It’s no secret to anyone that generative AI is a hot new thing in the tech space right now, promising to revolutionize the way humans interact with software. And perhaps uniquely, it’s a potentially transformative technology that doesn’t require a rebuild of his infrastructure stack.
Salesforce is one of a rising number of software companies betting on the potential of generative AI. But for Salesforce, the stakes seem high. And this could ultimately tie together the company’s disparate and high-profile acquisitions over the past few years in a way that could shed light on the company’s long-term vision for how customers leverage it. have a nature. We will introduce the whole picture of the product.
At the Salesforce World Tour NYC and Tableau Conference events earlier this month, the company announced a number of new generative AI improvements and products for Sales Cloud, Slack, and Tableau. Salesforce, in collaboration with his partner Accenture, also announced Generative AI for CRM Acceleration Hub to help customers scale their generative AI efforts.
Juan Perez, who will join Salesforce as CIO in 2022 after spending more than 30 years at UPS in various technology areas, said: He holds leadership roles such as CIO and Chief Information Engineering Officer. “How can we simplify the way account executives position deals in front of their customers, and position solutions in front of their customers, by leveraging the great, trusted data we have? ”
Gerry Murray, Research Director of Marketing and Sales Technologies at IDC, believes Salesforce is right on trend, noting real demand for AI in search and social services, along with enterprise cloud applications.
“Generative AI and prompt-based UIs will become defacto capabilities for marketers and marketing systems,” says Murray. “People naturally understand and prefer conversation-based ways of manipulating information, as demonstrated by ChatGPT’s record-breaking growth of 100 million monthly users in just two months.”
Generative AI is a set of algorithms that use training data to generate new content (text, images, audio, or video). Perhaps the best-known generative AI application to date, ChatGPT is a chatbot built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Large Language Models (LLMs). Like other generative pretrained transform (GPT) applications, you can also use neural network models to ask and answer questions, summarize information, and write code.
Companies have been cautiously embracing the technology recently, taking early profits from GPT-based efforts by the likes of Unilever and Carmax.
Everywhere Einstein GPT
In March, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, a generative AI CRM technology that combines Salesforce’s own AI models with generative AI technology from partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud. Einstein GPT can ingest and consolidate a company’s customer data and connect it to OpenAI’s or your own models, so instantiations of Salesforce CRM can do things like generate personalized emails that sales reps send to customers. You will be able to take action.
Earlier this month, Salesforce added Einstein GPT for Service to help service teams generate responses for customers, automate the creation of knowledge articles, and automatically generate case summary summaries. Salesforce also announced his Slack GPT, which enables the integration of generative AI apps and enhances features like conversation summarization and writing assistance in Slack. It also works with Einstein GPT to turn Slack into a conversational interface for Customer 360. The company sees generative AI as a key priority for senior IT leaders, and he has set aside $250 million to invest in AI startups.
At last week’s Tableau Conference, Salesforce announced Tableau GPT, powered by Einstein GPT, and its complementary Tableau Pulse product. Tableau GPT changes the way a user interacts with her Tableau, allowing her to generate visualizations using natural language prompts. Powered by Tableau GPT, Tableau Pulse aims to personalize the user experience interacting with Tableau by using AI to predict what data users need and automatically generate actionable insights. is.
“Generative AI has many use cases, including creating text, image, and video brand assets, personalizing marketing at scale, and conducting conversational interactions with customers across channels,” said IDC’s Murray. says. “But the use case that will change the way we interact with computers is his prompt-based UI.”
Murray said users will be able to describe what they want apps and systems to do, get recommendations from the AI, and create scripts for use cases that are inherently reusable and extensible. . Users can perform script quality assurance by watching the AI make the necessary menu calls and user interface clicks in the sandbox environment. Once users are confident in how well the script works, they can deploy it in production.
“Prompt-based user experiences are a killer app for AI. “It will also ultimately document in detail how work is done across the enterprise, freeing people from the tedious task of automating and analyzing click-based processes.”
Are you formulating a grand vision?
One of the criticisms of Salesforce in recent years is that it’s been slow to show how a string of recent multi-billion dollar acquisitions fit together as a whole. The company acquired Mulesoft for $6.5 billion in 2018, Tableau for $15.6 billion in 2019 and Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021. Some activist investors have begun to question the company’s spending pace. Earlier this year, the question started to gain more weight after Salesforce laid off about 10% of its workforce and then dissolved its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) committee, announcing that it would focus on existing businesses.
But these latest announcements from Salesforce mean that Salesforce will act as a central repository for all of your customer’s data, Mulesoft will connect to other data sources to help automate processes, and Tableau will provide insights. , starting to show that the whole is better than the sum of the parts. Slack as an interface to display data and provide interaction between sales teams, marketing teams, and customers.
“We’re proud that nearly every product we’ve released in the last year has been a combined product. Sometimes you have to squint to see Mulesoft technology,” said the CEO and general manager. Brent Hayward says. mule soft.
IDC’s Murray said that, like its peers in enterprise cloud applications, Salesforce has found the task of building a common architecture for all its cloud applications to be a daunting task.
“To be fair, the Salesforce acquisition is less than five years old, and moving/merging tons of code is a long process,” he says. “As brands need to solve for continuity across diverse interactions with their customers, Salesforce is looking for integration and interoperability, especially when it comes to his prompt-based UI and AI for engagement, automation, analytics, and data management. We look forward to continuing our efforts.”
