Salesforce has announced its UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Centre, which will officially open in London's Bluefin Building on June 18. Last year, the company committed to investing $4 billion in AI innovation and growth in the UK over five years.
Salesforce is the second major U.S. technology provider to set up an AI center in London this year. Microsoft opened an AI hub in London in April to drive “pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models.” The company said the London team will work closely with other parts of Microsoft and OpenAI to build the infrastructure that underpins the AI and develop tools to support the underlying models.
“Establishing Salesforce's first AI Center in London sends a clear message to our customers and partners on AI,” said Zahra Barololoumi, CEO, UK and Ireland, Salesforce.com. “We are committed to working closely together to help them harness the benefits of this transformative technology and drive positive social impact.”
Susan Emerson, senior vice president of product, AI, analytics and data at Salesforce, said the company is hosting a number of events that bring together thought leaders, practitioners and Salesforce product leaders to inform and inspire people to “think bigger about the possibilities of AI technology.”
The AI centre in London is also part of this strategy.The target users will be people who use Salesforce as Salesforce admins or sales people who want to understand more about AI, she said.
“For some people, AI is a big [learning] “The AI curve,” he said, adding that the center will help people demystify AI technology and experiment with workshops using AI within the Salesforce suite of products. “All the use cases that are easy to implement are there as buttons.”
For example, the Salesforce Service Desk module has an AI feature that provides service desk operators with answers to customer queries based on summaries of previous support cases.
As part of its focus on the UK, Salesforce Ventures has invested more than $200 million in UK companies, including text-to-speech and AI voice generation tool ElevenLabs and the world's leading AI bid writing engine AutoGenAI.
During its London World Tour, Salesforce announced the general availability of Data Cloud Vector Database, positioned within the company's Data Cloud as a way to help businesses analyze unstructured data sources such as call recordings, online customer reviews and support tickets.
According to Salesforce, this new feature enables Data Cloud to ingest a variety of unstructured content at scale from customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, including websites, social media platforms, commerce channels, etc. Data Cloud then uses generative AI to create embeddings in the unstructured data that is indexed in the Vector database.
In related news, Salesforce announced that its Data Cloud will be available on Hyperforce, its regional public cloud in the UK, from 31 July 2024.
