With the release of Coda 4.0 on Wednesday, Coda has joined the parade of productivity software vendors embedding generative AI features in their products.
Part of the Coda app’s new release, the Coda AI has three main components:
A “knowledge assistant” chatbot that responds in natural language to user queries, with the ability to access data from Coda docs and data made available from third-party app integrations, from calendars to sales data.
A writing assistant that can generate drafts of content such as emails or blog posts — a feature that is fast becoming table stakes in productivity applications.
“It’s kind of the new spell check,” said Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra. “It would be weird not to have it.”
A “task assistant,” where the Coda AI is applied to workflow automations, essentially allowing it to “take action in the world,” said Mehrotra. For example, a user that has synced Salesforce data could set up a workflow that, subject to a trigger action, automatically pulls in customer data, generates an email, and then sends it to recipients.
Coda
Coda AI can automate user tasks.
Coda launched its all-in-one productivity app — which combines elements of documents, spreadsheets, work management, and customer relationship management — in 2019. It’s now used by 40,000 customers, including at firms such as Uber, DoorDash, and The New York Times.
Now, amid an office software market increasingly crowded with generative AI features, Mehrotra believes Coda has some important points of difference.
One, he said, lies in the Coda’s connectivity to a variety of different data sources, such Salesforce CRM data. This is done in a “permission-compliant” way that Mehrotra claims will ensure the AI has access to only the information that users have pulled into a Coda doc, rather than training on large corporate data sets.
“That’s a very hard thing to do in a generic enterprise AI solution. I don’t think anybody has done a good job of that yet,” he said.
Another differentiator has been less expected, said Mehrotra. Unlike many others in the market, Coda is adding generative AI features to its application at no extra cost to those on paid subscriptions — a departure from the trend toward charging additional fees for access to generative AI.
“When we started designing this, we didn’t think pricing would be a big differentiator, but it’s turning out to be,” he said.
The pricing question
The Coda AI is available on all its paid products — Pro, Team, and Enterprise — and free tier users will be given “credits” to try out the AI features at no cost. This bucks the trend somewhat. Generative AI is a new and potentially transformative technology, but it remains to be seen how much customers are willing to pay for access to these features and what returns they will see on their investment.
Some vendors are pitching their generative AI assistants as premium features, with pricing…
2023-10-07 04:24:03
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn