G2 Data Solutions Analysis: The Impact of AI Features on Software Vendors’ Customer Interest & Satisfaction

It’s no secret that AI technology is booming, especially since the launch of ChatGPT. As of Q2 2023, equity funding for generative AI startups topped $14.1B across 86 deals. 

As the world’s largest software marketplace, G2 has a direct lens into what’s happening across the software landscape. Based on data from 2.4 M+ verified user reviews on 150k+ products and services in 2k+ categories, AI has experienced the fastest growth on G2 across all 26 high-level software markets between Sept. 2022 - Sept. 2023 — with AI categories gaining 643 new products. 

AI functionality such as text-to-speech, chatbots, image recognition, and intelligent virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular as they help users become more efficient in their day-to-day tasks. To glean insights on the impact of AI product features, G2 has been keeping track of when those features were added and how they’re being adopted by users. 

With this in mind, my G2 Data Solutions colleague Claire McCarthy and I had a hypothesis that software vendors investing in AI-enabled features will experience happier customers and more interested buyers. Our thesis, analysis, and findings were recently published in Eagle Alpha’s 2023 Alternative Data Report: A Year in Review. Read on to see what we discovered. 

Testing our hypothesis: does investment in AI-enabled features create happier customers & more interested buyers?  

To test our hypothesis, we turned to the wealth of proprietary data in G2’s marketplace. Keep in mind that G2 collects data from the 2.4 M+ reviews left by real users on its marketplace – each containing over 43 different data points! We also have insights on the 90M+ buyers visiting G2.com to research software. From this buyer behavior data, we’re able to collect insights on which categories are trending (via traffic) as well as customer sentiment (through net promoter scores, or NPS). 

Despite the recent hype around AI, G2 has been tracking its evolution for over a decade. With historical data, G2 review dataset makes it possible to track reviewer responses for each product use case per user in addition to customer sentiment. 

To begin our analysis, Claire and I first pulled the top products on G2 with the most AI feature reviews, as well as the date of the first AI feature reviewed for each product. For the purpose of this analysis, the date of the first AI feature review was our assumption for when the product first introduced AI capabilities. 

Then, we leveraged our traffic dataset to pull quarter-over-quarter visits for the top products to compare traffic visits before and after the AI capabilities were introduced. We also used our reviews dataset to pull quarter-over-quarter NPS for the same selected products and compared their NPS before and after adding the AI feature. 

G2 data insights: a look at how the introduction of AI affects existing software offerings 

ZoomInfo, Intercom, Appy Pie, and Notion represent the four products with the most AI-feature reviews that were not a part of the product's original use case. By highlighting these specific products, we can see how the introduction of AI affects existing software offerings. 

Based on this analysis, the following signals were found among those select software products analyzed:

ZoomInfo has seen a steady increase in its NPS score after introducing AI features to its product in 2019.

ZoomInfo’s traffic has increased since adding AI to its product and saw a large spike in Q3 of this year.

Intercom has seen a significant increase in its NPS score since adding AI features to its product.

Intercom’s quarter-over-quarter traffic has increased overall after introducing its first AI feature in 2018.

Appy Pie has seen a slight increase in its NPS score since introducing AI capabilities in 2020.

Appy Pie has seen an increase in quarter-over-quarter traffic after introducing AI capabilities in 2020.

Notion has seen a steady increase in NPS score since introducing its first AI feature in 2019.

Notion’s Traffic has increased significantly since adding AI capabilities.

The final verdict? When software vendors introduce AI functionality, they can expect happier customers but not necessarily a sustained traffic increase or uptick in new customers.

Ultimately, in analyzing G2 reviews and traffic data, we found that products have seen an increase in customer NPS after a product’s first AI feature was reviewed. These findings support our hypothesis that investing in AI-enabled features leads to happier customers.

However, the outcome is less clear when it comes to our hypothesis of increased interest following the release of AI-enabled features – by comparing traffic before and after the features were introduced. While we did see an increase in traffic overall, it was not always sustained. Some products experienced a steady increase in quarter-over-quarter traffic after the AI feature was introduced, while others saw inconsistent increases.

There are many factors that can play into increased traffic to G2.com, including companies raising funding, an article being published featuring the product, etc. However, with AI on the rise, we believe that AI features can play a factor in increased traffic on G2 – as many software buyers are proactively researching products offering AI functionality. 

In conclusion, the G2 data shows that adding AI functionality will lead to happier customers. While it may contribute to increased traffic, it may not lead to an immediate uptick in new customers. 

You can see our G2 research featured in Eagle Alpha’s 2023 Alternative Data Report: A Year in Review.