Salesforce Continues AI Push, Launches Enterprise-Ready Cloud Solution

Salesforce, one of the leading cloud-based companies globally, introduced its latest offering on June 12, dubbed ‘AI Cloud’ – a generative artificial intelligence (AI) solution aimed at “supercharging customer experiences and company productivity” for its enterprise clients.

Salesforce announced on Monday the launch of AI Cloud – a new set of products aimed at delivering enterprise-ready AI technology and reinforcing the company’s position in the world’s hottest sector. Shares of Salesforce slightly advanced by 0.4% in premarket trading following the announcement.

The move marks the latest Salesforce effort to expand its product portfolio with AI features. However, it is also seen as a continuation of the company’s generative AI solution, Einstein GPT, which was rolled out in March.

“It’s really about bringing generative AI in a trusted fashion to the enterprise,” “We’re moving incredibly fast to leverage the history we have in AI and build this into our stack in a trusted fashion.”

According to the press release, the new offering will include Salesforce’s products from the Einstein GPT, to the communication and collaboration platform Slack, and data analysis service Tableau. The starter pack version of AI cloud will be priced at $360,000 annually, Salesforce said.

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In addition to AI Cloud, Salesforce announced it has doubled its venture capital (VC) fund for generative AI startup companies to $500 million. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI “is reshaping our world and transforming business in ways we never imagined,” adding that “ every company needs to become AI-first.”

AI has been growing rapidly for several years, but it received a major boost late last year following the unprecedented success of ChatGPT – an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT’s rise to glory left all major tech giants and startups racing to develop their generative AI products and compete for their piece of the pie.

Last month, Goldman Sachs analysts said the nascent AI field could boost US corporate net margins by 4% over the next 10 years and become the biggest long-term support for companies’ profits. On the other hand, analysts added that a near-term growth boost is looking unlikely due to current macroeconomic challenges.

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About the author

Tim Fries is the cofounder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate on the investment team at RW Baird's US Private Equity division, and is also the co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.

The 10 best ChatGPT Plugins you can use right now

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, but plugins make it even more so by unlocking a range of exciting new abilities. From booking a restaurant table for you to custom designing t-shirts based on your prompts, ChatGPT plugins are the future of AI chatbots. Until the next big thing comes along, at least.

Here are some of the best ChatGPT plugins you can use to leverage AI in ways you never even dreamed of.

In order to run ChatGPT with plugins enabled, you need to be a ChatGPT Plus subscriber. It’s $20 a month, but you get priority access to the chatbot so there’s almost never any waiting, and you can also use advanced features like the GPT-4 language model, and play with the new web-search capabilities of ChatGPT.

If you’re a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, to use plugins you need to enable them. Use the three-dot settings menu icon in the bottom left of the screen to toggle Plugins to On within the Beta features menu. Then, in a new chat window, select GPT-4, then select Plugins. You’ll then need to scroll through the list to select the ones you want.

Look out for our favorite plugins below if you want to jump straight to the best.

This one is, unfortunately, a little hard to get access to, as at the time of writing, OpenAI has only made it available to select ChatGPT Plus members. If you have it, though, you need to give it a go. The Code Interpreter lets you upload files to ChatGPT (and download them afterward), as well as run Python scripts within the ChatGPT conversation. That means you can have ChatGPT create almost anything you want, from basic video editors to running data analysis on a range of information. You can then work on it with the ChatBot to perfect it.

Want some tips to get started? We have a great guide on how to use the ChatGPT code interpreter.

This one isn’t listed in the plugins menu on ChatGPT, but it’s there right next to the plugins module when you hover your mouse over GPT-4. Select it and you can have it search the web for you to augment its existing knowledgebase, answer questions from more recently, or perform research for you with multiple web searches. It can be a real timesaving feature and lets you keep all your ChatGPT interactions in one place, without having to visit the Bing website.

ChatGPT is great at suggesting recipes and can even do so based on a list of ingredients. The Instacart plugin takes it to the logical conclusion by allowing you to order food from the main Instacart service page. If you find yourself short of an ingredient when you’re putting together a meal with ChatGPT’s help, the Instacart plugin can make it super simple to top up what you’re missing without going to an entirely different site or service.

Got kids that are driving you up the wall asking for more time and attention than you have? ABCMouse is a great resource for providing different activities that your children can take part in based on what you tell the AI about them. It has activities for kids ages two to eight, and can make all kinds of suggestions for paid and free activities depending on what your kids are into.

You can specify what kind of materials you have handy, what kind of budget you’re working with, and how much time you have available. ABCMouse will find something fun and engaging for them to do.

Like your memes to be fresh and your reaction comics on point? Maybe you just can’t find that XKCD you swear you read years ago. Comic Finder can find the perfect comic for any situation. It currently supports XKCD and SMBC, giving you hundreds of comics to choose from. Ask for comics you’ve never heard of and see if anything comes up. You never know what it might find.

Plan your entire vacation within ChatGPT’s prompt window. With the Expedia plugin, you can have ChatGPT look up locations to visit, local resorts, restaurants, and activities, and factor it all in based on your budget. It can ask you follow-up questions to better fine-tune your search, and it can even base its suggestions on your availability, including preferred departure and arrival times.

You can also find ChatGPT incorporated into the Expedia standalone app if you’d rather access it that way.

Unlocking the true power of ChatGPT only really comes when you let it off the leash. That’s what Zapier can do. By combining ChatGPT’s natural language interactions with the Zapier plugin’s wider range of capabilities, you can have ChatGPT do almost anything for you. Hook it up to your Slack account and it can message anyone in your team and compose the message for you. Connect to your Gmail and it can send emails for you. Have it analyze data for you and spit our interesting results.

The only downside is that you need to pay for Zapier to get its full functionality. That might be worth it for you, but do your research before paying.

Want to have ChatGPT analyze a PDF for you? The ChatWithPDF plugin is great for that. It can analyze the PDF document, make suggestions about changes to it, extract relevant information, and summarize it — whatever you need. You can even use it to search through a long PDF document to find something you’re looking for, which can be a real time saver.

Do note, however, that there are a lot of websites claiming to offer AI PDF analysis for free. They may be legitimate, but they may also be looking for you to upload private PDF documents that they can glean information from. Only use the plugin via the ChatGPT prompt window on the OpenAI website.

ChatGPT is already good at Math, but the Wolfram plugin makes it a practical genius in comparison. It gives it access to more powerful computational tools, better math skills, real-time data, and visualization, letting you ask far more complicated questions of ChatGPT that cover the fields of geography, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and more.

The responses for complicated questions when using Wolfram tend to be more accurate and focused on the kind of answer you were looking for. The standard ChatGPT model tends to give you a lot of additional information you don’t need, like showing it’s working.

Move over RosettaStone, there’s a new kid on the block when it comes to learning foreign languages. ChatGPT with the Speak plugin lets ChatGPT coach you on a range of languages, helping you to better understand sentence structure, grammar, verb usage, conjunctions, and more, all within a ChatGPT prompt window.

Combine it with the Voice Control ChatGPT Chrome Extension and you can even talk with it to learn the language as naturally as if you were talking to a native.

Like that? Here are some more amazing Chrome Extensions for ChatGPT.

What Is CRM? The Ultimate Guide For Australian Businesses (2023)

There are four primary types of CRMs. Operational CRMs automate processes, freeing your team to focus on their expertise. Analytical CRMs gather, store and analyse data so you can act on trends to improve customer experiences and, therefore, boost conversions. Collaborative CRMs manage interactional data so team members know how and where to best interact with leads. Finally, marketing CRMs offer data-driven campaign-management tools.

Here is a closer look at the different types of CRMs and their uses.

An operational CRM helps to align your teams across marketing, customer service and sales via automation. In doing so, it allows these functions to work together using one customer or lead view and, ultimately, offer a smooth and positive experience while ushering leads from awareness to conversion and beyond. Its automation capabilities free up your team members to ditch repetitive, tedious tasks, so they can focus on tasks only humans can do.

Marketing tasks that operational CRMs help to automate include designing, distributing and tracking email campaigns and sequences. Customer service and sales automation examples include sales forecasting, tracking customer conversations, ticketing systems that assign complaints to experienced reps, task assigning, chatbots that receive complaints and the automated delivery of helpful content to answer customer questions.

As an example, a customer might interact with a website chatbot to complain about a product defect. From there, a ticket is created and routed to a sales rep who specialises in resolving the issue. After the assigned sales rep resolves the issue, the conversation with the rep triggers a follow-up email with a survey to ensure the issue has been resolved satisfactorily, along with a coupon code to entice the customer to buy again.

Analytical CRMs focus on data. It gathers data about each customer or lead, then offers an analysis of that data so marketers, sales reps and other functional members of your company can better serve your leads or customers. Example data includes customer and lead contact information, preferences, behaviors and interaction history with your brand and its reps.

More specifically, analytical CRMs first gather customer or lead data, then store that data in one place where all internal stakeholders can view it. Finally, analysis dashboards highlight data trends like how customers interact with your website or where they are located. This data is available on a customer-by-customer basis or as an overview of a large customer base. It reveals patterns your internal teams can use to improve the customer journey.

For example, your data may show that 25% of your customers in Queensland searched for a particular product during beach season. They even put it into their online carts. However, 50% of those searchers did not buy but, instead, abandoned their carts. This insight can help you know how to offer them personalised marketing campaigns that convert, such as flash sales delivered via a triggered email when a cart is abandoned.

Collaborative CRMs allow teams in and around your company to work together more seamlessly to create better customer experiences across customer touchpoints with your brand. Such teams include internal teams like your sales, customer service, technical support and marketing teams. It also often streamlines communication across your company’s vendors, technical support reps, suppliers and distributors.

To help companies manage interactions, a collaborative CRM stores all interactions between customers or leads and your company. It does so by sourcing data from all channels, including website, email, phone, social media and even face-to-face interactions. From there, the data is analysed to tell your team how and where to best interact with customers and leads for the best customer experience.

For example, your sales representative sold a customer a hot tub. In that interaction, your team member learned that the customer prefers to interact with your company via text and notes this in your CRM. So, when it comes time to upsell a new accessory or schedule a regular maintenance visit, your marketing or technical support rep will know to also reach out via text to interact with your customer over their preferred channel.

Marketing CRMs, such as other CRMs, gather data on your customers and offer you a holistic view of each customer. But they go further with marketing tools that help you target and automate campaigns. Then, tools like blog publishing, SEO, ad tracking, social media and video production tools allow you to respond to the collected data by giving you insights into the preferences your customers want in campaign content and product offerings.

Tools like landing-page and form builders allow you to collect customer data and segment customers. Then, marketing automation tools help you nurture leads and customers to convert or purchase again. All behaviours and preferences related to each customer or lead are captured in the marketing CRM, allowing all team members across your departments to know where the customer is in the conversion journey, then seamlessly nurture them from there.

For example, your data may show that a lead made a first purchase, becoming a customer. In response, you can use your CRM’s marketing segmentation and automation tools to nurture that customer to become a repeat buyer. Simply segment the customer into a category specifying their “new customer” status and their product interest. Then, create and launch an email sequence to automatically nurture more sales from that customer and similar ones.