Agent AI is looking to automate more of the customer service process. To do that, it’s built its own customer relationship management product, as well as AI tools that sit on top — and now it’s making the CRM part available for free.

While giant software businesses have been built around CRM, CEO Fred Hsu said the market has changed, with the software becoming less differentiated and more commoditized.

He’s not saying that Agent AI’s CRM software — which allows businesses to save customer data, manage different communication channels and visualize customer interactions — isn’t good. But in his view, his company’s advantage will be on the AI side (it’s in the name, after all). And those AI products work best when they have lots of data to work with.

“By making our commodity software available for free, it’s a no cost, no risk way to make it really easy to onboard that customer data,” Hsu said.

Specifically, Agent AI’s Co-Pilot and Auto-Pilot services both draw on data about past interactions, the company knowledge base and more.

Co-Pilot suggests responses to customer questions and allows team members to accept those responses with just one click, while Auto-Pilot moves closer to full automation, sending responses to routine questions without any human intervention. Agent AI says Auto-Pilot can answer 50 to 80 percent of routine customer service inquiries.

Hsu also noted that Agent AI isn’t charging a standard software-as-a-service subscription fee. Instead, customers pay $1 per automated conversation, which he argued makes AI accessible to a wider range of businesses.

“Part of the problem and maybe some of the opportunity is that it’s been very binary — you have AI or you don’t,” he said. “It’s cost and timing prohibitive. … I haven’t seen realistic, usable models for these [businesses] who just want rapid fire, accurate, high quality converstaions.”

Also worth noting: While Agent AI is using free CRM as a way to bring businesses and their data on-board, Hsu said its AI technology also integrates with other CRM services through APIs.