Gong Call Spotlight uses AI to summarize customer calls

Gong, the nine-year-old startup focused on making technology that streamlines workflows for revenue teams across sectors, made news earlier this summer by introducing new generative AI powered features to its customer conversation analysis platform, including gen AI messaging suggestions.

Now, it’s going a step further: the company today announced exclusively with VentureBeat that it is introducing a new feature, Call Spotlight, accessible for all of its 4,000 platform customers globally and counting at no extra charge.

The new AI-driven tool (powered by a mix of proprietary Gong AI models and GPT-4 in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service) automatically transcribes and analyzes a revenue team member’s conversation with a customer over video call, audio call, mobile or desktop, even emails and text correspondence — any communications the revenue team member wants — and auto-generates a summary and key points for the revenue team to act on.

Increased AI productivity with a human touch

For Gong’s largely business-to-business (B2B) focused clients, who spend lots of time prospecting customers of their own and managing customer relationships through direct correspondence, the tool is poised to offer increased productivity and efficienc.

At the same time, Gong hopes it allows revenue teams and salespeople even more time to forge and maintain the unique customer relationships that are key to landing business.

“You become more efficient” using Call Spotlight, said Gong chief product officer and co-founder Eilon Reshef, in a video call with VentureBeat. “You don’t need to review the whole text. You don’t need to listen to the whole call. You don’t need to take notes. You don’t need to do anything manually.”

Just enable Call Spotlight through Gong’s platform — there are modes that will prompt the other parties in any given call to agree to being recorded and analyzed by Gong’s AI — and it will take care of it for you.

Unparalleled accuracy

Gong says that Call Spotlight is unparalleled in its accuracy, offering sales insights that are twice as reliable as generic solutions available on the market such as other consumer large language models (LLMs), having been trained on billions of sales interactions that Gong sourced from customers.

“What’s unique about Gong is that because we train the system based on revenue conversations, we get much more accurate results,” Reshef told VentureBeat.

This includes a more accurate AI interpreter of specific company and product names — something other auto-transcription AI services often struggle to handle, in VentureBeat’s testing, defaulting to generic words instead of trademarks.

Ask the AI anything

One of Call Spotlight’s standout features is its unique “Ask Anything” function—the first of its kind tailored specifically for sales. Think of it as your personal sales coach, ready to answer any question you throw at it.

Whether it’s seeking guidance on sealing a deal or understanding why a particular conversation matters to a regional account executive, Ask Anything delivers precise, context-rich advice.

For instance, after a call, a sales rep might wonder, “What can I do to up my game for closing this deal?” Ask Anything churns out actionable steps based on its deep learning of a specific customer interaction, with context pulled from Gong’s extensive sales data.

Similarly, if a manager is keen to know whether competitors were name-dropped during a conversation, the tool can sift through the call details and flag any potential threats, allowing for targeted coaching strategies.

Call Spotlight’s key features

In addition to the Ask Anything feature, Call Spotlight also includes:

• Highlights: This feature boils down the crux of a conversation into easy-to-digest bullet points and suggests next steps. It’s like a cheat sheet for your sales calls, built on Gong’s in-house AI models.
• Outline: Imagine having your call topics neatly filed and categorized, almost like chapters in a book. It automatically organizes topics discussed in a call to make it easier for the revenue team member or the entire team to grasp the customer’s needs and concerns.
• Call Briefs: These are condensed summaries of conversations that Gong says allows reps and managers to catch up on previous talks up to 80% faster.
• Automated CRM Updates: In an age where time is money, automated CRM entries save reps from the drudgery of manual data entry, allowing them to focus on what they do best—selling.

Gong customers can also share any of these AI-generated products with their colleagues and managers as needed, and also push data to their customer relationship management (CRM) software of choice for record keeping — or not. It’s all up to the customer to decide what to do with their gen AI work products.

Security remains paramount

Furthermore, Gong knows that security is top-of-mind for many of its customers, and seeks to reassure them that safeguarding their data is of paramount importance while introducing all of these new generative AI features.

“One of the critical elements for us is security,” said Reshef. “We have some of the Fortune top 50 companies as customers, and they are very concerned about security and unlikely to allow us to sell their data outside the company. So we hire Gong employees and do everything in house.”

Gong noted that it has been recording calls since 2016, and is GDPR compliant and has stayed up-to-date on all relevant regulations in the years since.

By marrying highly accurate, context-specific advice with a range of other features and security, Gong hopes that Call Spotlight will be a game-changer for the revenue teams that try it out.