Salesforce bets big on Einstein and AI

• Salesforce unveils generative AI-powered conversational assistant, Einstein Copilot.
• Einstein Copilot will drive significant productivity gains and results for specific business needs
• The new Einstein 1 Platform integrated with Data Cloud to facilitate creation of low-code, AI-powered apps and workflows.

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced that it would release software incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into its customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Leveraging generative AI, the tool will help salespeople, customer service agents and marketers do their jobs better.

Called Einstein GPT, it is the world’s first AI for CRM. The cloud-based software has since seen major advancements. The proprietary AI technology was the highlight of the recently concluded Dreamforce 2023. And it’s no surprise that Salesforce has allocated a lot of its resources to generative AI.

As with other major tech companies, Salesforce also announced job cuts earlier this year. However, this did not slow down innovation at the company. According to a report by Bloomberg, Salesforce is hiring more than 3,000 people across departments, a huge shift in its direction after eliminating 10% of its workforce earlier this year.

Bloomberg also reported that Salesforce is putting its money on AI, in the hope that the technology will fuel a new cycle of tech investment. This includes plans for its data cloud product that helps customers organize information from multiple sources.

Statistics are showing favorable results for Salesforce’s decision. In fact, an upcoming IDC study shows that the company and its partner ecosystem, fueled by the new wave of generative AI, will create a net gain between 2022 and 2028 of more than US$2 trillion in business revenues and 11.6 million jobs.

The AI Cloud, which was unveiled in June 2023, is a suite of capabilities optimized for delivering trusted, open, and real-time generative experiences across all applications and workflows. It is built for CRM, supercharging customer experiences and company productivity by bringing together AI, data, analytics, and automation to provide trusted, open, real-time generative AI that is enterprise-ready.

Salesforce and AI

At the core of the success of AI Cloud and Salesforce will be Einstein AI. Einstein is foundational to Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform, which now powers over one trillion predictions per week for customers across sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and IT.

At Dreamforce 2023, Salesforce announced new capabilities of its generative AI tool. They included new generative AI capabilities with Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant built into every CRM application and customer experience. Einstein Copilot, integrated seamlessly into users’ flow of work, will drive productivity by enabling them to ask questions in natural language and receive relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure proprietary company data from Salesforce Data Cloud.

Another update is the Einstein Copilot Studio. Addressing specific business needs, Copilot Studio will give companies an easy way to customize Einstein Copilot with specific prompts, skills and AI models. This capability will help businesses close sales deals faster, streamline customer service, or turn natural language prompts into code, among hundreds of other business tasks.

At the same time, Einstein Copilot Studio will provide integrations to make Einstein Copilot available beyond Salesforce applications, for use across other consumer-facing channels like websites to power real-time chat, Slack, WhatsApp, or SMS.

The Einstein Trust Layer

To ensure the results generated do not infringe on data privacy and security standards, both Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio will operate with the Einstein trust layer. The Einstein trust layer is a secure AI architecture, natively built into the Salesforce platform. Designed for enterprise security standards, the Einstein trust layer allows teams to benefit from generative AI without compromising their customer data, while at the same time letting companies use their trusted data to improve generative AI responses.

Features of the Einstein trust layer include:

• Integrated and grounded – Built into every Einstein Copilot by default, the trust layer grounds and enriches generative prompts in trusted company data through an integration with Salesforce Data Cloud.
• Zero-data retention and PII protection – Companies can be confident their data will never be retained by third-party large language model (LLM) providers, and customer personal identifiable information (PII) masking delivers added data privacy.
• Toxicity awareness and compliance-ready AI monitoring – A safety-detector LLM will guard against toxicity and risks to brands by “scoring” AI generations to provide confidence that responses are safe. Additionally, every AI interaction will be captured in a secure, monitored audit trail, giving companies visibility and control of how their data is being used.

Salesforce has also announced the Einstein 1 platform. The Einstein 1 platform gives companies the ability to safely connect any data to build AI-powered apps with low code and deliver entirely new CRM experiences. This creates a unified view of data across an enterprise, regardless of how the data is structured in internal systems, and allows organizations to customize user experience and action data using a variety of low-code platform services.

“A company’s AI strategy is only as good as its data strategy,” said Parker Harris, co-founder and CTO of Salesforce.

“We pioneered the metadata framework nearly 25 years ago to seamlessly bridge data across applications. It’s the connective tissue that fuels innovation. Now, with Data Cloud and Einstein AI native on the Einstein 1 platform, companies can easily create AI-powered apps and workflows that supercharge productivity, reduce costs, and deliver amazing customer experiences.”

The new Data Cloud, now natively integrated with the Einstein 1 platform, allows companies to unlock siloed data at scale to create rich, unified customer profiles and deliver entirely new CRM experiences.

• Data at Scale: Einstein 1 platform supports thousands of metadata-enabled objects, each capable of having trillions of rows. Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud are also re-engineered onto the platform.
• Automation at Scale: massive amounts of data can now be immediately made available as actionable Salesforce objects on the Einstein 1 platform. Flows can be triggered at any change on any objects at scale, up to 20,000 events per second, and can interact with any system in the enterprise, including legacy systems, through Mulesoft.
• Analytics at Scale: Einstein 1 platform’s common metadata schema and access model allows Salesforce’s variety of insights and analytics solutions – including reports and dashboards, tableau, CRM analytics, and marketing cloud reports – to work on the same data at scale.

“Our latest innovations represent our vision for the future of AI, data, CRM and trust. This next generation of Einstein, along with the new Einstein 1 platform, extends the frontiers of trusted and accessible AI-powered solutions built for businesses. Organizations in ASEAN can now truly harness the value of their data and implement AI-powered solutions to drive productivity and deliver personalized customer experiences at scale,” commented Sujith Abraham, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce ASEAN.

 

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