Tag: Einstein

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Salesforce plans to incorporate generative AI across the platform

Salesforce has been in the news for a lot of non-product reasons of late, so it would be understandable that the company wants to bring the focus back to the business of selling software and away from the machinations of activist investors. Today at the TrailheadDX developer conference, the company announced a generative AI push with a pilot of technology they are calling ‘Einstein GPT’ that adds ChatGPT-like features across the platform.

“We’re announcing Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI for CRM. I think the future is really bright here. It’s creating a tremendous amount of opportunities for innovation within our ecosystem of products as well as our broader ecosystem,” Patrick Stokes, EVP and GM for platform at Salesforce told TechCrunch.

The company has had an underlying intelligence layer, Einstein, which has been running under the hood since 2016, helping bring intelligence across the platform. For example, it could help sales teams find the most likely customer to buy or the ones most likely to churn. The generative AI is more content-oriented and helps business users auto-generate text, pictures and code.

For Salesforce though, the data won’t in most cases be coming from the open internet, as with chat-based search. Instead, it will tie directly into the Salesforce data cloud. That means the new offering not only makes it easier for customers to generate content from their own data, it also provides a way to tie the new technology to a mainstay of the Salesforce platform as a data source.

It also can connect to Flow, the company’s workflow engine, so by adding generative AI to the equation, Salesforce could be helping sell other services, which could increase revenue at a time that it desperately needs it with activist investors pressuring the company to increase profits and reduce costs.

With that kind of cross-platform pollination in mind, Clara Shih, GM at Salesforce, says it will be incorporated across the different pieces of the platform, depending on the job at hand. For Service Cloud, the company will generate a reasonable answer to a customer’s inquiry based on information in the knowledge base automatically. Shih says the rep will always have the final say before sharing an AI-generated response with a customer.

“Think about all of the emails and chats that come into service agents today. They get inundated. With Einstein GPT for Service we can auto-generate draft replies so that the agents can respond to customers much faster, and they get final say. They can make any edits before they hit send,” she said.

Sales is also an obvious target for this technology. Imagine entering a question about a company, and the bot finds publicly available information to add or update a company record in the CRM. The AI can also generate an email to this company based on this information, and the salesperson could adjust the letter by asking for more or less formal tone, as one example of interacting with the generative technology.

Gif of Einstein GPT for Sales. A salesperson asks for recent information on a company and it answers the question automatically

Image Credits: Salesforce

Then there is marketing where employees can quickly generate web copy and pictures for a microsite using generative AI. In Slack, you could summarize long threads to understand them better, or perhaps gain insight on your customers, and ask questions to get back more details from long threads. Finally, coders can work faster using generative AI to create code snippets.

“Einstein GPT for Developers can improve developer productivity with AI-generated code snippets and test cases and comments for languages such as Apex,” Shih said.

She notes that customers can bring their own AI models or use one that comes out of the box from Salesforce, but given the ties to Salesforce data, and the potential headaches involved in dealing with external models, it seems customers would be more inclined to use Salesforce’s.

It’s not like this announcement came as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, given that CEO and Chair Marc Benioff has been telegraphing it for weeks on Twitter that he was enamored with the technology, and Salesforce has historically been known to try and incorporate whatever tech was the popular darling of the moment.

The Einstein GPT line of products will be available in pilot starting today with the expectation it will be made generally available some time later this year.

Salesforce plans to incorporate generative AI across the platform by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Salesforce applies AI to workflow with Einstein Automate

While Salesforce made a big splash yesterday with the announcement that it’s buying Slack for $27.7 billion, it’s not the only thing going on for the CRM giant this week. In fact Dreamforce, the company’s customer extravaganza is also on the docket. While it is virtual this year, there are still product announcements aplenty and today the company announced Einstein Automate, a new AI-fueled set of workflow solutions.

Sarah Franklin, EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange at Salesforce says that she is seeing companies facing a digital imperative to automate processes as things move ever more quickly online, being driven there even faster by the pandemic. “With Einstein Automate, everyone can change the speed of work and be more productive through intelligent workflow automation,” she said in a statement.

Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials says that combined these tools are designed to help customers get to work more quickly. “It’s not only about identifying the insight, it’s about making it easier to leverage it at the the right time. And this should make it easier for users to do it without spending more time and effort,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Einstein is the commercial name given to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform that touches every aspect of the company’s product line, bringing automation to many tasks and making it easier to find the most valuable information on customers, which is often buried in an avalanche of data.

Einstein Automate encompasses several products designed to improve workflows inside organizations. For starters, the company has created Flow Orchestrator, a tool that uses a low-code, drag and drop approach for building workflows, but it doesn’t stop there. It also relies on AI to provide help suggest logical next steps to speed up workflow creation.

Salesforce is also bringing Mulesoft, the integration company it bought for $6.5 billion in 2018 into the mix. Instead of processes like a mortgage approval workflow, the Mulesoft piece lets IT build complex integrations between applications across the enterprise, and the Salesforce family of products more easily.

Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5 billion

To make it easier to build these workflows, Salesforce is announcing the Einstein Automate collection page available in AppExchange, the company’s application marketplace. The collection includes over 700 pre-built connectors so customers can grab and go as they build these workflows, and finally it’s updating the OmniStudio, their platform for generating customer experiences. As Salesforce describes it, “Included in OmniStudio is a suite of resources and no-code tools, including pre-built guided experiences, templates and more, allowing users to deploy digital-first experiences like licensing and permit applications quickly and with ease. ”

Per usual with Salesforce Dreamforce announcements, the Flow Orchestrator being announced today won’t be available in beta until next summer. The Mulesoft component will be available in early 2021, but the OmniStudio updates and the Einstein connections collection are available today.

Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal

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Salesforce wants to bring voice to the workplace

At its annual Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco, Salesforce today introduced the next steps in its Einstein Voice project, which it first announced last year. Einstein Voice is the company’s AI voice assistant. You can think of it as Salesforce’s Alexa or Google Assistant, but with a more focused mission.

During a briefing ahead of the event, Salesforce Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor showed off an Einstein and Alexa enabled Einstein speaker (Salesforce chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff was supposed to be at the meeting, too, but for unknown reasons, he didn’t show) — and yes, it looked like Salesforce’s Einstein cartoon figure and its voluminous white hair lit up when it responded to queries. The company isn’t planning on making these devices available to the public, but it does show off the work the company has done with Amazon to integrate the service (though is by no means an Amazon -exclusive since the company is also working to bring Einstein to Google devices).

The theory here, as Taylor explained, is that having access to Salesforce data through voice will enable salespeople to quickly enter data into Salesforce when they are on the go and to ask the system questions about their data. The company argues that while voice assistants have found a place in the home, there are a lot of upsides to bringing it to businesses as well. That means a system has to account for the security needs of enterprises, too, as well as the fact that there is a wide range of different user personas it has to account for.

“We’re really excited about the idea of voice in businesses — the idea that every business can have an AI guide to their business decisions,” Taylor said. “I view it as part of this progression of technology. Computers and software started in the terminal with a keyboard, thanks to Xerox Parc moved to a mouse and graphic user interface, and then thanks to Steve Jobs, moved to a touchscreen, which I think is probably the dominant form factor for computers nowadays. And voice is really that next step.”

Einstein Voice gives Salesforce users gift of gab

This next step, Taylor argues, will allow companies to rethink how people interact with software and data. With voice, Einstein, which is Salesforce’s catch-all name for its AI products, has a “seat at the table,” he noted because you can simply as the system a question if you need additional data during a conversation. But the real mission here is to bring these tools to every business — not just to Salesforce’s executive meetings.

To enable this, Salesforce is launching a tool that will allow anybody within a company to quickly build basic Einstein skills to pull up data from Salesforce. These skills focus on data input and relatively basic queries, for now. During a demo ahead of the event, the team showed off how easy it would be to enable a manager to ask about the current sales performance of his team, for example. By now means, though, is this tool as rich as products like Google’s DialogFlow or Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service. It’s nowhere near as flexible yet, but the team notes that it’s still early days and that it is working on enabling the ability to have more complex dialogs with Einstein in the future, for example.

To be honest, it’s hard not to look at this as a bit of a gimmick. There are probably real use cases here, that every company will have to define for itself. Maybe there are salespeople who indeed want to use a voice interface to update their CRM system after a customer meeting, for example. Or they may want to ask about the value of an account while they are in the car. In many ways, though, this feels like a technology looking for a problem, despite Salesforce’s protestations that customers are asking for this.

Some of the other uses cases here, which the company didn’t really highlight all that much in its briefing, seem far more compelling. It’s using Einstein Voice to coach call center agents by analyzing calls to pull out insights and trends from sales call transcripts. It’s also launching Service Cloud Voice, which integrates telephony inside the company’s Service Cloud. Using a built-in transcription service, Einstein can listen to the call in real time and proactively provide sales teams and call center agents with relevant information. Those use cases may not be quite as exciting, but in the end, they may generate for more value for companies than having yet another voice assistant for which they have to build their own skills, using what is, at least for the time being, a rather limited tool.

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Einstein Voice gives Salesforce users gift of gab

Salespeople usually spend their days talking. They are on the phone and in meetings, but when it comes to updating Salesforce, they are back at the keyboard again typing notes and milestones, or searching for metrics about their performance. Today, Salesforce decided to change that by introducing Einstein Voice, a bit of AI magic that allows salespeople to talk to the program instead of typing.

In a world where Amazon Alexa and Siri make talking to our devices more commonplace in our non-work lives, it makes sense that companies are trying to bring that same kind of interaction to work.

In this case, you can conversationally enter information about a meeting, get daily briefings about key information on your day’s meetings (particularly nice for salespeople who spend their day in the car) and interact with Salesforce data dashboards by asking questions instead of typing queries.

All of these tools are designed to make life easier for busy salespeople. Most hate doing the administrative part of their jobs because if they are entering information, even if it will benefit them having a record in the long run, they are not doing their primary job, which is selling stuff.

For the meetings notes part, instead of typing on a smartphone, which can be a challenge anyway, you simply touch Meeting Debrief in the Einstein Voice mobile tool and start talking to enter your notes. The tool interprets what you’re saying. As with most transcription services, this is probably not perfect and will require some correcting, but should get you most of the way there.

It can also pick out key data like dates and deal amounts and let you set action items to follow up on.

Gif: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who is the founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials says this is a natural progression for Salesforce as people get more comfortable using voice interfaces. “I think this will make voice-first devices and assistants as important pieces to the CRM puzzle from both a customer experience and an employee productivity perspective,” he told TechCrunch.

It’s worth pointing out that Tact.AI has been doing this for some time on top of Salesforce giving this type of voice interaction for Salesforce users. It’s likely ahead of Salesforce at this point, but Leary believes having Salesforce enter the voice arena will probably benefit the startup more than hurt it.

“The Salesforce tide will lift all boats, and companies like Tact will see their profile increased significantly because while Salesforce is the leader in the category, it’s share of the market is still less than 20% of the market,” he pointed out.

Einstein is Salesforce’s catch-all brand for its artificial intelligence layer. In this case it’s using natural language processing, voice recognition technology and other artificial intelligence pieces to interpret the person’s voice and transcribe what they are saying or understand their request better.

Typically, Salesforce starts with a small set of functionality and the builds on that over time. That’s very likely what they are doing here, coming out with a product announcement in time for Dreamforce, their massive customer conference next week,