Drift goes Bionic

In the run up to their recent product announcements, Drift claimed that they were going to revolutionise B2B marketing. They haven't quite lived up to that claim, but they have shown how important Generative AI is to the future of conversation marketing.

Drift like to claim they invented conversational marketing. They certainly pioneered the use of chatbots within B2B, taking the personalisation capabilities seen within B2C websites and applying them to B2B buying journeys. In the years since then, they've taken those conversational capabilities beyond chatbots into email and landing page scenarios. At the same time, many Drift implementations have struggled to prove ROI amid internal pressure to adopt a cheaper all-in-one chat solution that can be used by support or e-commerce teams, as well as marketing teams. Drift is a high-end solution and comes with a price tag to match.

The main problem with Drift is that many companies are still using it to create very basic chatbot experiences, that appear very superficial to end users accustomed to in-depth support or e-commerce use cases for chat. It's rarely been a solution that customers can use to enter arbitrary questions and expect to get a relevant answer. All too often, it's used as an alternative to web forms, particularly in situations where marketers want to pre-qualify website visitors for relevance before collecting their personal information. It's pretty good at that, but can be used for much more.