What Is Data Cloud?

Data Cloud is a data platform that unifies all of your company’s data on to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, giving every team a 360-degree view of the customer to drive automation and analytics, personalize engagement, and power trusted AI. Data Cloud creates this holistic customer view by turning volumes of disconnected data into a single, trusted model that’s easy to access and understand. This includes diverse data sets, like telemetry data, web engagement data and more across your organization or your external data lakes and warehouses. And this unified view helps your Sales, Service, and Marketing teams build personalized customer experiences, trigger data-driven actions and workflows, and safely drive AI across all of your Salesforce apps.

Regardless of where your data comes from — internal apps, systems, channels, external data lakes, and even emails, images, or PDFs — Data Cloud can bring it all together, creating a unified customer profile that helps your team better understand what your customer needs today, and anticipate what they may need tomorrow. This helps teams across your organization use all of your company’s data to boost productivity and deliver deeper customer value.

Using Data Cloud, your business can consistently provide personalized customer experiences that lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Data Cloud ensures that every employee has the right information at the right time to deliver what customers need, in near real-time, across the entire customer journey.

Examples of Data Cloud

Here are a few examples that show how organizations use Data Cloud to improve customer experiences:

• Formula 1 delights fans with personalization based on location, content preferences, and favorite driver. They’ve created near real-time fan journeys with one-of-a-kind experiences and exclusive offers, providing meaningful interactions to turn new fans into loyal ones and fuel sustained growth worldwide. Results include 88% fan satisfaction, 86% first contact resolution, and 99.6% email delivery rate.
• Air India has achieved faster case handling, efficient routing, and personalized customer experiences using Data Cloud and Einstein. With AI-powered reply recommendations and predictive AI, agents provide quick assistance and offer personalized recommendations.
• Turtle Bay, a luxury vacation destination on O‘ahu, has invested in Data Cloud to help segment customers into ideal personas, and Einstein Copilot will make tailored recommendations. For example, if they are segmented into a family category, family-friendly activities will be recommended by Einstein Copilot.

The powerful combination of data and CRM makes these personalized customer experiences possible. And for today’s “need-it-now” consumer, milliseconds matter. The cost of not keeping up with your customer could be lost sales opportunities, poor social media reviews, a disconnect in healthcare delivery, and much more.

Is this a customer data platform (CDP)?

Historically, customer data platforms (CDP) have been a solution used primarily by marketing teams. Data Cloud not only provides the traditional benefits of a CDP but also offers a comprehensive data solution for all other lines of business, including Sales and Service. With Data Cloud, these teams can effortlessly activate their data to automate workflows, personalize customer interactions, and build smarter AI.

New and innovative Data Cloud features

Data Cloud is unlike any data solution in the market today. 

1. Data Cloud is natively integrated with the Salesforce metadata framework  

This allows your organization to turn data from any source into standard objects and fields that teams using Salesforce already know how to work with. This means companies can more easily use all their data that lives outside of Salesforce within everyday apps, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, without having to invest in and maintain messy, expensive data pipelines.

2. Data Cloud is designed to put data to work through low-code, no-code tools 

With all your data harmonized within the Salesforce metadata framework, you can put your data to work using low code tools unique to Salesforce, such as Flow, and generative AI solutions like Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder. This helps business teams more easily use data to power all their workflows, automations, AI, and analytics without relying on IT.

3. Data Cloud is fully open and extensible

Your company has already dedicated substantial resources to implement data solutions, such as data lakes or data warehouses. With Data Cloud, you can maximize the ROI on all of these investments. That’s because Data Cloud is designed with an open, extensible architecture that employs zero-copy integrations, allowing seamless connections to top platforms like Snowflake or Databricks — without the need to move or copy data. This approach provides unparalleled flexibility and control for managing data within Data Cloud, making it easier than ever to bring data in and send it out as needed.

How does Data Cloud work?

Data Cloud is part of the Einstein 1 Platform, which helps you and your team gain a complete understanding of your customer, based on data. Data Cloud has three key capabilities that make this possible:

1. Data Cloud connects to every data source

First, Data Cloud lets you easily combine your data on Salesforce with data from any other external source to create a trusted, comprehensive view of your customer. Use pre-built connectors or our zero-copy integrations to quickly pull in data from across your enterprise that’s trapped in platforms like AWS, Snowflake, and Google Big Query.

2. Data Cloud harmonizes your data

Next, since Data Cloud is purpose-built on Salesforce, it helps you take advantage of integrating all your data to our standard metadata model. Once integrated into the model, companies can access and use any of this data directly inside Salesforce applications — like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Unlike other data solutions that are difficult to use when harmonizing disparate data into a singular model, Salesforce makes data harmonization incredibly easy through point-and-click mapping and pre-configured data bundles that automatically map your data for you.

3. Data Cloud makes it easy to activate your data

Finally, with Data Cloud, teams can transform messy, hard-to-use data that’s scattered across your enterprise into a unified resource. Data Cloud makes it easy to use your data to build data-driven automations and business processes.

With seamless integrations to both Salesforce applications and popular destinations, like telemetry data or purchase invoicing systems, teams can activate experiences powered by Data Cloud in nearly any environment where their work takes place.

How does Data Cloud keep data secure and what data ethics standards are in place?

The Salesforce vision for Data Cloud is to lead the industry on privacy and data ethics via best-in-class consent management, policy automation, and more. In collaboration with our Office of Ethical and Humane Use, Data Cloud is designed with privacy and data ethics best practices from the ground up. Most importantly, the Einstein 1 Platform adds a layer of data policy management to Data Cloud to make it possible for customers to keep their data safe and meet regulatory compliance requirements globally.

Take the next step to unify your data

Companies are collecting more data about their customers than ever before, yet that data sits in siloes and is disconnected from the customer experience. Data Cloud integrates information from various sources, which helps all teams provide a personalized customer experience at every touchpoint, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, business growth.

Bring it all together: Your data, your teams, and your customers. Learn how Salesforce Data Cloud can help you connect all of your data, and discover insights that lead to memorable customer experiences.

Watch the Data Cloud demo