Salesforce is set to make a number of product and strategy announcements at its AI Day special event in New York later today, and CEO Marc Benioff has now declared himself an AI company, as we saw at Connections last week. Here is an overview of the company’s roadmap.
We’ll share more details as the event unfolds, but Bill Patterson, GM of C360 Applications, who attended Bank of America’s 2023 Global Technology Conference virtual event last week, spoke about Salesforce’s thinking. There was a useful and clear summary, in which he declared: Generative AI will be “the greatest opportunity of our lifetime” for enterprise software.
He argued that trust is Salesforce’s starting point in the AI revolution.
We believe that in the early days of generative AI, people used public models and publicly available consumer services in wrong and inappropriate ways, shared information with these models, and now I have seen many stumbling blocks that have been part of the model for If you want to, even if it’s confidential information. So first and foremost, a platform we can trust is important to how we think of AI as a foundational service across applications.
Patterson also pointed out that today’s enterprise reality is a large and diverse technology world. He used customer service as an example.
Service organizations often have 20, 30, or 40 different systems that enable customer experience and contact center-like operations. It’s not sustainable for an organization to have 30 or 40 different AI strategies trying to deliver a consistent experience to their customers.
These two factors have shaped Salesforce’s AI thinking, he said.
Our approach to starting with a trusted foundation was, “Okay. First and foremost, we want to make sure our data resides, is safe and secure.” Second, we want to help organizations jump into this AI age, rather than trying to have all the different situations for models that are just flying around within an organization. I want it to be more compelling, more coherent, and more easily available at the heart of every interaction the company has.
Customer impact
There are more considerations, he continued:
The final horizon of AI is specifically how we serve, how we sell, how we market, how we do digital business with organizations. It comes down to how you think about application. It’s exactly like the last horizon we’re thinking of. How do we really think of radical new ways to break through the marketing, service, and sales areas in those areas?
With a focus on applying AI to transform the customer experience, and its organizational and operational impact, he said, high on the corporate agenda is the 130-person conference in Chicago. Recalling a recent meeting with a service leader at , he suggested:
Customer service is one of the areas and areas where many predict a huge disruption to work related to generative AI and the practice of generative AI. So I was at a conference, talking to customer service leaders, and the question came up, “So you’re going to have fewer people working in the service center?”
The reality is that for software companies, and for software technology like the one offered by Salesforce, the value of software is because it can make users in that domain more productive, more interactive, and actually more intelligent. actually increases. There are more scales out there. So, first and foremost, I think there may be less labor being hired, but the value of the software actually gets more premium value associated with it.
On that second horizon, I think we’re still lagging behind the demands consumers make in terms of their expectations of brands for sales, marketing, and service interactions. In short, AI and always-on experiences really give companies like Salesforce new ways to drive growth. Because what we’re trying to do is build technology that’s always running and always connected, even when employees aren’t working. . So I think it gives a different kind of horizon.
And finally, when you think about some kind of value creation, what companies really want today from a company like Salesforce is to drive growth and reduce costs. I believe that the opportunity to use software to participate in business transformation and reduce costs is truly a new avenue for growth for companies like Salesforce.
Learn how Salesforce handles large language models [LLMs] Mr. Patterson took additional responsibility for the sales and service division and suggested some differentiators starting with the data itself.
Today, you can take advantage of large-scale language models like ChatGPT to write highly compelling stories and create travel plans online. But what you don’t get is an individualized response. You won’t get anything tailored to you as an individual, your needs, or your unique circumstances. So first and foremost is the data you have in your CRM system: not just about customer profiles and customer histories, but about your business policies, your operational policies, how you communicate your brand and emotions, and so on. Or allowing it to happen in the regulatory environment that exists within his CRM core today.
So the ability to combine CRM data structures and run with this generative technology in a safe and secure manner will ultimately not only create this amazing flywheel of innovation, but will also enable platforms like Salesforce to power enterprises well into the future. It also creates long-term value for continuing service. You will interact with your customers in a more AI-first way.
my view
Full AI meal tasting menus will be available later today.
