Salesforce Inc. today unveiled a new real-time data platform called Salesforce Genie that will power the company’s suite of customer relationship management products, allowing its customers to deliver highly personalized experiences across all channels from marketing, sales and commerce that can adapt to changing information rapidly.

“This might be the most significant shift in our platform” in 20 years,” Salesforce co-Chief Executive Bret Taylor told attendees at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, where Genie was introduced.

Doing business has become an increasingly personalized affair for many services and retailers, especially with the pandemic pushing even more companies to digitize. Keeping ahead of customer interests can be difficult for businesses that see millions of transactions a day, especially when more and more customers expect interactions to be more personalized than before.

Rahul Auradkar, head of customer data platform at Salesforce, told SiliconANGLE that Genie was built to create a single platform to unify and personalize data that could be accessed in real-time and power the entirety of Salesforce’s platform.

He explained that the company’s own customers had said that more of their own downstream customers had begun to expect more personalized experiences. Companies also averaged 976 separate applications running in their businesses, leading to data fragmentation, which meant there could be 976 different versions of a customer within a single company.

Without real-time propagation of customer information, customers moving between departments could discover themselves repeating the same thing over and over. That would lead to a very frustrating customer experience and potentially lost customers and lost sales. And the situation becomes even more critical in other industries such as healthcare where real-time data for patients moving between departments can affect people’s health.

“In the next three to five years, we expect this notion of the real-time customer relationship management will come to life, it’s here, it’s now, but it will evolve over that period and we are referring to that as the heartbeat of the future,” said Auradkar.

With Genie’s customer data platform, all data ingested into Salesforce becomes a single point of truth in real time, which means that nothing gets left behind. It also transforms and harmonizes data into a real-time customer graph, which means that all of the data can be used by any app in Salesforce, AppExchange marketplace, including custom apps.

“The power of real time is doing the right thing, at the right time,” said Auradkar. “Let’s say a customer calls in through a phone call or a text message or a Slack message and then the customer gets the right response. And the customer service agent’s experience is very similar as well. He should get real-time AI information from the back-end that can then delegate the right response such as a connection to another system to give a discount or a cancellation for a customer.”

All of this is made possible by connecting real-time streaming data into Salesforce Einstein, Auradkar said, the artificial intelligence that powers an analytical engine capable of context awareness and insight delivery. Einstein generates more than 175 billion predictions every day, and now with Genie, it can provide predictions and personalization based on real-time data.

By partnering with data warehouse provider Snowflake Inc., Salesforce has secured real-time open data-sharing directly within Snowflake’s cloud to enable access between both platforms without having to move or duplicate data. Customers can also “bring their own AI” by coupling Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Sagemaker instead of using Salesforce Einstein. For marketing, first-party advertising is also available with Amazon Ads and Meta Platforms Inc. with new privacy-safe integrations for advertising activation and insights.

An all-new section App Exchange, the marketplace for Salesforce custom apps, for Genie now features 18 Genie partners with apps and experts that help companies automate for advertising, enrich their customer profiles and use the power of real-time data.

With reporting from Robert Hof

 Image: Salesforce