Drift vs Hiver
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Drift has effectively dissolved into Salesloft's monthly release rhythm.
The product no longer ships under the Drift name. The changelog is a monthly link to Salesloft's release notes, with the May 2026 drop the only one carrying actual content — Agent Tasks metrics for AI Data, Channels & Conversations updates, and Rhythm/Cadence workflow tweaks. Nothing on the page is positioned as a Drift-specific feature anymore.
What was once a category-defining conversational marketing tool is now a feature surface inside the broader Salesloft revenue platform. Expect the Drift brand to keep fading; product investment lives in Salesloft's combined cadence and is increasingly framed as 'Agents' and 'AI Data' — a sales-engagement framing rather than a marketing-website chat one.
The next directional move is the eventual retirement of any standalone Drift surfacing in Salesloft's UI. Conversational features will be re-pitched as part of the Agent platform, with the historical Drift chat capabilities subsumed into a generalized buyer-engagement layer.
Hiver pivots from Gmail-only to AI-grounded omnichannel.
The recent feed shows two parallel pushes: an AI knowledge layer (Google Drive, Confluence, and Google Sheets becoming Ask-AI-queryable sources) and a channel-expansion push (Slack as a managed customer-service channel inside Hiver Omni, plus omnichannel search and automation primitives that work across email/chat/Slack). Automation gets meaningful new building blocks too — API calls as actions, new triggers and conditions.
Hiver is repositioning from 'shared inboxes inside Gmail' to 'AI-grounded omnichannel customer service platform.' The Slack-as-channel and API-call automation moves directly compete with Front, Help Scout, and the lightweight tier of Zendesk. The AI knowledge-source work is laying the grounding layer that turns Hiver AI from a reply-suggester into something closer to a tier-1 agent.
Expect a Microsoft Teams channel addition, more knowledge-source connectors (Notion, SharePoint, Salesforce KB), and a packaged 'AI Agent' tier that bundles Ask AI + grounded sources + automation actions into something that resolves tickets autonomously. Pricing for AI usage is the next question — flat seats won't survive heavy Ask-AI workloads on customer data.
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