techies manage orgs, support users, and deliver business value faster. Developers and admins can save time on manual reporting, uncover data insights more easily, and even build smarter workflows with less effort.

Use cases:

• Generate Apex classes, triggers, and LWC components
• Code review and be-bugging
• Automatically generate unit test classes
• Navigate documentation via AI chat

7 Best Salesforce AI Assistants to Save Time and Boost CRM Productivity

Provider	Integration	Main Features	Best For	Pricing
SUMO	Native Salesforce	AI scheduling, meeting prep & lead research, note taker & follow-ups, AI website chat	Customer engagement, sales and service teams	On-demand
Agentforce Assistant	Native Salesforce	AI chat, role skills, content gen, insights	Sales, service, marketing	$500/100K credits or $2/convo
Agentforce Dev	Salesforce IDE	Code gen, completions, docs help, tests, scanning	Developers, admins	Open beta
Conversica	Integrated API + AppExchange	AI email/SMS/chat, lead follow-up, analytics	High-volume lead processing	From $2,999/mo
Clari	Native Salesforce	Pipeline insights, forecasts, deal risk, tracking	Sales, revenue teams	$80–120/user/mo avg
Slack AI	Slack + Salesforce	Summaries, actions, lookups, SF data ref	Cross-team collab	$10/user/mo (add-on)
Sweep AI	Native Salesforce	Admin tasks, flow setup, schema mgmt, alerts	Admins, RevOps	$1.5K–$5K/mo

1. SUMO: Best Salesforce AI Assistant For Sales, Support & Service Teams

SUMO provides an AI-powered customer engagement platform natively built on Salesforce AI.

You can schedule appointments intelligently, auto-research your meeting attendees, summarize conversations, generate follow-up messages, and more—all while keeping data safe in Salesforce. 

One of SUMO’s key strengths is how its AI assistant aligns with Salesforce workflows. The AI lives inside Salesforce and integrates with records, making it a lightweight yet powerful and fully-compliant tool for customer engagement and lead prospecting in healthcare, government, education, nonprofit and retail.

Key Features:

• Engage prospects via SUMO Agentforce chat to qualify and book meetings.
• Schedule appointments based on capacity, routing, roles, etc.
• Automate appointment self-booking, reminders & follow ups 
• Research leads and companies before meetings scanning public professional info.
• Generate meeting agendas, topics, and discovery questions.
• Capture real-time notes and action items with AI meeting note taker
• Draft and automate personalized meeting follow-ups.

Pricing:

• On-demand

Explore How SUMO Gives Your Team More Time for What Matters

2. Agentforce Assistant (aka Einstein Copilot) by Salesforce

Einstein Copilot is a generative Salesforce AI assistant first released in February, 2024 and later evolved to Agentforce Assistant. It uses natural language understanding to answer your questions and recommend next steps. 

You can chat with Agentforce in a similar way like with any AI chat about any data related to your Salesforce CRM and trigger required action.

Agentforce Assistant browses your account history, opportunity status, and contact records to help you with day-to-day CRM tasks such as writing emails, summarizing notes, updating records, or even preparing pipeline reviews. If you’re tired of searching through Salesforce, Agentforce lets you pull insights quickly without navigating the full interface.

Key Features:

• Embedded AI chat assistant for Salesforce 
• Pre-built with role-based skills for Sales, Service, and Marketing
• Can be extended with industry-specific skills (e.g., healthcare, retail)
• Supports custom actions through Copilot Studio
• Grounded in real-time CRM data via Data Cloud
• Integrated with Einstein GPT for content generation (emails, summaries)
• Available in Salesforce UI and channels like Slack

Pricing:

• Two pricing models for Agentforce: Flex Credits and Conversations
• Flex Credits: $500 USD per 100,000 Credits
• Conversations: $2 USD per conversation

3. Agentforce for Salesforce Developers

Formerly known as Einstein, Agentforce for Developers brings Salesforce-specific generative AI right into the developer’s IDE. It helps developers and admins with code writing, debugging, and documentation within Salesforce.

Among the features, you may create Apex code from prompts, generate validation rules, write test classes, and explain existing code. 

If you’re into a large Salesforce org, where maintaining documentation or understanding legacy code can give you a headache, Agentforce is a painkiller. Unlike low-code tools, Agentforce for Devs still requires technical knowledge but lets you avoid context switching or documentation browsing to complete dev tasks. 

Key Features:

• Dev Assistant chat for code generation, documentation, and explanation using slash‑commands
• Inline code completions
• Unit test generation
• Documentation management and explanation
• Support for best practices: linting, static analysis, and security scanning through supplementary tools

Pricing:

• Currently in open beta

4. Conversica for Automated Lead Processing in Salesforce

Conversica is an AI-driven digital assistant platform that helps you automate lead engagement and follow-up. Its flagship offering, Revenue Digital Assistants, reaches out via email or SMS, maintains conversations with prospects or customers, and hands off qualified leads to human teams. These assistants mimic real conversation patterns, not like robo-bots everyone hates talking to.

While it’s not native to Salesforce, Conversica integrates well through API or AppExchange to sync all conversation data with your CRM records. If you run high-volume lead pipelines, where manually following up on every inbound contact would take you ages, Convertica saves your time. 

Key Features:

• Two-way conversational assistants for email, SMS, and chat 
• Outcome-based dialog flows designed for lead qualification, reactivation, and retention
• Multilingual support 
• Self-learning AI that adapts to improve conversations
• Omni-channel engagement across email, SMS, and web chat 
• Integrations with 50+ CRM/marketing systems, including Salesforce
• Analytics and reporting to track engagement, conversion rates, and ROI 

Pricing:

• Basic plan: $2,999/month (annual billing) 
• Unlimited user seats; pricing tiers vary by functionality

5. Clari for Revenue-Driven Salesforce Teams

Clari is a revenue intelligence platform that connects to Salesforce and layers AI-driven insights on top of pipeline data. It helps sales teams with forecasting, deal inspection, activity tracking, and risk identification.

Rather than acting as a conversational assistant, Clari analyzes the history and trends of deal activity, emails, meetings, and CRM entries to spot patterns that may lead to closing or stalling.

Sales leaders and reps use Clari to get a more accurate view of their pipeline health and sales execution. The platform applies AI to determine which deals are slipping, which need attention, and what the likely outcome will be. 

Key Features:

• Revenue orchestration: pipeline intelligence, deal scoring, AI-driven forecasting, risk alerts, activity tracking 
• Native Salesforce and email integrations for real-time insights
  

Pricing:

• Modular; average investment ~ $80–120/user/month
• Median total deal value ~$81K/year

6. Slack AI For Salesforce Team Collaboration

Slack AI, introduced by Salesforce for its Slack collaboration platform, brings generative AI capabilities into team conversations. It helps summarize threads, extract action items, and provide instant answers based on company knowledge or linked systems like Salesforce. For example, a user can ask Slack AI to summarize a long sales thread or surface a key contract detail discussed earlier.

When connected to Salesforce, Slack AI can become a lightweight assistant for cross-functional teams. Marketing, sales, or support reps can get updates on deals, tickets, or customer issues without leaving Slack. 

Key Features:

• Conversation summarization, daily digests, answer retrieval, document or Slack data lookup 
• Can reference Salesforce data when connected via integrations
  

Pricing:

• Add-on for paid Slack plans: $10/user/month

7. Sweep: Salesforce AI Support Assistant

Sweep is an AI assistant designed to help Salesforce admins and RevOps teams automate and manage Salesforce configuration using natural language. Instead of navigating setup menus or writing configuration scripts, admins can describe what they want to build (e.g., “Create a flow to reassign leads based on territory”) and Sweep AI generates the underlying automation or configuration needed.

This tool is especially useful for smaller operations teams or orgs without full-time Salesforce admins. It reduces the time and technical effort required to set up automation, update objects, or maintain the data model. Sweep AI integrates directly with Salesforce and keeps a change log, which is useful for auditing and rollback. It is not a general-purpose assistant but highly focused on backend configuration and org management.

Key Features:

• AI agent in Salesforce for admin tasks—automating flows, fixing fields, managing schema, detecting issues
• Real-time documentation, schema monitoring, Slack alerts, workflow connector support

Pricing:

• Analytic tier: $1,500/month/company
• Control tier: $2,500/month
• Full agentic tier: $5,000/month

Summing Up

Salesforce AI assistants are becoming part and parcel of productive teams across sales, service, marketing, and operations. Whether embedded, native, or integrated, AI tools help businesses to eliminate CRM friction and automate repetitive tasks. 

SUMO stands out as a powerful Customer Engagement Platform that delivers Salesforce-native AI for intelligent scheduling, lead prospecting, and meeting automation.

Ready to experience true AI-powered engagement inside Salesforce? 

Your brand surely has some sort of online customer interaction. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make those interactions faster, easier, and more convenient for both your team and clients. In our post, we’re featuring 12 inspiring real-world AI customer experience examples, along with takeaways you can apply to your strategy.

Key Takeaways

• AI-driven customer experiences like conversational chatbots, AI customer engagement software, and recommendation engines help companies answer questions faster, book appointments without back-and-forth, and suggest the right actions at the right time.
  
• AI takes over repetitive tasks—like checking availability or answering FAQs—so customers get help instantly, even outside business hours.
  
• Companies using AI in customer support & service are cutting costs by 20–30%, and those with existing automation can let AI handle up to half of all requests without needing a human.
  
• From tech giants like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoom to healthcare providers, governments, and nonprofits, real-world examples show that AI makes service faster for users and more manageable for teams.

Best Examples of AI Customer Experiences in Action

AI experiences are not just science fiction predictions anymore—businesses across all sectors are actively using them showing measurable impacts. Companies that use AI for customer service are cutting their support costs by 20–30%. And if they already have some automation in place, AI could handle up to half of all customer requests — meaning even fewer calls or chats need a real person.

From 24/7 AI chatbots, smart self-service portals, and virtual assistants to predictive analytics, AI-driven customer experiences have penetrated our lives. AI brings better service, streamlined communication, and takes care of the boring stuff — things we couldn’t even imagine automating years ago.

Here are the most impressive AI customer experience examples implemented by leading companies and organizations across SaaS, retail, healthcare, education, and beyond.

1. Salesforce Einstein: The AI CRM Sidekick

Salesforce has always been a pioneer in technology adoption. In 2016, the platform launched Salesforce Einstein, an integrated suite of tools that enables an AI-driven sales and marketing experience within the Salesforce CRM.

Under the hood, it uses machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analytics. Combined, these technologies help sales and marketing teams rank leads, suggest the best times to reach out, and even write emails.

As an example, the Einstein Lead Scoring tool lets you evaluate your leads based on their behavior, interaction track record, and general customer profile data, so you can focus your efforts on the most promising leads.

How AI Impacts Sales Team Experience

Sales teams that have been using it for some time report a 25% boost in sales conversion. AI improves Salesforce teams’ productivity and helps target the right prospects, rather than scattering efforts on someone who’ll never converts.

Empower Your Salesforce Teams with an AI-Powered Sales Assistant

2. HubSpot: AI Email Suggestions + Meeting Booking

If you’re on the HubSpot CRM, you may already be unconsciously using its first AI tools for content writing and CRM reporting tasks which has been around for 2 years. With the help of AI, HubSpot can white your personalized email replies that are content-aware and include smart meeting links if your prospect is close to purchase. You can also share calendar links that are personalized to the recipient’s behavior and lifecycle stage.

How AI Impacts Marketing Team Experience

The company has no plans to stop scaling its AI adoption. In April 2025, HubSpot announced its new AI tool suite, Breeze. It automates customer support with 24/7 agents and personalizes marketing outreach with real-time account research, all integrated across their platform.

3. Zoom: AI For Meeting Summaries & Action Items

Zoom launched its AI Companion in 2023. Like other AI meeting note-takers, it transcribes your meeting summaries, lists key actions, and highlights major discussion points. Only now, you don’t need any connectors, so there’s less friction and better data management. If you communicate with customers via Zoom or use it internally, you can just follow the meeting without manually taking notes on paper.

How AI Impacts Meeting Experience

Zoom reported that 74% of leaders say AI saves them one or more hours a day on meeting tasks like messages, emails, and follow-ups. Now, teams can stay focused on the conversion while AI ensures nothing important is missed.

Turn Conversations Into Conversions with SUMO’s AI Meeting Assistant

4. Lightspeed + Intercom’s Fin Agent: AI For Customer Support

Lightspeed is a global commerce platform for retailers, restaurants, and hospitality businesses. By partnering with Intercom, they rolled out an AI Fin Agent that browsers their knowledge base and handles customer support by answering simple user questions like “How do I reset my password?”.

It’s not just a chatbot that pulls links to articles, but conversational AI ,which makes the customer support experience feel human and personalized.

For complex support cases, Fin passes all the information to a human, so the customer doesn’t need to repeat anything. On the employee side, AI Copilot backs support agents by suggesting helpful replies, pulling in relevant knowledge base content and speeding up onboarding for new team members.

How AI Impacts Customer Support

With the help of AI, Lightspeed processes up to 65% of customer conversations automatically. Their agents close 31% more conversations daily with the help of AI.

5. Allina Health: AI For Patient Engagement

Allina Health, a nonprofit healthcare provider, recently launched “Alli,” an AI-powered voice agent that automates call center operations. Alli integrates with Allina’s EMR to instantly identify and authenticate callers.

Patients can now manage appointments and, in the future, refill prescriptions, locate providers, and get answers to non-clinical questions. All without waiting on hold. The AI voice agent reduces call center workload and gives patients faster, more convenient access to services.

How AI Impacts Patient and Staff Experience

Since the launch, Alli has helped Allina Health achieve faster average call times and resolve 80% of incoming calls in under 45 seconds, without adding staff. By handling routine tasks like identity verification and scheduling, the AI agent lets support representatives focus on complex and sensitive patient needs.

6. CVS Health: AI-Powered Vaccine Scheduling

In response to the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine rollout, CVS Health launched an AI-powered vaccine scheduling service. It simplifies and digitizes the check-in process for patients looking for immunization and vaccination. Intelligent vaccine scheduling software automates self-service appointments, routes patients to the nearest location and suggests the optimal time slots based on your capacity.

How AI Impacts Patient Scheduling 

AI makes patient scheduling more accessible and convenient by going online and paperless. Nearly 80% of patients adopted this capability and are actively using it according to CVS Health report.

7. Arizona State University: AI Chatbot for Student Engagement

Arizona State University’s AI chatbot, Sunny, uses a knowledge base to answer students’ and parents’ questions. Launched in 2019, Sunny handles student questions around admissions, class registration, financial aid, and more. About 5,900 students engaged with Sunny to inquire about their classes and remote alternatives to ASU services in March 2020 during the peak of the pandemic.

How AI Impacts Student Engagement

AI not only cuts down the administrative workload for universities but also drives student engagement. Among AI experience examples are smart educational scheduling software, personalized notifications about upcoming deadlines, and campus events. Students enjoy 24/7 informational assistance and a better onboarding experience.

8. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: AI for Appointment Support

In the public service sector, AI can automate government appointment scheduling, community engagement and public service delivery.

An example, The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs deployed an AI assistant VA chat. With this, veterans can book appointments, navigate claim statuses, and access benefits via chatbot. The solution uses Dialogflow and NLP to understand context-sensitive inquiries and guide users accurately.

How AI Impacts Public Service

AI improves public service experiences by making information more accessible and reducing wait times.

9. Sephora: AI for Product Choice and Appointment Booking

Sephrora delivers one of the best AI customer experience examples with its Virtual Assistant. It uses AI to recommend best-fit makeup products based on your previous interactions and purchased items. Moreover, you can book beauty appointments in-store via chat or online platform. It’s an excellent example of how a retail brand can blend AI into its omnichannel customer experience.

Sephora’s Reservation Assistant helps customers find beauty products, book in-store beauty consultations, find available time slots and nearby store locations. No back-and-forth needed. Launched via Facebook Messenger, in under 2 years, it increased booking rates by 11% — leading to happier customers and higher in-store spending. 

How AI Impacts Customer Experience in Retail

If your goal is to increase foot traffic and create more meaningful online customer interactions, SUMO’s AI-driven retail scheduling software provides a simple way to scale in-store visits.

10. Crisis Text Line: AI for Mental Health Support

Crisis Text Line is one of the world’s most prominent mental health support lines offering free, 24/7 support. Their AI chat scans incoming text messages in real time with NLP and machine learning models. Then, it detect patterns linked to suicide, self-harm, or severe distress.

AI flags these messages for immediate human intervention and also helps counselors by suggesting potential next responses based on successful outcomes from past chats.

How AI Impacts Nonprofits

Thanks to AI, Crisis Text Line reduced their response time for high-risk texters from 2 min to within 39 seconds. The system ensures that limited human resources are focused where they’re needed most.

Summing Up

Each of these AI customer experience examples isn’t just about automation—they’re about relevance, personalization, and scale. Whether you’re closing a deal or resolving a support issue, AI streamlines the process. You can automate routine tasks and access the right information at the right time.

And if you’re looking to bring the same kind of AI-driven efficiency to your own business, SUMO Scheduler is built to help you engage customers faster and smarter.

Power Your Salesforce with AI Customer Engagement Tools

Looking to automate meeting scheduling in Salesforce? We’ve shortlisted some of the best Salesforce meeting schedulers, including SUMO Scheduler, Salesforce Scheduler, Calendly, Engageware, and Chili Piper. Learn how they compare by platform capabilities and features to decide on the right tool that fits your needs.

Key Takeaways:

• SUMO Scheduler offers the most feature-rich Salesforce Meeting Scheduler combined with powerful platform capabilities. Unlike non-native apps like Calendly or Chili Piper, SUMO is built on Salesforce. For admins and reps, this means even the most complex scheduling workflows run smoothly and securely—with every lead automatically captured, tracked, and followed up inside Salesforce CRM. 

• Salesforce Scheduler is also native, although it covers only the basics. If you seek to automate internal meeting scheduling, Salesforce Scheduler is fine. Advanced features like flexible assignment logic, room and resource booking, or waitlists are possible with custom coding or configuration.

• Calendly is user-friendly and great for quick, simple meeting links. It connects to Salesforce via integrated API and provides all basic functionality. Advanced functionality is heavily configured. It’s best for individual users, small businesses, or straightforward meeting scheduling.

• Engageware and Chili Piper provide core features like lead routing and real-time booking. However, they don’t support recurring or service-based scheduling, so they’re less suited for broader use. While not Salesforce-native, these tools integrate into your Salesforce CRM via API. Configuring your meeting booking flows and syncing data within Salesforce will take time and effort.

Top 5 Salesforce Meeting & Appointment Scheduling Apps

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Native to Salesforce	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	❌ No	❌ No	❌ No
Online Scheduling	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Real-Time Scheduling	✅ Fully	✅ Partially	❌ Requires Zapier/API config	❌	❌ Activity Logging Only
Appointment Links	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Cancel + Reschedule	✅ Email + SMS	✅ Email Only	✅	✅	✅
1-to-1 / 1-to-Many	✅	⚠️(Limited to 5 per appt)	✅	✅	✅
Recurring Appointments	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Service-Based Scheduling	✅	⚠️ Requires Service Cloud	❌	❌	❌
Appointment Routing	✅ Round Robin, Priority, Load Balanced, Custom	⚠️ Load Balancing Only	⚠️ Round Robin Only	⚠️ Round Robin Only	⚠️ Requires Distro Package
Room & Resource Booking	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Book from Any Salesforce Object	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Schedule on Behalf of Others	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅
Pricing	Custom Quote	Included in Salesforce (or paid add-on)	Free – $10/user/mo	Custom Quote	From ~$22/user/mo
Best Fit For	Healthcare, Education, Fin Service, Nonprofit, Retail, Sales & Marketing, Enterprise	Internal Needs, Standard Booking Flows	Individuals, Small Teams	Fin Service, Call Centers	Small Sales & Marketing Teams

When evaluating a Salesforce meeting scheduler, tech and business decision makers often differ in opinions. 

Salesforce admins prioritize how well a meeting scheduler fits into your existing Salesforce environment and how it can evolve with your business. Those who are on the business side look for ways to solve their daily tasks, i.e., what the Salesforce meeting scheduler can do out of the box. 

That’s why it’s important to differentiate platform capabilities from feature capabilities. While a good meeting scheduler for Salesforce balances both, the platform should always be your first filter, especially if you’re on the admin side.

What are Platform Capabilities in Salesforce Meeting Schedulers?

Platform capabilities refer to a scheduler’s integration depth with Salesforce, how it handles data, and how it manages contacts.

In practice, they determine how much manual work you or your Salesforce admin will need to configure and support meeting scheduling across your organization. When evaluating Salesforce meeting schedulers, consider the following platform capabilities:

Salesforce Native Scheduling

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Salesforce Native	✅ Native	✅ Built by Salesforce	❌	❌	❌

Native meeting schedulers run inside Salesforce. It means your meeting data gets right in Salesforce and stored there without being processed by any 3rd party connectors. Enterprises and organizations put Salesforce’s native scheduling as a priority as it reduces integration complexity and guarantees compliance and security.

Why Matters: 

• No data syncing issues
• Utmost security
• No admin overhead with configuration and support

Scheduling Journey Builder (Flows) 

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Scheduling Journey (Flows)	✅ Flow Builder	✅ Flow + OmniStudio	❌	⚠️ Requires Integration	❌

Custom scheduling flows in Salesforce let you automate complex scheduling scenarios (e.g., auto-booking based on lead score or routing to the right rep). You don’t need to write code, so it’s ideal for non techies.

Why Matters: 

• Saves admin time & efforts
• Reduces manual steps

Automated Salesforce Lead/Contact Creation 

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Automated Lead/Contact Creation	✅ Native	✅ Native	⚠️ API/Zapier	⚠️ API setup	✅ Native + API

It automates your funnel entry point, so reps don’t have to manually enter meeting data.

Why Matters: 

• No leads fall through the cracks
• Faster follow-ups and lead nurturing. 

Custom Fields for Salesforce Data Capture

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Custom Fields for Data Capture	✅ Fully Supports	⚠️Require Dev	⚠️Requires Integration	⚠️ Requires Integration	⚠️ Requires Connector

If your team needs context before meetings (like lead source, product interest, location, etc.) capturing custom data during scheduling, Custom Salesforce fields are invaluable. You can customize your meeting booking form and store data right in Salesforce. On an advanced level, you can Upload/Attach Documents.

Why Matters: 

• Everything is centralized
• Data capture and lead processing without workarounds 
• Fewer mistakes or missed information

Single Sign On In Salesforce (SSO)

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Single Sign-On in Salesforce	✅ Supports SFDC SSO fully	✅ Native	❌	❌	❌

With SSO, users log in securely without managing separate passwords. If you’re scaling or in a regulated space, this is critical.

Why Matters:

• Reduces friction for your users while keeping access secure.

Salesforce Meeting Schedulers Compared by Platform Capabilities

	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Salesforce Native	✅ Native	✅ Built by Salesforce	❌	❌	❌
Scheduling Journey (Flows)	✅ Flow Builder	✅ Flow + OmniStudio	❌	⚠️ Requires Integration	❌
Automated Lead/Contact Creation	✅ Native	✅ Native	⚠️ API/Zapier	⚠️ API setup	✅ Native + API
Custom Fields for Data Capture	✅ Fully Supports	⚠️Require Dev	⚠️Requires Integration	⚠️ Requires Integration	⚠️ Requires Connector
Upload Documents	✅ Directly to Salesforce	❌	❌	❌	⚠️ Not SF-native
Single Sign-On in Salesforce	✅ Supports SFDC SSO fully	✅ Native	❌	❌	❌

What are Feature Capabilities in Meeting Schedulers?

Features in Salesforce appointment schedulers have the most business impact. They define the daily meeting scheduling and management routine for your team and clients.

For easy scanning, we break them down into what’s essential for a Salesforce meeting scheduler, what’s nice to have, and what’s only useful in specific cases.

Tier 1: Essential Features

If you’re looking to replace manual scheduling in your organization, these features will help you automate your meeting scheduling in Salesforce.

• Scheduling in Real-Time – Instantly update and adjust schedules based on live changes, e.g. reschedules, late-minute cancellations.
• Email Appointment Invites From Salesforce – Keeps communication inside Salesforce.
• Create Appointment Links – For manual sharing or embedding in workflows.
• Online Scheduling – For self-service booking from public or internal pages.
• Cancel + Reschedule – For reducing no-shows and admin overhead.
• Automated Time Zone Support – For scheduling across regions.

Tier 2: Nice-to-have for Team Collaboration and Automation

If you have multiple team members, distributed teams, or complex workflows, a simple meeting scheduler won’t do. For support teams, call centers, or sales teams, the following features will help you generate leads through scheduling and improve your customer service.

• Recurring Appointments – For ongoing meetings or regular check-ins.
• Schedule On-Behalf of Team Members – Useful for assistants, admins, or call centers.
• Assignment Rules (Priority, Balanced, Round Robin, Random) – Automates smart routing.
• Meeting Availability – Let each user tailor their own schedule.
• Service Based Availability – Book based on the type of service needed.
• Buffers – Prevent back-to-back meetings or travel issues.
• Room & Resources Booking – Coordinate physical assets or locations.
• Schedule From Any SF Object or Case – Flexibility to schedule from wherever the context is.

Tier 3: Use-Case-Specific Features

Not required for everyone. Valuable in specific roles or industries like education, support, or partner scheduling.

• 1 to Many – For webinars, training sessions, or group appointments.
• User to User – For internal meetings or peer scheduling.
• Waitlist – Offer earlier slots when cancellations occur.
• Scheduling in a Salesforce Community – Enables customer or partner self-scheduling.
• Create, Route + Assign Leads In Salesforce – Ideal for sales and marketing use cases.

Salesforce Meeting Schedulers Compared by Features

If you’re choosing a Salesforce meeting scheduler, your feature choice depends on the complexity of your needs.

Feature	SUMO Scheduler	Salesforce Scheduler	Calendly	Engageware	Chili Piper
Real-Time Scheduling	✅ Fully	✅ Partially	❌ Requires config	❌	❌
Email Appointment Invites From Salesforce	✅	❌ Requires Development	⚠️ Requires Config	⚠️ Requires Config	❌
Create Appointment Links	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Online Scheduling	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Scheduling in a Salesforce Community	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Create, Route + Assign Leads In Salesforce	✅	✅	⚠️ Requires Config	✅	✅
Cancel + Reschedule	✅	❌ Requires Community License	✅	✅	✅
Recurring Appointments	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Schedule On-Behalf	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅
Room & Resources Booking	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Assignment Rules	✅ Priority, Load-Balanced, Round Robin, Custom	⚠️ Load Balance Only	⚠️ Round Robin Only	⚠️ Round Robin Only	⚠️  Distro Package
Custom Meeting Availability	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ Distro Package
Service-Based Availability	✅	⚠️ Requires Service Cloud	❌	❌	❌
Buffer Time	✅ Custom for all users	⚠️ One for all users	✅	⚠️ Requires Config	✅
Schedule From Any SF Object or Case	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
1-1 / 1 to Many	✅	⚠️(Limited to 5 per appt)	✅	✅	✅
Waitlist	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌

Feature-wise, SUMO’s Salesforce Meeting Scheduler allows for recurring appointments, waitlists, room and resource booking, and service-based availability—all out of the box in Salesforce. Compared to Salesforce Scheduler, SUMO fits more enterprise and large-scale organizations with complex scheduling needs. 

Calendly, Engageware and Chili Piper close Tire 1 and partially Tire 2 Salesforce meeting scheduling functionality, although not all are out-of-the-box. You may configure some of the advanced Tire 2 & 3 functionality in them, yet the process will take you or your team extra effort and time—or budget.

Best Salesforce Meeting Schedulers: Overview & Use-Cases

SUMO Scheduler

SUMO Scheduler is a Salesforce-native customer engagement platform made for organizations with complex appointment workflows. It provides a powerful meeting scheduler with multi-step logic including service-based availability, location and resource booking, and custom business rules. If your organization needs high configurability and native integration with Salesforce workflows and data models, SUMO’s meeting scheduler is an ideal fit.

Pros:

• 100% Salesforce-native: no third-party data storage or external syncs.
• Supports any complex flows (multi-user scheduling, service/location logic, role-based access).
• Offers scheduling inside Salesforce Communities and Experience Cloud.
• Enterprise-grade features and calendar management.

Use Cases:

• For healthcare providers looking to automate medical appointment scheduling for patients and staff including recurring meetings.
• For universities and K–12 schools to coordinate student and tutor scheduling for meetings, advising, and academic services.
• For public sector appointments and nonprofit scheduling to manage constituent appointments, outreach events, and service-based appointments.
• In retail to schedule in-store appointments, personal shopping sessions, and service bookings.
• For sales and marketing reps including field sales to auto-schedule demos, consultations, and follow-ups.
• For financial service appointments, advisors and agents schedule consultations, compliance meetings, and account reviews.

Salesforce Scheduler

Salesforce Scheduler is a native tool included as a paid add-on in Salesforce clouds (like Financial Services or Health Cloud). With this, you can schedule appointments directly from Salesforce using standard objects such as Leads, Opportunities, or Cases. And it supports automated time zone management, service-based availability, and integration with resource calendars, while staying entirely within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Pros:

• Integration with standard Salesforce objects and flows.
• Managed and supported by Salesforce directly.
• No need for external apps or data synchronization.
• Works well for one-on-one scheduling inside customer service workflows.

Best for:

• Internal scheduling or basic meeting automation.
• Simple meeting booking without advanced features needed.

Calendly

Calendly is a popular standalone scheduling tool known for its simplicity and fast setup. Although not Salesforce-native, it can still be a viable option—especially if your team is already using it or you need to launch basic online booking quickly. With the help of APIs or third-party tools like Zapier, Calendly can push meeting data into Salesforce and support simple scheduling workflows. So, if you don’t need deep platform integration and just want a lightweight solution, Calendly may still fit the bill.

Pros:

• Easy to adopt and intuitive.
• Affordable price tiers.
• Flexible links for embedding in emails, websites, and outreach tools.
• Supports basic Salesforce integration for routing bookings to campaigns, leads, or opportunities.

Best for:

• Small and mid-size business
• Orgs that doesn’t require deep Salesforce integration in daily workflows

Engageware

Engageware offers robust, enterprise-level scheduling capabilities with tight Salesforce integration. It is commonly adopted by large institutions—especially in finance, higher education, and government—who need detailed control over appointment flows, customer segmentation, and reporting. Engageware emphasizes compliance, branding consistency, and customer self-service.

Pros:

• Highly configurable scheduling rules and workflows.
• Strong customer segmentation and routing logic.
• Handles self-service and agent-assisted scheduling.

Best for:

• Orgs focused on fast lead conversion with low complexity scheduling needs.
• Orgs having internal IT resources to support Salesforce integration options (custom fields, objects, triggers).

Chili Piper

Chili Piper is a scheduling tool built for B2B sales and marketing teams. It focuses on booking meetings—typically right after a form fill or campaign interaction. It routes leads based on ownership, territory, or round-robin rules, and can instantly insert bookings into Salesforce records. Its strength lies in speed, lead qualification, and alignment with revenue operations.

Pros:

• Optimized for speed: meetings can be booked immediately after form submission.
• Strong Salesforce integration with automatic record updates and reporting.
• Supports team-based scheduling and on-behalf booking.

Best For:

• Sales and marketing teams—less suited for customer service or operations.

How to Choose the Right Salesforce Meeting Scheduler

Step 1. Define Your Scheduling Needs

• Who will schedule meetings?
  (e.g. Sales reps, service agents, medical reps, volunteers, executives)
• Who are the invitees?
  (e.g. Customers, partners, patients, internal teams)
• What is the scheduling format?
  (e.g. One-on-one, group meetings, round-robin, pooled availability)
• Do you need to schedule on behalf of others?
  (e.g. Assistants booking for executives, call center agents scheduling for field staff)
• Will meetings need to trigger automated actions?
  (e.g. Lead routing, reminders, follow-ups, record updates in Salesforce)

Step 2. Assess Platform Fit & Capabilities

• Native to Salesforce or integrated
• Key features (e.g. Recurring meetings, real-time scheduling, resource booking, service-based availability)
• Does it align with your data model and objects in Salesforce?
• How flexible is it with customization and workflows?

Step 3. Evaluate Vendor Strength

• Check user reviews and ratings (AppExchange, G2, etc.)
• Industry or use case match
• Support available (chat, email, Salesforce cases)
• Documentation for users and admins

Step 4. Try & Test

• Can you see a live demo or use a free trial?

Choosing the right Salesforce meeting scheduler isn’t just about booking appointments—it’s about creating a seamless, automated flow between teams and customers. Looking to drive more leads and engage customers through online meetings? Try SUMO Scheduler—built on Salesforce from the ground up.

Schedule Easily in Salesforce with SUMO

At SUMO Scheduler, we talk to organizations and businesses every day — and we shape our platform around their actual needs. In this post, we share our insights on key appointment scheduling trends to watch this year — and how they’re already reshaping sales, healthcare, education, retail, and beyond.

Whether you’re a hospital managing patient flow, a university coordinating academic advising, or a sales team pursuing client calls, the way we schedule appointments is changing fast and for the better.

1. AI Scheduling Assistants Are Becoming the Norm

Smart scheduling assistants have been a hot topic for some time. AI scheduling assistants can book appointments based on your availability, time zone, and even user preferences — all within seconds and in a single system. With AI outreach agents, you can now suggest meetings automatically through website chat or email—making it easier to capture high-intent leads.

In healthcare, AI-driven scheduling reduces no-shows and eases the administrative burden. Studies show that 67% of patients prefer self-scheduling via patient portals or apps, which are both fast and easy to use.

With automated reminders and simple rescheduling through email or SMS, your healthcare organization can significantly reduce patient no-shows.

For example, our customer Medtronic decreased appointment wait times while ensuring that clinicians had time for training and development. Cleveland Clinic also allows patients to book appointments directly through its MyChart app, streamlining the scheduling process and improving access to care.

AI chatbots can handle scheduling and answering questions 24/7, providing immediate help to those who are in need. 

Universities are also seeing benefits. Case in point. Using SUMO Scheduler’s AI features, the University of Kentucky now automatically matches students to available tutors based on class subject, availability, and student profile — saving countless hours previously spent on manual coordination.

2. Omni-Channel Scheduling Is Now an Expectation

For customer-facing businesses, easy appointment scheduling is vital for success. Consumers expect to schedule appointments how and when they want — whether it’s online, via SMS, over the phone, or in-app. That’s where omni-channel scheduling comes in.

Retailers, for instance, are offering in-store appointments via website, social media or email campaigns, then confirming them through automated reminders.

Sephora’s makeup appointment booking system lets customers easily schedule in-store beauty sessions with a consultant, automatically matching them with available times and nearby locations.

If you’re looking to encourage foot traffic and boost client’s engagement, retail scheduling software is a perfect way to personalize custom service.

Online appointment scheduling has become a standard in many industries. For instance, 54% of appointment bookings occur during working hours, and 34% of appointments are scheduled online after working hours.

For sales and marketing teams, omni-channel scheduling tools integrated with CRMs (like Salesforce) ensure that no lead is left behind — prospects can book calls instantly from an email or chatbot.

More and more people are booking appointments directly through social media. In fact, over 41% of bookings now come from platforms like Instagram and Facebook. That’s a clear sign: if you’re not offering online booking through your social channels, you’re missing out.

With this in mind, appointment scheduling trends reflect how businesses and customers prefer to communicate today.

3. Cloud-Based Scheduling Is Now Standard

According to the report, Healthcare, Hospitality, and Education are among the leading industries driving adoption of appointment scheduling software — with cloud-based solutions quickly becoming the standard across these sectors. 

Cloud-based software minimizes the initial investment required for implementation. Appointment booking software is not an exception. You can select the feasible solution depending on the nature of your service and budget.

In education, cloud-based systems are enabling advisors and students to connect from anywhere. 

In healthcare, cloud-based scheduling platforms are making it easier for multi-location clinics to share resources and standardize operations. The HIMSS survey revealed that 70% of providers plan to move scheduling fully to the cloud by 2026, citing cost savings and scalability.

4. Capacity-Based Scheduling Helps Balance Demand

Rather than offering unlimited bookings, modern systems are using capacity-based scheduling to avoid staff overloads and optimize service delivery. This means, you can route appointments based on available personnel, location constraints, or equipment. In field sales or field service, you can minimize travel time by assigning appointments to the nearest representative or specialist.

For example, COVID-19 vaccination clinics used capacity-based scheduling to balance demand while adhering to public health guidelines. Now, the same logic is helping healthcare organizations manage flu shot clinics, mental health visits, and recurring check-ins.

In higher education, capacity rules can ensure that popular advising sessions or orientations don’t get overbooked, reducing student wait times and staff frustration.

5. Actionable Scheduling Data Drives Smarter Decisions

Appointment scheduling is no longer just about “Let me know if we can meet.” It’s about getting booked for the right meeting by creating a chain of meaningful interactions between your business and customers. The key to making that happen is data. 

Organizations are now using meeting analytics reports to understand appointment trends, peak times, service gaps, and customer behaviors.

Sales teams, for example, can track no-show rates by rep or region and adjust outreach strategies accordingly. Retail teams can measure in-store consultation success by product category and optimize staffing.

Businesses and organizations using SUMO’s Salesforce-native Scheduler can build dashboards to monitor appointment volume by location or service type, helping forecast demand and staff accordingly — and catching inefficiencies early.

Final Thoughts

Appointment scheduling trends are heading towards intelligent, connected, and flexible tools. Whether it’s AI doing the heavy lifting, cloud infrastructure making everything accessible, or smarter data guiding decisions — scheduling is becoming a strategic advantage across sectors.

If your scheduling process still feels like a patchwork of spreadsheets and emails, 2025 might be the year to rethink it.

SUMO Scheduler supports these workflows natively in Salesforce, giving full visibility into appointment activity across channels.

Schedule Easily in Salesforce with SUMO

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is a new European Union law took effect May 25, 2018. The GDPR gives persons in the EU greater control over their online data and adds new requirements for businesses that handle that data.

Does SUMO Scheduler comply with GDPR?

Yes, SUMO has taken a number of steps to ensure we are able to comply with the GDPR regulations. We have updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, created a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) and made changes to how we store and process data. As an interpretation of the GDPR regulations continues to evolve, we will continue implementing new practices and tools as needed to ensure continued compliance.

Does SUMO Scheduler allow clients to comply with GDPR?

Yes, SUMO has tools to allow customers to comply with the GDPR. This feature allows customers to display their own Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policies. SUMO also provides users with the tools necessary to delete client data upon request, or to provide customers with copies of their data, or to comply with a client’s data portability request. SUMO clients can query all appointment data relating to a particular appointment. Client data deletion requests can be made by emailing support@sumoscheduler.com and including in the request the names of all persons whose data should be deleted.

However, the determination of whether you’re impacted by the GDPR and what steps you must take to comply is ultimately up to you. This includes how you configure and use your SUMO account, the data you choose to collect from your customers, and other issues. Your company is ultimately responsible for upholding your obligations under the GDPR and SUMO Scheduler is not responsible for your lack of compliance or misuse of the software.

How can my organization use SUMO Scheduler in a GDPR-compliant manner?

SUMO customers who are subject to the GDPR will need to make some changes to the way they use our system. Step-by-step instructions about how to use SUMO in a compliant manner can be found here. SUMO users are also responsible for upholding their obligations under our Terms of Service and Data Processing Addendum (DPA).

Before we get down to it, let’s start with a basic explanation of the terms SaaS and Cloud-native.

SaaS (software as a service) is a software distribution model. Companies purchase a subscription to a software application that is hosted or managed in the cloud rather than buying the software outright and installing it on their own hardware. SaaS is one of the three top cloud computing categories, along with IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). SaaS is also referred to as web-based or on-demand software.

A cloud-native application is developed to be used on a particular platform or device. These type of apps are entirely built in the cloud which is why they are also referred to as cloud-native. Non-native apps are built outside the cloud then transferred over into one. They are also known as cloud-enabled applications.

Now let’s work through a few pros and cons to decide what’s so great about a SaaS app being native (cloud-native). There are a few cons to using a native app and here is a list that we think will help inform you about the key points and allow you to decide if a native app is the best choice for your organization.

Pros of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App

User Experience: This is perhaps the thing that native apps do best. The operations are smoother and provide a more intuitive experience for users accustomed to the functionality of a particular platform.

Speed: Native apps are inherently faster. This affects implementation and data retrieval which in turn affects productivity levels. Everything lives within the app itself so there is no dependency on browsers or internet speeds to keep things moving along quickly.

Data Access: Native apps tap into a platform more easily than a non-native app. Since data is retained in one place, there’s no need to have a request leave the platform to retrieve information being housed in another location outside the platform.

Scale: By being built in the cloud from the ground up, a native app doesn’t have any hardware limitations. This allows for continuous app development which means the application is more scalable, more adaptable to your business’ needs. The savings on hardware and software maintenance can also be significant.

For example, SUMO Scheduler is an online appointment scheduler built native on the Salesforce platform. This means the application can easily be implemented into an organization’s Salesforce org. Being a native application, SUMO allows users to interact with Salesforce’s many features and affords the same security parameters. It creates a seamless Salesforce experience that is highly customizable to your organization’s requirements and business processes.

Cons of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App

Platform: Native apps only live on the platform they are designed for and moving information between platforms requires integration.

Cost: There certainly are native apps that are free to install and use. However, most of these apps are not capable of supporting an enterprise level organization. Technical support is also not a given with even documentation not being available to reference. The other potential cost could be in the form of licenses and other fees that may be associated with implementation.

The cons are certainly shorter than the pros list but this does not mean the cons are not worth considering. Having the right personnel in place within your company to manage the app from implementation to daily use can help mitigate any potential issues. As for the costs involved, an enterprise-level application is generally an investment that provides tangible returns quite readily within a short period of time.

If you are operating a department within a large enterprise or foresee a significant growth spurt coming down the road for your area of the business, then a native application may be the best choice. It delivers a more cost-effective alternative to a traditional software purchase, allows your organization to respond to marketplace changes and capture new business opportunities much more quickly.

Scheduling appointments are common tasks in any organization but an efficient method of managing this process is essential for profitability and productivity. While traditional methods have evolved over time, they do present many drawbacks. Automated systems have innovated to address those issues, and go a step beyond in providing scheduling solutions that can easily improve upon current practices. While investing in a new application or platform can be a cause for concern, the risks experienced when not implementing such solutions are far greater.

My staff can schedule their own appointments.

The average sales rep spent up to 4 hours per day sending email, following up on calls, sending faxes, and other admin which can be reduced using templates and automation. Source: Insidesales

Scheduling an appointment is simple, right? Much as you’d like to believe otherwise, scheduling an appointment is cumbersome and typically takes multiple phone conversations and/or email exchanges before one is finalized. It’s not always the best use of your staff’s time either. Your people could be focusing on closing deals, providing support or services, and adding to the organization’s bottom line, not taking away from it. With appointment automation scheduling, steps are set in motion for reminders heading out prior to appointment, a ready history is captured for any follow-ups and reports can be generated for management or available documents for reference without the drudgery of scrolling through past correspondence. A lot of time can be saved with an appointment scheduling application, and you will also observe monetary savings since staff is now more involved in their primary responsibilities.

We’re winning customers without it.

There is a 10x drop in lead qualification when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond, and a 400% decrease when you respond within 10 minutes versus 5 minutes. Source: Harvard Business Review

No deal ever came from an unqualified appointment. Scheduling software can help your conversion rates, customer satisfaction and churn. When you trade manual processes for automated scheduling, you can deliver a better customer experience. Greater flexibility and convenience is a given since automated scheduling can be available on your lead or customer’s schedule, not just during your business hours. When you make it a part of your sales campaigns, it can also speed up your sales cycle. Appointment requests are delivered immediately to your calendar, and the quality of the lead is highly increased. Automating scheduling reduces errors like double-bookings and no-shows, ultimately cutting down on all the back and forth of calls and emails that a traditional appointment scheduling method entails.

Our data may not be secure with an external application.

40% of salespeople still use informal means such as Microsoft Excel or Outlook to store its lead and customer data. Source: Hubspot

Manual scheduling cannot provide the sense of professionalism and a greater guarantee of security like an automated appointment scheduling application. Go with a native application and you can have the added benefit of your data staying within the same scheduling system, retained in one place for easy retrieval time and again. No client wants to work with an enterprise that has lost, or worse, mistakenly shared, information that is intended solely for the parties involved.

There are many appointment scheduling application vendors in the market and each has a different purpose/ value proposition. If you are looking to engage a service, the first step is to identify your objective and qualification criteria. Do your research on scheduling solutions, take the time to ask a lot of questions, and choose the scheduling system that best fits your organization’s particular needs. You will find one that can address the workload you demand of it, will integrate with your current software and processes, and can be easily navigated for your industry, staff and clients.

The tangible and non-tangible return on your organization’s investment in an appointment scheduling application can be immediately measured. You won’t be disappointed by the outcome.

SUMO is the only online scheduling solution built 100% native on the Salesforce^® platform, which we firmly believe has serious advantages you should consider. This article aims to outline:

• What is a native, false native, and non-native application?
• What are the risks of a solution that is not native?
• What are the benefits of native?

Native

This means the app runs on the same the platform you are using. You have access to a data warehouse in the cloud that you can access with business intelligence software running as a service. It’s a plug and play set-up so no additional work or expense is required, outside of the native setup.

False Native

This is why you really need to dig into the back-end. There are applications that can be labeled native but are actually not built 100% native on the Salesforce^® platform. With a false native application, there’s only a percentage of the app you are using to access your data that is claiming to be built native on a platform. In this scenario, native is a misleading label.

Non-Native

Your data gets shipped in and out your Salesforce^® org to your non-native solution as it lives outside of the Salesforce® platform. There is also additional setup and assembly required in a non-native solution.

Risks of False-Native -and- Non-Native Apps

There are a number of risks you inherit when adopting a false-native or non-native scheduling solution. You should investigate the following:

1. Data Privacy, Security, & Speed Risk

Is your data 100% stored, processed, administrated, and accessed in Salesforce^®?
A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution means your data does NOT fully live in Salesforce®. This type of app provides a user interface in Salesforce, but your data may be stored, processed, administrated, and / or accessed in another system. This poses a data privacy, data security, and data speed risk.

2. Compliance Risk

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution means your security is compromised and the solution does not inherit the Salesforce^® platform comprehensive privacy and security assessments and certifications performed by multiple third parties.

3. Administration Risk

Can your Salesforce^® Administrator operate 100% of the necessary configurations from within Salesforce^®?

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution requires you to make some configurations in Salesforce^® and login to another system to make other configurations, so now your staff must manage the application in two places. This also poses a security risk, since the application does not rely on Salesforce user provisioning, profile, and sharing controls. Worse yet, some require you to file a case to make configuration changes and you can not even make them yourself.

4. User Adoption Risk

Does the user interface look exactly like Salesforce^®?

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution often means the application is embedded inside of Salesforce^®, but does not have the same Salesforce^® Classic or Lightning look and feel, which confused the users, hurting user adoption.

Benefits of Native

Now that you understand the risks in adopting a false-native or non-native solution, it’s easy to understand the benefits of using a truly Salesforce^® NATIVE application:

1. Your data is SECURE.

A native app has a single data location: the Salesforce^® cloud. The Salesforce^® platform employs bank grade security with SAS70 compliance. Sharing one location with Salesforce^® means you have full control to ensure your customer info and appointment data reside in the cloud. The need to connect to a 3rd party API to access your data is eliminated, so data loss between databases is avoided. Native applications use the same Salesforce security model, eliminating the need to manage multiple security policies and procedures across enterprise systems.

2. Your data is PRIVATE.

Since your data resides in one database (Salesforce^®), your data is private and you have full control of it. You may learn more about how SUMO offers GDPR Compliance Tools here.

3. Accessing your data is lightning FAST.

This single data source solution also helps increase the speed of accessing data or generating reports because there is no delay from the data making trips back and forth from the database.

4. Your data is always up and running.

Salesforce® has invested over a $100,000,000 into their cloud infrastructure, making it geographically distributed, monitored 24/7, and ultimately enabling true 99.9% uptime. As a native salesforce platform application, our applications (and your data) inherit all the benefits of the considerable investments made by salesforce.com in infrastructure, data management, controls, security and certifications including Truste and ISO 27001.

5. A native app leverages your investment in Salesforce^®.

Installing updates and upgrades is minimal, because they are all completed in one place, instantly available through a native application. It’s easy to integrate them as they are all built on Salesforce^®.

6. Administration is immediate.

Your Salesforce Administrator or IT Department can easily administrate a native solution, since all of the user and application settings are in Salesforce.

7. User adoption is assured.

Your new software investment is worthless if the users do not adopt it. A native solution should run 100% inside the Salesforce solutions (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Console, Communities, and more) and looks exactly like Salesforce, so user adoption is not a risk.

In closing, the above key points, along with the structure of the application, are important things to consider as you look for tools to help add value to your organization or your Salesforce^® investment.