AI has evolved from being a mere feature to becoming the driving force behind more intelligent pipelines, quicker decision-making, and enhanced customer relationships.

Today, CRM platforms are in competition over how extensively they incorporate AI into every interaction, offering everything from predictive insights to automated workflows.

While both Zoho CRM and Clarify offer intelligent sales assistance, the depth of their AI capabilities, user-friendliness, and overall business impact differ greatly. For teams prioritizing simplicity over complexity and avoiding cluttered dashboards, folk provides robust AI integration that ensures timely follow-ups and insightful analytics from your calls and emails. It represents the pinnacle of AI utilization within a CRM.

Why Does AI Integration Matter?

AI revolutionizes CRMs by transforming them from static databases into proactive sales assistants. Rather than waiting for representatives to sift through contacts or compose follow-up messages, AI automates essential actions, anticipates outcomes, and enriches data on the spot.

• Faster decisions. AI identifies which leads to prioritize based on intent signals and deal velocity.
• Smarter outreach. Tools can recommend message templates, optimal timing, and even assess tone or sentiment.
• Cleaner data. Eliminate manual data entry; AI automatically fills in gaps and flags duplicates or outdated records.
• Sales forecasting. Predictive analytics enable teams to identify pipeline risks proactively.
• B2B data enrichment. AI swiftly gathers information such as 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 AI seamlessly integrated into a CRM, sales representatives can devote less time to administrative tasks and focus more on selling—this distinction is what elevates a CRM from good to truly revenue-generating!

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho’s Zia is an integrated AI assistant that allows you to get instant CRM updates through chat or voice. You can request reports, make record edits, or create tasks without navigating complex menus. Zia provides dynamic predictions for deal outcomes, detects anomalies, and forecasts churn to keep your sales pipeline robust. It enriches customer records from email signatures, flags competitor mentions in real-time, and suggests workflow automation based on team habits. With the custom Prediction Builder, you can easily create personalized AI models for any module without needing coding skills.

What is Clarify?

Clarify is an autonomous AI-driven CRM designed to serve as 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. Its AI analyzes conversations to highlight key points, identify risks, and outline next steps, ensuring that representatives always know their next move. Clarify can draft follow-up emails, summarize calls, and recommend actions based on real-time context, allowing teams to focus more on selling while the AI manages administrative tasks and keeps the CRM up-to-date.

Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Clarify

AI Follow-ups

Zia utilizes Workflow Rules to streamline your follow-up tasks. After setting triggers like deal stage changes or task completions, Zia monitors which follow-up actions yield the best results and can automatically create tasks or send notifications when it's time to reconnect. Additionally, Zia’s “Best Time to Contact” feature analyzes past interactions to recommend the ideal moment for your call or email. For more complex branching beyond the built-in workflows, you can integrate with Zoho Flow or Zapier.

Clarify can draft follow-up messages based on recent meetings and email exchanges related to a contact or deal. The agent pulls from information already captured in the recap, such as dates, next steps, and stakeholders, to pre-fill the message. Users can review, modify, and send directly from the CRM, avoiding the hassle of starting from a blank email. Follow-ups are logged on the timeline, ensuring teams maintain a traceable record of what was sent and when.

Automated Contact Enrichment

Zoho’s native Zia Data Enrichment seamlessly fills in details like company size, industry, key contacts, and financial data by matching your leads against public records. For firmographics or technographics not covered by Zia, consider installing marketplace extensions such as Clearbit or InsideView—once integrated, they automatically populate your selected fields in real time, eliminating the need for manual lookups or CSV imports.

Clarify extracts context from connected calendars, mailboxes, and meetings to ensure contact and company records remain current. When new individuals surface in calls or email threads, the system automatically creates or updates profiles with standardized names, roles, and associations. This process aims to minimize manual data entry while maintaining reasonably accurate contact information. Moreover, all proposed changes are logged on the record timeline, allowing teams to track how a profile has evolved over time.

Smart Fields

With Zia for Emails, you can easily prompt Zia to draft or refine your messages—covering subject lines, body copy, and even tone adjustments—and it will generate polished email snippets in seconds. You can save these snippets as templates and arrange them into a sequence using Zoho’s workflow rules. For complete automation, connect Zia-generated templates to Zoho Flow to trigger each step based on opens, clicks, or field updates.

Clarify enhances this experience with AI field suggestions, ensuring that key CRM fields align with conversations. When calls or emails reference budgets, dates, or new stakeholders, the system can recommend updates to the relevant properties, minimizing the need for manual edits. Users can review and modify these suggestions before finalizing them, with an audit trail that details what changed and why. This approach makes “smart” fields in Clarify less about custom logic and more about leveraging call and email context to maintain up-to-date core data.

AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation

With Zia for Emails, all you need to do is prompt Zia to draft or refine your message—whether it's subject lines, body copy, or tone adjustments—and it quickly delivers polished email snippets within seconds. You can save these as templates and string them into a sequence using Zoho’s workflow rules. For complete automation, connect Zia-generated templates to Zoho Flow to trigger each step based on opens, clicks, or field updates.

Clarify also offers AI email drafting, enabling users to compose and send follow-ups, introductions, or updates directly from the CRM. Drafts are generated based on existing deal and contact contexts, minimizing the need for copy-pasting from notes and timelines. Bulk or multi-recipient sending is available, allowing teams to maintain a consistent structure while incorporating a degree of personalization. Emails sent from Clarify are tracked within the record, creating a unified history of messages throughout the pipeline.

Next Best Action

Zia’s Next Best Experience widget evaluates deal health, engagement signals, and historical win patterns to suggest your most impactful next steps—whether it’s a reminder for a call, sharing a relevant PDF, or sending a personalized follow-up. These recommendations are conveniently displayed within your CRM and can be integrated into workflows, ensuring reps always know their next move.

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

folk CRM: The Ultimate AI CRM

folk serves as the sales assistant teams have longed for. This straightforward, integrated, and proactive CRM handles the tedious tasks, allowing sales reps to concentrate on nurturing genuine relationships. With a 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk is recognized as one of the most reliable AI-powered CRMs for streamlined teams.

Crafted for startups, agencies, and sales teams, folk makes AI accessible and manageable rather than overwhelming.

Conclusion

Both Zoho CRM and Clarify excel in their AI-driven capabilities, with Zoho offering personalized predictions and automated data enrichment, while Clarify focuses on seamless note-taking and actionable insights from conversations. However, folk stands out as a remarkable alternative, providing an intuitive interface and robust AI features like proactive follow-up reminders and intelligent data extraction from calls and emails. Tailored for teams that desire simplicity and efficiency, folk empowers users to nurture genuine relationships without the clutter.

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