Salesforce released Einstein Copilot, a customizable, conversational, generative AI assistant, and we’re answering the big questions about what it is and what it can do for businesses.
Einstein Copilot combines the power of Salesforce CRM with the convenience of an AI assistant that interacts with users in a conversational way.
Unlike other AI assistants or copilots that lack adequate company data to generate useful responses, Einstein Copilot utilizes an organization’s own unique data and metadata to produce powerful customer insights and recommendations, while maintaining privacy and data governance and without requiring costly AI model training.
It can answer questions, summarize content, create new content, interpret complex conversations, and dynamically automate tasks for users — all from a consistent conversational UI across Salesforce’s #1 AI CRM applications. Marketers can use Einstein Copilot to build more effective digital storefronts. Customer service agents will be able to quickly handle requests, from generating replies to suggesting activities. And sales professionals can employ it to understand customers more deeply and close deals.
Einstein Copilot comes with a library of pre-programmed capabilities, automated responses, and business tasks that the AI can perform for users when prompted. Actions can be combined to execute dynamic multi-step plans.
How do Einstein Copilot, Data Cloud, and Einstein 1 Platform fit together?
Einstein Copilot is part of Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, which integrates the user interface, a variety of AI models, and data in a single metadata-driven platform. A trusted AI platform for customer companies, Einstein 1 Platform gives companies the ability to safely connect any data to build AI-powered apps with low code and deliver entirely new CRM experiences.
AI is only as good as the data it’s trained upon, and that’s why grounding Einstein Copilot in Data Cloud makes it so powerful. Data Cloud connects, federates, and harmonizes any data type from any product and system, and connects it back to the Salesforce applications that business users need to use every day, to deliver a comprehensive, 360-degree view of customers and power CRM, AI, automation, and analytics across any business process.
BYOL (Bring Your Own Lake) means companies can integrate any system with Data Cloud, accessing all of their trapped data from data lakes like AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake within Salesforce. They also no longer need to move data across platforms because of Data Cloud’s zero-ETL integration, and it connects to external predictive models for seamless use in Salesforce workflows.
Also, for the approximately 80% of data that is unstructured, semantic search and vector embeddings in Data Cloud unlock a brand new way to interact with data. Einstein Copilot Search enhances Einstein Copilot, providing sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams with an AI assistant capable of solving problems and generating content by accessing real-time unstructured and structured business data.
Say hello to Einstein Copilot
Video: Einstein Copilot Product Launch
With Data Cloud, all the relevant, trusted customer and business data — structured and unstructured, within and beyond Salesforce, across many disparate data lakes — can be unified and made available for use by every team and workflow.
How does Einstein Copilot empower teams to work faster?
Einstein Copilot brings together an intuitive interface for interacting with AI, world-class AI models, and deep integration of the data and metadata needed to benefit from AI.
Einstein Copilot is the only copilot with the ability to truly understand what is going on with your customer relationships.
Marc Benioff, Chair & CEO, Salesforce
All of this means Einstein Copilot, which is integrated with all Salesforce CRM applications, will provide a significant productivity boost, improve customer experiences, and increase margins.
- Sales professionals can accelerate deal closures by summarizing records or generating customized communications to provide more personalized client engagement.
- Service teams can streamline case resolution and boost customer satisfaction by surfacing relevant answers, offers, and data from disparate systems.
- Financial service companies can simplify client onboarding and craft personalized financial plans by automating data collection and analysis, enabling advisors to dedicate more time to client relationships and strategic advice.
- Marketing pros can simplify the development of new campaigns, create website landing pages based on personalized consumer browsing and buying preferences, and easily create contact forms that populate based on unified customer profile data from across the Salesforce platform. Following online purchases, Einstein Copilot can also automatically generate customer surveys, which help businesses increase long-term engagement and encourage future orders.
- Ecommerce retailers can tap Einstein Copilot for step-by-step assistance in building high-converting digital storefronts as well as customize and design different storefront components simply through conversation. Users can have Einstein Copilot automate complex tasks like managing multi-product catalog data and with the power of generative AI, Einstein Copilot can develop product descriptions in multiple languages, personalized product promotions, and SEO metadata that help drive conversions.
- Developers can supercharge their productivity by prompting Einstein Copilot using natural language to generate Apex code, suggest more effective and accurate code, and proactively scan for any code vulnerabilities — all from within the developer environment.
- Data analysts working in Tableau can enjoy productivity gains. Using the conversational interface, analysts can go from raw to actionable insights with just a few prompts. Einstein Copilot helps perform faster data exploration, build relevant visualizations based on best practices, automate repetitive tasks, and promote efficient data curation.
How can companies customize Einstein Copilot?
Users can customize Einstein Copilot and seamlessly embed AI prompts and actions across any CRM app with Einstein 1 Studio, a set of low-code tools deeply integrated with Data Cloud.
- Prompt Builder: A low-code prompt management tool that helps users create custom, reusable AI prompts in the flow of work, broadening the use of generative AI beyond conversational interfaces.
- Copilot Builder: A library of actions, or capabilities, that users can choose from to customize their AI assistant. For example, users can use it to configure their AI assistant to perform tasks like updating an account record or getting a shipping update.
- Model Builder: A capability that allows users to ‘bring your own LLM’ — including those from Anthropic, Hugging Face, Google, and OpenAI — to power custom Einstein Copilot functionality.
How does Salesforce ensure trust in Einstein Copilot?
Trust couldn’t be more important to today’s businesses. In fact, Salesforce research found the likelihood of business buyers using AI to improve their experiences declined in 2023 compared to the previous year. Another study found that most people (57%) do not trust AI.
Einstein Copilot addresses such concerns by serving up trusted AI interactions with privacy and security measures provided by the Einstein Trust Layer. Every AI interaction passes through the Einstein Trust Layer, part of Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, which can perform functions like masking personally identifiable information (PII), scoring outputs for toxicity, and helping to protect information from unauthorized access and data breaches through zero-data retention from Salesforce’s LLM partners.
New to the Einstein Trust Layer is customer-configured data masking, enabling admins to select the fields they want to mask, providing greater control. Additionally, the audit trail and feedback data collected from AI prompts and responses is now stored in Data Cloud, where it can be easily reported on or used for automated alerts through Flow and other Einstein 1 Platform tools.
Salesforce believes trusted AI needs a human at the helm. Instead of asking humans to intervene in every individual AI interaction, Salesforce is designing more powerful, system-wide controls that let humans focus on the high-risk items that really need their attention. In other words, humans let the AI row the boat but remain very much in charge of steering the ship. This means customers can get the very best from both human and machine intelligence.
How will Einstein Copilot shape the future of CRM?
Copilot is the first glimpse into a future where people primarily interact with software using conversational interfaces rather than clicking buttons, and will fundamentally change the way people use technology.
By integrating Einstein Copilot into Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, businesses of all sizes can take full advantage of generative AI.
Just by asking a question or giving an instruction, Einstein Copilot can free up time for more strategic work by automating repetitive tasks and providing users with easy access to information. Copilot also analyzes data to provide insights that would be difficult or time-consuming for humans to uncover. These insights can help businesses make better decisions about everything, ranging from sales and marketing strategies to product development and customer service.
New Einstein Copilot capabilities, such as the customization available through Einstein 1 Studio, allow businesses to build and customize their own AI assistants with skills and prompts that fit their needs.
How can customers get Einstein Copilot?
Customers can access Einstein Copilot by purchasing Einstein 1 Editions or by adding it on to Enterprise or Unlimited Editions. Detailed pricing information is available here.
Einstein Copilot is available globally now for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and will be available in Marketing Cloud later in 2024. Additionally, Einstein Copilot for Tableau will be launching in the second half of this year. Tableau currently supports generative AI capabilities with Tableau Pulse and Tableau Copilot (now in Beta). Einstein Copilot initially supports data residency in the United States and the English language.
Go deeper:
- Read the news announcing Einstein Copilot’s arrival and watch the video
- See how Salesforce is applying more than a decade of AI research to usher in a new era of productivity
- Read why Salesforce’s leading AI minds say trust is job number one for developing AI
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