Salesforce Enters The Generative AI Race With EinsteinGPT

‘We believe that the value that generative AI can deliver to enterprises is enormous,’ says Clara Shih, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager of Service Cloud.

After teases of a content-generating artificial intelligence offering from Salesforce, the vendor unveiled EinsteinGPT during its TrailblazerDX conference aimed at developers.

Although San Francisco-based CRM vendor Salesforce didn’t give a date for when EinsteinGPT will become generally available, the company showcased a variety of use cases and revealed an integration between its collaboration application Slack and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the maker of text-generating AI tool ChatGPT and image-generating AI tool Dall-E.

“We believe that the value that generative AI can deliver to enterprises is enormous,” Clara Shih, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager of Service Cloud, said during a press conference Monday. “Seven years ago, we introduced the world to AI purpose-built for CRM. We’re so excited now to be leading the industry again in creating generative AI purpose-built for CRM. … This market is ours to win.”

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Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff teased EinsteinGPT in a tweet last month, saying it can generate leads and close deals. Salesforce introduced its regular Einstein AI tool in 2016.

During the company’s latest quarterly earnings call held Wednesday, Benioff said that EinsteinGPT will integrate with all Salesforce cloud offerings plus its Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack subsidiaries.

“It is another way we’re opening the door to use AI for our future and for all of our customers,” Benioff said.

Customers have used Slack as the user interface for generative AI assistants, Benioff said.

“The relevance of Slack as an incredible enterprise productivity platform, user interface and critical data sets for these new AI systems, well, it‘s inspiring all kinds of new use cases,” he said. “I couldn’t be more excited about the future.”

The growth of AI as well as the Internet of Things is an opportunity for other Salesforce products, he said.

“We’ve always been influenced by the world of AI and IoT and seeing our customers try to add in all of their intelligent devices onto our platform so they can have better relationships with their customers who are connected to them in these incredible new ways,” he said.

Along with an upcoming offering of ChatGPT on Slack—notably, Slack competes with Microsoft’s own collaboration app Teams—Salesforce unveiled five products and services around EinsteinGPT at the conference:

*EinsteinGPT for Service

*EinsteinGPT for Sales

*EinsteinGPT for Marketing

*EinsteinGPT for Slack

*EinsteinGPT for Developers

EinsteinGPT for Service aims to help service agents with customer chats and emails with auto-drafted, tailored responses, according to the vendor. Agents can edit the tone, and EinsteinGPT pulls in publicly available data about locations, weather and other information. The goal is to decrease the average handle time.

The service will also turn agent case notes into knowledge articles, which can take on average 10 days to generate.

EinsteinGPT for Sales will try to create natural language summaries for account news and updates, identify key contacts for salespeople and auto-generate drafts for sales emails. Salespeople can also change the formal tone of the content language.

EinsteinGPT for Marketing will try to generate content for tailored landing pages, email campaigns, ads and other efforts based on targeted segments.

The ChatGPT for Slack integration will summarize conversation threads, saving users from having to scroll back weeks and months into a Slack conversation.

EinsteinGPT for Developers will auto-generate code, test cases and comments. The tool can fit the coding style of a company, and it offers auto-complete such as with Google searches.

Salesforce also unveiled a $250 million fund for investing in generative AI startups. During the Salesforce earnings call, Benioff and his team signaled no more acquisitions on the scale of the 2021 $27.7 billion purchase of Slack, with Salesforce now concentrating on growing its margins.

For EinsteinGPT, Shih said that Salesforce is focused on putting guardrails around its generative AI to prevent bias, toxic results and ensure ethics.

Guardrails will also keep customer data secure and private and comply with local data residency requirements, she said.

EinsteinGPT will always have a human—a seller, marketing manager or customer service agent, for example—give the final say and editing capabilities on the content drafts created, she said.

Google Analytics 4 can now be integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot AI Will Soon Analyze Unstructured Data

Salesforce announced expanded capabilities of its generative AI assistant Einstein Copilot, enhanced integrations with Apple offerings and more today at the Salesforce World Tour New York 2023 event. The addition of the Data Cloud Vector Database to the Salesforce Data Cloud will allow both the Salesforce Data Cloud and Einstein Copilot to handle unstructured data.

Salesforce announced several other enhancements to its business software, particularly within Data Cloud for Advertisers. These products could be useful for a wide variety of teams, including IT, sales, customer service, marketing and commerce.

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A major enhancement to Salesforce Data Cloud is Data Cloud Vector Database, coming in a pilot program in February 2024. Data Cloud Vector Database is integrated vector database support that allows for the use of a wide variety of data types. Unstructured data — e.g., PDFs, email, audio and social media content — will be combined with structured data — e.g., purchase history, customer support cases and product inventory.

Einstein Copilot, Salesforce’s generative AI assistant, will be able to use unstructured data to respond to questions or perform analysis; it will access this data through Salesforce Data Cloud. Einstein Copilot will be generally available in February 2024.

“This transforms every piece of data — from emails to social media posts to audio — into actionable insights using AI, CRM, automation, AI, Einstein Copilot, and analytics,” said Rahul Auradkar, executive vice president and general manager of Unified Data Services and Einstein at Salesforce, in a press release.

Possible use cases of Einstein Copilot include:

Another enhancement for Salesforce Data Cloud will be Einstein Copilot Search, which will be in pilot in February 2024. Einstein Copilot Search draws from data across Data Cloud to provide smart suggestions for searches. It will be useful for problem-solving tasks performed by sales, customer service, marketing, commerce and IT teams. For example, Einstein Copilot search will be able to link a customer’s emails and phone calls to their formal support ticket history to assist a customer service representative.

Apple Messaging, Apple Pay and augmented reality will be accessible directly in certain Salesforce products. Salesforce and Apple have had a strategic partnership since 2018.

Specifically, Apple Messages for Business in Service Cloud, generally available today with Salesforce’s Service Cloud Digital Engagement, will let businesses set up live chat experiences with customers for customer service, product recommendations, tracking shipments or setting up appointments. Customers can pay for services and products with Apple Pay within the Messenger app.

Augmented reality with Apple’s ARKit will be available within the Salesforce Field Service mobile app in the summer of 2024. With it, field technicians can capture 3D renderings of real locations to make planning and installations easier.

The Salesforce Field Service iOS widget will be available for iPhones in the summer of 2024. It provides a quick view of key account information in Salesforce Field Service.

At Salesforce World Tour New York 2023, Salesforce’s AWS partnership was highlighted and other news was announced.

Salesforce reiterated the company’s partnership with AWS announced in November 2023, in which Salesforce expanded its use of AWS in multiple ways:

Salesforce opened a new jobs site for careers within the Salesforce ecosystem called Trailblazer Career Marketplace, which is open today to Salesforce partners.

Salesforce announced Unlimited Edition+, a package of Salesforce technologies for companies interested in getting into generative AI, data and CRM. UE+ is now in general availability.

New integrations are coming to Data Cloud for Advertisers. Data Cloud for Advertisers will be able to connect to Google Display & Video 360 for personalized ads across channels. Data Cloud for Advertisers will be able to connect to LinkedIn, letting advertisers target specific groups of professionals using Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud product usage data from their own apps and LinkedIn.

Note: TechRepublic is covering the Salesforce World Tour New York 2023 event virtually.