Celebrating G2’s AI Monty: A Year of Growth & Innovation

Just over a month ago, Monty celebrated his first birthday, marking a year since G2’s chatbot emerged as the world’s first AI-powered software recommender. This milestone provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on Monty's remarkable growth journey since April 2023, driven by our unwavering commitment to enhancing his capabilities and enriching the G2 experience for our global community of software buyers, sellers, and investors.

If you haven’t been following along to date, no worries. Here, you’ll learn all of the skill sets Monty has added to his toolbelt that are available to G2 users today. Let's reflect on Monty’s 1-year journey and highlight the pivotal milestones that have shaped his growth:

Birth of Monty

April 2023:  Software Recommender Monty

We started working with AI with a simple problem —  G2 has always been great if you already have some idea of what you’re looking for, but what if you’re a buyer and you don’t know exactly where to start your software buying journey? How can we leverage conversational AI to help streamline that experience? 

We launched Monty — the world’s first AI-powered B2B software recommendation assistant — to help buyers instantly sort through the 2,000+ categories and 160,000+ products and services in the G2 catalog to find their next best software based on their unique requirements. Buyers are chatting away – as of this month, Monty is having upwards of 6,000 conversations each week!

Monty’s Growth

May 2023: Enhancements to Software Recommender Monty

Integration of G2 widgets such as My Lists and G2 Grid®, alongside enhancements like vector embeddings and interactive chat features, marked a significant leap forward in Monty's capabilities.

July 2023: Support Monty

With the introduction of Support Monty, G2 vendors and reviewers gained access to round-the-clock assistance: Monty helps vendors optimize their G2 profiles directly in my.G2 and assists reviewers with submissions and moderation status updates.

March 2024: Monty for Market Intelligence and Data Solutions

For competitive intelligence analysts, swiftly accessing insights on customer sentiment about their products and competitors is crucial. However, doing so efficiently can be challenging. 

Monty stepped into an exciting new job helping G2 customers answer their most pressing go-to-market (GTM) questions. Monty streamlines the discovery process by providing granular analysis about product feature sets and customer sentiment, straight from G2 user reviews. 

Around the same time, Monty also took on a role providing G2 Data Solutions customers with  AI-generated market insights. This gives investors an interactive experience to help them understand trends across software categories, vendors, and products, as well as buyer engagement and customer sentiment – all from one software expert.

Monty's Graduation

May 2024: Monty for Sales
There’s only so much information that can fit on a single G2 profile page. As a buyer, how valuable would it be if you could have your detailed product questions answered as you’re researching products and comparing them on G2? And as a seller, how great would it be if you could have a sales representative ready to answer those questions 24/7? 

In May 2024, we launched Monty for Sales, which enables G2 customers to create their own version of Monty to act as an AI SDR. Using a vendor’s Sales and Marketing content, Monty autonomously sells a vendor’s software directly from their G2 profile (and even their own website!) by educating high-intent buyers and pushing them down the funnel. 

Our customers are already loving Monty’s new role, and have reported millions of dollars in pipeline generated, hundreds of sales prospecting hours saved monthly, and nearly 30% of chats resulting  in a conversion.

Monty's Future

In our relentless pursuit of excellence in AI, we're thrilled to announce several game-changing improvements coming soon as Monty spreads its wings to new and exciting ventures:

• Enhanced Monty Chat Quality: We're constantly iterating on Monty's chat interface and using the most cutting-edge AI models available, ensuring smoother interactions and faster resolution of queries.
• Contextual Intelligence: By knowing where a user is on G2, Monty will be able to anticipate a user’s needs and provide tailored recommendations based on their G2 buying history.
• Seamless Bot Switching: Buyers chatting with Software Recommender Monty can transfer their chat to Monty for Sales to have their detailed questions answered and take next steps.
• Integrated Calendars: Monty for Sales will soon support direct integration with meeting schedulers, enabling buyers to immediately book a demo with the right human rep at the right time.
• Voice Chat: With the recent advancement of multi-modal AI models, such as GPT-4o, we’re going to be testing enabling voice chat for conversations with Monty.

Gratitude for Our Resilient Labs Team Driving Monty’s Innovation Forward

As we celebrate Monty's first year of growth, I’m grateful for the support of our community and the dedication of our G2 Labs Team. Together, we've paved the way for new innovation in AI, and we're excited to continue pushing boundaries and unlocking new possibilities with Monty in the years to come.

If you haven’t chatted with Monty already to help you discover software for your business (or wish to chat again), you can start a new conversation directly from the G2 homepage.

We’ll have more to share shortly! Stay tuned.