Introducing Ask Modal: answers from every record, email and call

Every CRM holds more than its users can see. A deal record has a stage and an amount, but the reason it is stuck lives in an email thread from three weeks ago, a call where the buyer mentioned a budget freeze, and a contact who quietly changed jobs. Reps know this, which is why they keep their own notes and ask each other on Slack instead of searching the CRM.

Ask Modal is our answer to that. From today, every workspace has a box at the top of the screen where you can ask a question about your customers in plain English. Modal reads the records, emails, meetings and call transcripts it already syncs, and replies with an answer and the sources it used.

What you can ask

We spent the beta watching what 300 teams typed. Most questions fell into four groups:

• Pipeline questions. “Which open deals over $40k haven’t heard from us in a week?” or “What changed in the forecast since Monday?”

• Account questions. “What did Aster Health say about pricing on the last two calls?” or “Who is our strongest contact at Copperline?”

• Preparation. “Summarise everything since the last QBR with Lumen Labs” before a meeting, instead of scrolling a timeline.

• Lists. “Customers on the Pro plan whose champion left in the last 90 days”, returned as a view you can save, filter and share.

The last one matters more than it sounds. An answer that ends in a saved view becomes part of how the team works. An answer that ends in a chat bubble is forgotten by Thursday.

Every answer shows its working

A wrong answer delivered confidently is worse than no answer. So Ask Modal never replies without sources. Each claim links to the email, call, note or field it came from, and you can open any of them in one click.

When the data doesn’t support an answer, it says so. If you ask why a deal slipped and nobody has emailed the buyer in a month, Ask Modal tells you there is nothing recent to go on rather than guessing.

AI fields

Some questions are worth asking about every row. AI fields let you add a column that Ask Modal fills in for each record: the company’s latest funding round, whether they use a competitor, the main objection raised in the last call. You write the instruction once, choose the sources it may use, and the column fills as records are created or updated.

Early users have built fields like these:

1. Next step, read from the latest meeting notes and email reply.

2. Risk reason, a one-line explanation of why a renewal looks shaky.

3. Tech stack, researched from public sources for new inbound companies.

AI fields are ordinary fields. You can filter, sort, report and trigger automations on them, and you can always edit a value by hand. Edited values stay put until you ask Modal to refresh them.

Permissions come first

Ask Modal can only see what the person asking can see. If a rep has no access to the partnerships object, questions about partners return nothing from it, and private email domains stay private. Answers are built at the moment you ask, using your permissions, not from a shared index that everyone reads.

Your data is never used to train models, ours or anyone else’s. Workspaces hosted in the EU have their questions processed in the EU. Admins can switch Ask Modal off for the whole workspace or for particular roles, and every question is recorded in the audit log.

What it costs

Ask Modal is included on every paid plan with a monthly allowance of questions per seat, which covers about 95% of beta users without them noticing a limit. AI fields use the same allowance. Free workspaces get a smaller allowance to try it out.

What’s next

We are working on three things for the coming months: questions that run on a schedule and post the answer to Slack, answers that can draft the follow-up email, and support for asking about reports and dashboards directly.

Ask Modal is rolling out to all workspaces this week. If you have questions it gets wrong, there is a button on every answer to tell us, and the product team reads every one.