AI has evolved beyond a mere feature; it now serves as the driving force behind more intelligent pipelines, quicker decision-making, and enhanced customer relationships.

From predictive analytics to automated workflows, CRM platforms are increasingly competing on the extent to which they integrate AI into every interaction.

While both Insightly and Clarify offer intelligent sales assistance, their levels of AI integration, user-friendliness, and business impact differ significantly. For teams prioritizing simplicity over complexity and cluttered dashboards, folk provides seamless AI integration that enables timely follow-ups and insightful analysis of calls and emails, making it the most potent application of AI within a CRM.

Why AI Integration Matters?

AI revolutionizes CRMs, transforming them from passive databases into proactive sales assistants. Rather than waiting for representatives to sift through contacts or draft follow-up messages, AI automates crucial tasks, anticipates outcomes, and instantly enriches data.

• Faster decisions: AI identifies which leads to prioritize based on intent signals and deal velocity.
• Smarter outreach: Tools recommend message templates, optimal timing, and even analyze tone or sentiment.
• Cleaner data: Eliminate manual entry as AI fills in missing information and flags duplicates or outdated records.
• Sales forecasting: Predictive models enable teams to identify pipeline risks before they arise.
• B2B data enrichment: AI rapidly gathers company size, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, and contact details to complete lead records.
• AI-powered sequences: Personalized cold emails are automatically generated and scheduled based on deal stage, persona, or interaction history.

With deep AI integration in a CRM, representatives can spend less time on administrative tasks and focus more on selling, distinguishing a good CRM from one that genuinely boosts revenue!

What is Insightly?

Insightly’s AI roadmap integrates generative assistance throughout marketing, sales, and service. In the Marketing realm, the AI assistant crafts and enhances email and landing-page content, complete with A/B testing variations. CRM users can generate AI-designed email replies, summarize lengthy ticket threads, and articulate calculated-field formulas in straightforward language to auto-generate code. Additionally, the AI-driven business card scanning on mobile enhances accuracy and contact capturing. The aim is to ensure that every aspect of your CRM feels conversational rather than cumbersome.

What is Clarify?

Clarify serves as an AI-powered, autonomous CRM designed to function like a smart copilot for sales teams and founders. It automatically captures meetings and calls, converting them into structured notes while updating contacts, deals, and pipelines without any manual data entry. The AI analyzes conversations to highlight key points, potential risks, and next steps, ensuring that representatives always know their next actions. Clarify can draft follow-up emails, summarize calls, and suggest actions based on real-time context, empowering teams to focus more on selling while the AI manages administrative tasks and keeps the CRM consistently updated.

Feature comparison of Insightly and Clarify

AI Follow-ups

Insightly’s AI Assistant analyzes your activity feed and email threads for potential follow-up cues. When it identifies phrases like “let’s touch base next week,” it recommends a task or a draft reply with a subject line and an opening sentence. You have the flexibility to modify the timing and content before finalizing. For conditional actions—such as “if no reply in three days, send a reminder”—integrate these suggestions into Insightly’s Workflow Automation.

Clarify can create follow-up drafts based on recent meetings and email exchanges linked to a contact or deal. The agent utilizes information already captured in the recap, including dates, next steps, and key stakeholders, to pre-fill the message. Users can review, modify, and send directly from the CRM, eliminating the need to start from scratch. Follow-ups are recorded on the timeline, allowing teams to maintain a traceable log of what was sent and when.

Automated Contact Enrichment

Whenever a new lead record is created, Insightly’s AI-driven business card scanner, along with its integrated data partners, automatically retrieves profile details—such as name, title, company, email, phone number, and social links—from public sources. To enhance firmographics or technographics, you can integrate AppConnect enrichers like Seamless.AI or Clearbit, ensuring that every contact is updated in real time.

Clarify extracts context from connected calendars, mailboxes, and meetings to keep contact and company records current. When new individuals are identified in calls or email threads, the system automatically creates or updates records, standardizing names, roles, and associations. This process aims to minimize manual data entry while maintaining reasonably accurate contact information. All proposed changes are documented on the record timeline, allowing teams to track the evolution of a profile over time.

Smart Fields

Simply provide Insightly’s AI Assistant with a prompt like “three-step outreach to marketing directors” or “post-demo follow-up,” and it will generate complete email sequences—including subject lines, body text, and sending schedules—in mere seconds. You can save these sequences as templates and launch them through Campaigns or Workflow Automation, ensuring that each step activates based on opens, clicks, or stage changes.

Clarify enhances user experience with AI field suggestions that maintain alignment between crucial CRM fields and conversation content. When calls or emails reference budgets, dates, or new stakeholders, the system can suggest updates to the relevant properties, moving beyond manual edits. Users have the option to review or modify these suggestions prior to implementation, complete with an audit trail detailing what changes were made and why. This shift makes “smart” fields in Clarify less about custom logic and more about leveraging call and email context to keep essential data up-to-date.

AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation

With Insightly's AI Assistant, simply provide a prompt like “three-step outreach to marketing directors” or “post-demo follow-up,” and it will quickly generate complete email sequences—including subject lines, body copy, and send cadences—in just seconds. You can save these sequences as templates and deploy them through Campaigns or Workflow Automation, ensuring that each step activates based on opens, clicks, or stage changes.

Clarify also features AI-driven email drafting, enabling users to create and send follow-ups, introductions, or updates directly from within the CRM. Drafts are tailored using the existing context of deals and contacts, minimizing the need for copy-pasting from notes and timelines. Teams can send emails in bulk or to multiple recipients while maintaining a degree of personalization. Each email sent from Clarify is tracked in the record, offering a comprehensive history of messages throughout the pipeline.

Next Best Action

Insightly’s predictive analytics engine analyzes deal health, engagement signals, and historical win patterns to suggest the most impactful next steps—whether it’s a call reminder, sharing personalized content, or sending a proposal. These recommendations are displayed in your pipeline view or as task prompts, and they can be integrated into workflows to guide your team throughout every phase.

Clarify’s agent tracks meetings, emails, and pipeline data to highlight suggested actions, such as sending follow-ups, updating close dates, or creating tasks. These prompts are readily available in the workspace, allowing sellers to determine the next course of action without the need to manually review every deal. Features like automatic task creation, nudges for stale deals, and deal detection approvals enhance this “next step” guidance. Additionally, Clarify maintains an audit trail of accepted or rejected suggestions, enabling teams to fine-tune their reliance on these recommendations.

folk CRM: The Best AI CRM

folk acts as the sales assistant that teams have always desired. It's a straightforward, integrated, and proactive CRM that handles the tedious tasks—allowing sales representatives to concentrate on nurturing genuine relationships. With a 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk stands out as one of the most reliable AI-driven CRMs for lean teams.

Tailored for startups, agencies, and sales teams, folk makes AI accessible without being overwhelming.

Extract Intel from Calls and Emails

Among Folk's standout features is its AI-driven call transcript analysis, designed to help sales and investment teams glean critical insights from recorded discussions. By integrating with dialers like Ringover, Aircall, or call recording tools such as Grain for Google Meet, users can seamlessly import transcripts into Folk. From there, they can utilize Magic Fields, an embedded AI feature that allows you to create prompts for extracting specific information from transcripts. For instance, sales teams can automatically extract details like contract value, user count, decision-makers, budget, or next steps—eliminating the need for manual note-taking. Investment teams can obtain insights on founder backgrounds, fundraising stages, or what a startup seeks. These fields are fully customizable: simply write a prompt, map it to the transcript, and let Folk's AI handle the rest. This results in a structured, searchable CRM enriched with valuable data from your calls—enhancing the efficiency of follow-ups, qualification, and reporting.

AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders

folk's AI Follow-Up feature ensures that no opportunity is overlooked. Built directly into the platform, this intelligent assistant scrutinizes your email exchanges to recognize when a follow-up is necessary. For example, if you’ve posed a question in an email and the lead hasn’t responded, Folk will automatically identify this and prompt you to follow up at the optimal time.

Moreover, this feature also functions in reverse—bringing to light leads you might have neglected or conversations that have grown cold. By reviewing past interactions, Folk assists you in prioritizing the right contacts to re-engage and advance deals. This intelligent, contextual follow-up system saves time, minimizes manual tracking, and enhances your chances of closing more deals.

AI Features in folk CRM Summary

• Suggested Actions: Receive proactive reminders and AI-driven suggestions based on recent activities or deal stages.
• Extract Intel from Calls: Use AI to pull next steps, decision-makers, your leads' budget, and all necessary information.
• AI-Generated Messages: Save time with context-aware outreach recommendations tailored to each contact.
• Duplicate Management: AI identifies duplicates and organizes messy contact lists to keep your CRM tidy.

folk starts at a competitive $20 per user per month, complete with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required!

Conclusion

In this analysis, we explored two prominent CRMs: Insightly, which focuses on generative AI for marketing and sales content enhancement, and Clarify, designed as a smart copilot for autonomous sales processes. While both provide valuable AI capabilities, folk stands out as an exceptional alternative. Offering streamlined features such as AI-driven follow-up reminders and call transcript analysis, folk enables teams to automate tedious tasks while fostering genuine customer relationships—all at an accessible price point.

Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.