Watch all the Transform 2020 sessions on-demand here.
Drift today launched the Drift Platform to give developers tools to make Drift bots for marketing and sales. Companies have been able to deploy their own templated Drift bots for some time now, but the Drift Platform gives developers and businesses using Drift the ability to make custom bots and integrations.
The Drift Platform launches the same day as the Drift App Directory. Similar to services like the Slack App Directory and Microsoft’s Bot Directory, the Drift App Directory will allow customers to find and discover bots made by third-party developers, enterprise software makers, or Drift customers.
Developers can show what to submit to the app directory, but Drift will continue to focus on the development marketing and sales verticals rather than general offerings for enterprise customers.
Unlike Slack or Microsoft’s bot offerings for chat apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack, Drift bots are most often used on apps and websites.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
“There are over 5,000 products in the marketing and sales ecosystem today, and as a result, every business has a different stack,” Drift founder and CTO Elias Torres said in a statement shared with VentureBeat. “We don’t want to hold any company back from unlocking the power of conversations, so we wanted to open our API to developers to ensure that all of the tools that Drift customers are using play well together, and that data can flow freely between systems.”
Above: Drift App Directory screenshot
The Drift App Directory is available today through login with a Drift account, but in the future it will have a dedicated website, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. Drift users have been able to integrate services like Salesforce or Slack for some time now.
Since the launch of initial services like Leadbot and Drift for Enterprise in spring 2016, Drift has been used by more than 50,000 customers. This fall, in an exclusive reported by VentureBeat, Drift shared plans to bring its sales and marketing automation services to email clients. Weeks later, Drift closed a $32 million funding round backed by investors like General Catalyst, HubSpot, and Sequoia Capital.
