Conversational AI for Sales: 11 Tools Compared (2026)

Reps can hold a conversation with their own tools too. Ask Clu for a prospect list in one sentence and it returns the buyers with verified work emails and phone numbers; the steps below show what each step costs.

Disclosure: Cleanlist AI publishes this page, and Clu, Cleanlist AI's GTM agent, is third of the 11, labeled as our product. HubSpot and Salesforce sit above it, and Salesloft and Outreach follow the list, unranked. Clu works for your reps: it places no calls, joins no meetings and does not chat with buyers. The order is our editorial pick for a B2B team of 5 to 50 reps and carries no score. Every price was read on the vendor's own page on November 10, 2026.

What is conversational AI for sales?

Conversational AI for sales is software that understands what a person writes or says and answers in kind, in a chat window, on a phone line or in a meeting. Older sales chatbots followed a decision tree of buttons. Current tools run on large language models, so they handle free text and speech, answer from your own content and act in your CRM.

There are four kinds, sorted by who is on the other end of the conversation.

Conversational AI vs chatbots vs AI SDRs

The labels overlap, and vendors use them loosely. Who starts the conversation is the useful difference.

For software that runs outbound by itself, our AI SDR tools comparison prices 15 of them. For assistants that sit beside a rep, see AI sales assistants, and for agents that run jobs on a trigger, AI sales agents explained.

The 11 best conversational AI tools for sales, ranked

1. HubSpot Sales Hub: best for teams that run HubSpot

Price (read November 10, 2026): free for up to 2 users. Starter starts at $7 a seat a month for new customers ($20 regular) with 500 HubSpot Credits. Professional starts at $90 a seat a month, billed annually, plus a $1,500 onboarding fee and 3,000 credits. Enterprise is $150 a seat plus $3,500 onboarding and 5,000 credits. Extra credits cost $0.010 each.

HubSpot's Customer Agent answers questions across chat, email, forms, WhatsApp, Messenger and inbound calls, takes action in the CRM and hands off to your team with the context. HubSpot says it requires Professional or Enterprise and runs on HubSpot Credits: $0.50 per resolution for messages and $0.50 a minute for voice, and qualifying a lead can count as a resolution. Starter includes the Prospecting Agent, which HubSpot says researches each lead and suggests personalized outreach, plus the Notetaker and 500 calling minutes. Professional adds conversation intelligence and sequences.

Best for: teams on HubSpot that want chat, voice, call notes and outreach on one bill.

2. Salesforce Sales Cloud (Agentforce): best for teams that run Salesforce

Price (read November 10, 2026): Agentforce for Sales is an add-on from $125 a user a month. Sales Cloud runs from Starter Suite at $25 a user a month, billed monthly or annually, and Pro Suite at $100, billed annually, up to Max at $550, billed annually, which includes Agentforce for Sales and 2.75 million Flex Credits per org a year.

Salesforce describes Agentforce for Sales as bringing predictive, generative and agentic AI into the sales cycle, and its pricing page lists Agentforce features for prospecting, lead nurture, pipeline management and sales emails. Because the agents work inside Sales Cloud, they read the same accounts, opportunities and activity as your forecast.

Best for: teams already on Salesforce that want agents working from the same records as the pipeline.

3. Clu, Cleanlist AI's GTM agent (our product): best for reps who want prospect lists by asking

Disclosure. We make Cleanlist AI. Its 98% verified email and 85% direct dial figures come from our own 500-lead benchmark, which named no other vendor.

Clu is the assistant inside Cleanlist AI that reps talk to in plain words, in the app and, on Pro, in Slack. Describe the buyer in a sentence and Clu searches 1B+ profiles, then gets a verified work email and phone number for each person from 25+ data providers. Clu places no calls, joins no meetings and does not chat with website visitors, so pair it with a voice agent or meeting assistant from this list.

Clu charges credits for its own work, priced by the AI model a task runs on. Agents run on Pro, 5 active at a time, and the MCP server comes with Starter.

4. Qualified (Piper): best for B2B website chat on Salesforce

Price (read November 10, 2026): no published price; every plan says "Contact us." The plans are Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate, capped at 250,000, 2 million and 5 million monthly web sessions.

Piper, Qualified's AI SDR agent, talks with website visitors in real time by text, voice and video, holds email conversations with inbound leads and books meetings. Every plan includes Salesforce integration. Enterprise and Ultimate add handoff to a person, MCP and API access and a Salesforce sandbox.

Best for: B2B companies on Salesforce with steady website traffic and reps waiting for meetings.

5. Conversica: best for following up every inbound lead

Price (read November 10, 2026): no published price; the site leads to a demo request.

Conversica sells AI agents that hold two-way conversations by email, SMS, chat and messaging apps, which it says run around the clock in any language you need. The jobs range from answering web forms and following up after events to nurture and re-engaging inactive accounts. It fits the leads a team never gets to: the late form fill, the webinar attendee, the stalled opportunity.

Best for: marketing teams with more inbound leads than reps can answer.

6. Tidio (Lyro): best for small teams that want website chat fast

Price (read November 10, 2026): the Free plan includes 50 billable conversations and 50 one-time Lyro AI conversations. Starter is $29 a month, or $24.17 billed annually. Lyro, the AI agent, starts at $39 a month for 50 AI conversations, or $32.50 billed annually, and is also sold on its own.

Tidio combines live chat, a help desk and Lyro, which answers from your knowledge base, can match your communication style and hands off to a person. Its Flows feature adds no-code automations, such as a quote request or a message when a chat is missed. Pricing follows conversation volume, which suits small teams with a steady flow of chats.

Best for: small teams that want a chat assistant live this week.

7. Bland AI: best for building voice agents at volume

Price (read November 10, 2026): Start has no platform fee and costs $0.14 a minute, with 10 concurrent calls and 100 calls a day. Build is $299 a month plus $0.12 a minute, with 50 concurrent calls and 2,000 calls a day. Enterprise is custom. Bland says telephony is billed separately.

Bland is a platform for building phone agents that place and answer calls, with Conversational Pathways to map how a call can branch and integrations to pass results to other systems. It is a build-it-yourself tool, so plan on someone who can design call flows and test them.

Best for: teams with real call volume and a technical owner for the agent.

8. Retell AI: best for testing voice agents on pay-as-you-go pricing

Price (read November 10, 2026): pay as you go at $0.07 to $0.31 a minute for voice agents, with $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls included. Enterprise pricing is custom.

Retell builds each minute's price from parts: its voice engine at $0.055 a minute, the language model you choose, the text-to-speech voice, and telephony at $0.015 a minute for US calls through its listed carrier. That makes a pilot easy to budget: 1,000 minutes cost $70 to $310 before add-ons.

Best for: teams that want to test an inbound or callback voice agent before committing to a contract.

9. Gong: best for teams that coach from call data

Price (read November 10, 2026): no published price. Gong says licenses are priced per user, with a platform fee based on the number of users supported.

Gong records and transcribes calls, emails and meetings, tags topics, action items and risks, and shows managers which deals are moving. By Gong's description, its AI agents monitor deals, compose emails and help with coaching, and its forecasting reads live pipeline signals. Our Gong MCP server review covers connecting it to AI assistants.

Best for: sales teams of about 20 reps or more whose managers coach from recordings.

10. Fathom: best for meeting notes on a small budget

Price (read November 10, 2026): free for individuals. Premium is $16 a month billed annually, or $20 monthly. Team is $15 a user a month billed annually ($19 monthly) and Business $25 ($34 monthly), both with a 2-user minimum. Enterprise is $35 a user a month, billed annually.

Fathom records and transcribes meetings and writes AI summaries on every plan, Free included. Team adds a shared workspace and Ask Fathom across the team's calls. Business adds CRM field sync, a deal view, coaching metrics and AI scorecards.

Best for: small teams that want call notes in the CRM without an enterprise contract.

11. Otter.ai: best for budget notes across Zoom, Teams and Meet

Price (read November 10, 2026): Basic is free with 300 minutes a user a month and up to 30 minutes per conversation. Pro is $8.33 a user a month billed annually, or $16.99 monthly. Business is $19.99 a user a month billed annually, or $30 monthly. Enterprise is custom.

Otter joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls to write and share notes, and its AI Chat answers questions about past meetings. Notes sync to Salesforce or HubSpot for 1 user on Pro, 5 on Business and everyone on Enterprise, which adds an Otter Sales Notetaker with live coaching.

Best for: individual reps and small teams that want searchable notes for little money.

Salesloft and Outreach: conversation tools inside your sequencer (unranked)

Many teams already send from one of these two, so its built-in conversation tools are the first to try. We describe them here without a rank.

Salesloft. No published price as of November 10, 2026; the pricing page leads to a sales conversation. Salesloft lists Conversation Intelligence, Cadence, Deals, AI Agents, Clari Forecast and an MCP server, and its site also links to a Drift login.

Outreach. No published price as of November 10, 2026. Outreach bills seats plus consumption-based AI credits. Its Amplify Essentials package, with 10,000 AI credits, centers on conversation intelligence: the Outreach Voice dialer, real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, meeting insights and live coaching. Larger packages run up to Amplify Pro with 100,000 credits.

Cleanlist AI pushes leads to Salesloft, so a list Clu builds can go straight into a Salesloft cadence.

How to choose conversational AI for sales

Start from the conversation you want to automate, then test the three things that most often go wrong.

1. Accuracy. Run a two-week pilot and read 20 real transcripts. Look for confident wrong answers about price, features or contract terms.
2. Handoff. Every assistant needs a clean path to a person. Ask for a human in chat and on the phone, and time how long the handoff takes.
3. Data. A chat or voice agent answers from your content and your CRM. Fix outdated pages and duplicate records before launch, or the agent repeats them to buyers.

See pricing

Voice agents and the TCPA

On February 8, 2024, the FCC announced a Declaratory Ruling that calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Under FCC rules, telemarketers need prior express written consent before robocalling consumers, and the ruling holds AI voices to the same standard (FCC news release, read November 10, 2026).

In practice, get consent before an AI voice agent calls anyone, start with inbound calls and callbacks people asked for, and keep records of the consent. This is not legal advice, and other countries have their own rules. Our cold calling lists guide covers the US calling rules in more detail.

What conversational AI for sales costs

Prices were read on each vendor's own page on November 10, 2026. The volumes are examples.

Ask Clu for a prospect list, step by step

Every first conversation with a buyer starts with a list. Here is that job done with Clu, with what each step costs. For the whole outbound workflow, see Cleanlist AI for outbound.

1. Open a workspace. Every new Cleanlist AI workspace starts with a 14-day Pro trial: up to 3 seats and 250 credits, plus 100 more when you register with a work email. A card is required. After the trial, the Free plan keeps 50 credits a month.
2. Ask in plain words. For example: "VPs of Sales at US software companies with 51 to 200 employees, one per company." Clu searches 1B+ profiles, and searching costs 0 credits.
3. Check the count. Tighten the request until the list is the size you want, still at 0 credits.
4. Get the contact data. Confirm, and Clu gets a verified work email for each person at 1 credit and, where you ask, a phone number at 10 credits, across 25+ providers. A miss costs nothing.
5. Send the list where the conversations happen. Start a sequence in Cleanlist AI, push the list to Salesloft or lemlist, or, on Pro, sync it to HubSpot or Salesforce for your dialer or voice agent to work.
6. Repeat it on Pro. On Pro, you can talk to Clu in Slack, and the same search can run as an agent on a schedule, with up to 5 active agents. For one person you already know, the email finder does the same job from a name and a company.

What you get: one row per person with name, title and company, a verified work email and, where you asked, a phone number. What it costs: 100 people with emails is at most 100 credits, and phone numbers for the top 20 add at most 200, which fits inside the 750 credits a Starter seat adds each month. Clu also spends credits on its own work, priced by the AI model a task runs on.

A Cleanlist AI prospect list with company, job title, email and phone columns filled in, the contact details blurred

Frequently asked questions

Which AI is best for salespeople?

It depends on the conversation. For website visitors, a chat assistant such as Qualified or HubSpot's Customer Agent. For calls, a meeting assistant such as Gong or Fathom. For a rep's own prep, Clu (our product) for lists and contact data, or ChatGPT and Claude for research. Our AI sales assistant comparison ranks nine.

Is conversational AI the same as a chatbot?

A chatbot is one kind of it. Older chatbots follow a fixed decision tree of buttons. Conversational AI understands free text and speech, answers from your content and can act in your CRM, and the term also covers voice agents and meeting assistants.

How can a salesperson use conversational AI?

Three ways that save time this week: let a meeting assistant write call notes and CRM updates, let a chat assistant answer and qualify website visitors after hours, and ask an assistant for prospect lists in place of building them by hand. For where AI fits across the whole revenue team, see AI in sales and marketing.

Do buyers need to know they are talking to AI?

For phone calls in the US, the FCC treats AI-generated voices as artificial under the TCPA, so the consent rules for robocalls apply. For chat, tell visitors when they are talking to an AI agent and offer a person, which avoids confusion and makes the handoff smoother. Rules differ by country and state, so check yours; this is not legal advice.

How much does conversational AI for sales cost?

Website chat starts free, and Tidio's entry plans run $24.17 to $39 a month. Voice agents bill by the minute, from $0.07 to $0.31 on Retell AI as of November 10, 2026. Meeting assistants run $15 to $35 a user a month on Fathom's paid plans, and the CRM platforms charge seats plus credits.