Built on Salesforce, recently-launched digital subscription platform Santander Navigator delivers personalized growth strategies to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to expand internationally.
Why it’s important: SMEs are crucial to the UK economy, but they face numerous challenges when seeking to expand their services abroad, including:
Driving the news: Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UKI, spoke to John Carroll, Head of International and Transactional Banking at Santander UK, to unpack how Salesforce technology helps Santander support UK SMEs make the leap to international sales. Companies don’t have to bank with Santander to access the support of Santander Navigator.
In-depth: Previously, Santander’s manually built ecosystems offering industry-specific content and solutions would serve between 300 and 400 companies each year.
With Salesforce, we’re reimagining how we understand, serve, and engage with our UK SMEs. Our relationship directors are getting insights generated by the platform onto their dashboard on a Thursday before they see their clients on the Friday, to have transformational conversations which other banks can’t have. All of this enables our customers to grow faster, and for us to grow with them.
John Carroll, Head of International and Transactional Banking, Santander UK
The Salesforce perspective: “Supported by Salesforce technology, Santander is accelerating its transformation into a digital bank focused as much on the future as its customers,” said Bahrololoumi.
What’s next: Santander plans to roll out its Navigator platform across other countries later this year.
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Ahead of Shoptalk, Salesforce announced new Commerce Cloud innovations that will help companies in any industry connect to their customers with personalized experiences powered by real-time data – all on one unified platform.
Significance: Eighty-one percent of consumers plan to reassess their budget over the next 12 months, shifting spending toward more personalized experiences. Retailers who don’t focus on increased personalization while also increasing efficiency will find their business at risk.
Technology context: Commerce Cloud leverages the full power of the Customer 360 to deliver personalized experiences at scale that are intelligent, automated, and real time, while driving efficiency, productivity, and time to value.
Go deeper: Two new Commerce Cloud innovations will help merchants build seamless, personalized experiences — on any commerce platform.
Quotes:
“Commerce Cloud gives us the opportunity to minimize our total cost of ownership while maximizing flexibility, with options to build a storefront that’s templated, composable, or a hybrid of the two. Now we can drive efficient growth and faster time to value — all on one platform.” – Frank De Maria, Vice President of Digital Engineering & Platforms Technology, MillerKnoll
Now we can drive efficient growth and faster time to value — all on one platform.
Frank De Maria, Vice President of Digital Engineering & Platforms Technology, MillerKnoll
“Composable Storefront has been the key to unlocking a more agile and customer-experience focused approach to product development. It allows us to focus energy and effort on the biggest problems to solve without the overhead and wasted effort of working full stack. Enabling quicker speed to market and site speed, we’ve seen positive outcomes for both our customers and teams.” – Helen Martin, Lead Digital Product Manager, Sweaty Betty
Fast facts:
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Ahead of Shoptalk, Salesforce announced an integration with Google Merchant Center to help merchants show consumers the product they have available in local stores.
Why it’s important: Local stores are integral to how people shop today. According to a Google survey, online search was used before 95% of in-store holiday shopping occasions in the U.S. in 2022.
Go deeper: The Google integration with Commerce Cloud will help merchants reach new audiences across free and paid Google surfaces by streamlining how they share local inventory with Google Merchant Center.
Soundbites:
“Commerce Cloud helps sellers connect with their customers in intelligent, automated, and personalized ways — across every channel. Salesforce’s integration with Google extends this power, helping merchants reach new customers and unlock new revenue by showing them the precise products they’re looking for in real time. With Google and Commerce Cloud, they are driving awareness of new store locations, diverting foot traffic from competitors, and increasing store visits.” – Michael Affronti, GM, Commerce Cloud
Salesforce’s integration with Google extends this power, helping merchants reach new customers and unlock new revenue by showing them the precise products they’re looking for in real time.
Michael Affronti, GM, Commerce Cloud
“People shop with Google more than a billion times per day. This integration is a meaningful update in the way Google merchants using Commerce Cloud are able to show shoppers what they have in store. It’s no secret that shoppers today do their shopping research in many new, personal ways. Being able to see what’s in store — whether because you need something same-day or because you want to touch and feel a product — can be the difference between a merchant making a sale or not.” – Matt Madrigal, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping, Google
This integration is a meaningful update in the way Google merchants using Commerce Cloud are able to show shoppers what they have in store.
Matt Madrigal, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping, Google
“With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Under Armour has seamlessly enabled Google’s local inventory ads for all of our stores, which is helping us promote our omnichannel buying experience to customers on Google. This integration has helped make setup seamless and has already started to show business impact.” – Dimitrija Georgiev, Senior Director Americas Marketing, Under Armour
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Earlier today, Salesforce announced a new, multi-year partnership with McLaren Racing to help the Formula 1 team deepen its relationship with its global fan base and connect with audiences in new markets.
Formula 1 has exploded in popularity and now counts over 500 million fans globally. But with fewer than 1% actually attending a Grand Prix in a year, racing teams must complement exceptional real-world performance with exceptional digital fan experiences.
Ed Green, Head of Commercial Technology for McLaren Racing, explains how the partnership is empowering McLaren to get a 360-degree view of fans to personalize both digital and in-person experiences.
Marketing Cloud means we can do things like target groups of users… and make sure we send that communication to them at the right time based on their local market.
Ed Green, McLaren Racing
MuleSoft for us has been a bit of a game changer.
Ed Green, McLaren Racing
I love seeing the team getting empowered.
Ed Green, McLaren Racing
Tableau has launched new features that help customers make data-driven decisions more quickly and efficiently. The new release will further enable companies to put their data at the center of every business interaction, use natural language to add business context to dashboards, personalize access based on their security policies, and more. This follows Salesforce’s recent announcement of Einstein GPT, which powers Tableau functionality to empower anyone to ask questions of their data and get answers with generative AI.
Significance: 8 out of 10 business leaders agree that data is critical for decision-making — especially today. However, many still struggle with how to use it. In fact, 41% of business leaders report not understanding their data because it is too complex or not accessible enough.
While companies agree about the advantages of using data, there’s a clear disconnect from how they’re actually using it in practice.
Go deeper:
Impact:
Soundbites:
We are committed to continuously delivering capabilities inspired directly by the Tableau Community, and with these new innovations, businesses are able to make data-driven decisions that will drive continued growth and efficiency
Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau
More information:
*Tableau for Slack enhancements is coming soon.Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM.” For more information please visit https://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Today, Salesforce announced the limited general availability of Salesforce Web3, which will enable companies to sustainably mint, manage, and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on a trusted platform.
As businesses and brands explore emerging Web3 technologies, including NFTs, it’s imperative that everyone does so in a responsible, ethical way. Salesforce is no exception, which is why the company has centered its values as it developed, piloted, and launched this new product.
Salesforce has seen growing customer demand for NFTs as a way to build brand loyalty and consumer engagement. NFTs present an opportunity for companies to find new audiences and source zero-party data, and to unlock co-creation and co-ownership, token-gated communities, and personalized engagement using wallet data.
However, as with any early-stage technology, there are potential risks to safety, privacy, and trust. For example, in a recent survey conducted by Salesforce of 935 global respondents*, 59% reported experiencing or witnessing some type of fraud (the most common being fake accounts acting as a brand for the purposes of phishing). There was also a significant trust gap between those who have purchased an NFT in the past and those who have yet to do so. For these reasons, it was important that Salesforce provide customers with a trusted, sustainable platform to operate NFT campaigns and programs.
For these reasons, it was important that Salesforce provide customers with a trusted, sustainable platform to operate NFT campaigns and programs.
To develop Salesforce Web3, Salesforce engaged its Office of the Ethical and Humane Use, Technology (Product and Engineering), Sustainability, and Equality teams – as well as its Web3 Advisory Board – to understand the complex dynamics of Web3 and determine how to engage in this emerging space through a values-driven lens.
Together these teams developed five principles to guide their Web3 development efforts:
Salesforce put these principles to work by building Trust and Sustainability features directly into the product. To do so, the Web3 product team partnered closely with Salesforce’s Ethical Use Advisory Council, external experts from academia and non-governmental organizations, and employees.
Some of the many trust features and functionality include:
Salesforce Web3 also delivers sustainable experiences for customers by:
To ensure these principals were met, Salesforce undertook a deep research process that included a successful customer pilot with over 275,000 transactions on Polygon and Flow. No fraudulent activity of any impact was discovered. Furthermore, Salesforce found:
These are still the early days of a rapidly evolving technological landscape — and Salesforce will continue to evolve and innovate along with it.
For example, Salesforce is currently exploring additional features that push the boundaries on privacy approaches that don’t simply replicate a Web2 privacy paradigm (e.g. box-checking for opt-in, cookies) but that are unique to Web3 (e.g. consent tokens or use of verifiable credentials). The promise of these and other innovations will deliver more trust for customers and consumers.
The promise of these and other innovations will deliver more trust for customers and consumers.
Salesforce does not have all the answers, but knows that by leading with values, it can help guide Web3 in a positive direction.
*Data is from a double-blind survey of 935 consumers across 30 countries conducted by Salesforce Research November 7–28, 2022.
Salesforce Web3 helps companies create, manage, and deploy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a trusted, scalable, and sustainable way. With the limited release of Salesforce Web3, companies can connect with their customers in a whole new way by connecting their Customer 360 with Web3 data for a holistic view of how customers interact with their brand across traditional and emerging digital environments.
Significance: Web3, considered the next generation of the internet, includes emerging technologies like blockchain and NFTs, which offer brands creative opportunities to engage new audiences and tap into first-party data to deepen customer relationships and drive loyalty.
Go deeper:
Soundbites:
“Salesforce helped us reimagine and digitally scale Crown Royal’s Purple Bag Project by giving us a trusted partner to support our front-end commerce site and back-end data connector to support the #ThatDeservesACrown campaign. For every digital collectible claimed, we sent a care package to active duty U.S. military members around the world,” said Devin Nagy, Director, Technology and Emerging Platforms, Diageo North America.
“Salesforce Web3 enhances our NFT collections to help us connect with customers and bring our Web2 and Web3 systems together. Web3 Connect is powering invaluable insights into our audience and seamlessly bridging Web3 channels with the rest of our customer experience. We know we have a trusted partner with Salesforce, and are now able to provide an exciting user experience and gateway to Mattel’s iconic IP in a new way,” Sven Gerjets, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Mattel.
“We wanted to work with a trusted partner, and choosing Salesforce Web3 was an easy decision. What could have taken months — creating and securely deploying our Club Soda 3.0 NFT pilot program — took less than two weeks. The seamless data integration into our CRM gave us real-time insight into the 30% net new customers we were able to reach and powered our personalized campaigns via Marketing Cloud,” said Claire Boots, Global CRM Manager, Scotch & Soda.
Fast facts: 67% of consumers surveyed* said values are important to them when considering purchasing an NFT from a brand. And 65% say a brand’s environmental and sustainability practices are important when considering purchasing an NFT.
Learn more:
*Salesforce Consumer NFT Survey, June 2022
Technological advances are really only effective if they improve on experiences or create an entirely new kind of experience that manages to break through the inertia barrier and reach broad adoption. Does it do something that I can’t currently do? Does it do something novel or better? Will it create new opportunities and markets?
With Web3 — the next generation of the internet — we are still in the midst of answering those questions. For those who might think the current version of the internet (Web2) checks all the boxes, there are others like Adam Caplan, Salesforce’s SVP of Emerging Technology, who think that the next chapter of the internet is less about links and clicks as it is “about building community and creating personalized digital experiences in this Web3 world.”
In this interview, Caplan gets into the nitty-gritty of Web3 technology — or more specifically NFTs — as well as what the company is doing to help brands deploy and manage Web3 campaigns in a sustainable and trusted way.
While still in its early years, the mission behind Web3 is to create a decentralized web that creates new types of ownership, new ways of building trust and collaboration, and offers exciting new opportunities for brands to engage with customers.
NFTs and Crypto live in Web3, which is the next generation of the internet built on blockchain. It allows people to read, write, and own their data and digital identity. And, it’s a decentralized network, meaning there is no centralized control point. Everyone in the network has the exact same copy of the data in the form of a distributed ledger. If someone’s ledger is altered or corrupted in any way, the majority of the people in the network will reject it.
Crypto – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, etc. – are ‘fungible tokens.’ ‘Fungible’ basically means they’re all the same, they’re not unique, and one can be swapped for another.
Non-fungible tokens – NFTs – are unique. They have unique properties and different rarity levels.
Non-fungible tokens – NFTs – are unique. They have unique properties and different rarity levels. They give their owners an opportunity to harness the IP to create value and a sense of community in terms of ownership. As an example, if I buy an NFT of a digital shoe, I can exclusively use it on my avatar in a virtual world. I also can get access to an exclusive new community of sneaker enthusiasts.
Each time an asset, like my digital shoe, is purchased or transferred, a ‘stamp,’ much like a physical stamp, is added to the blockchain. Think of blockchain as a ledger that stores information, like purchases, in a digital format. Blockchain helps verify every step of the NFT purchase, from being stamped as owned by one person, to being sold, transferred, traded, and so on. It also helps verify ownership so holders know their NFT is authentic and unique.
We’ve seen a lot of interest from customers who want to understand and tap into this new world of Web3 and NFTs. Unique digital assets like NFTs present new avenues for brands to tap into first-party data to build digital communities, create digital twins, and drive loyalty programs.
Unique digital assets like NFTs present new avenues for brands to tap into first-party data to build digital communities, create digital twins, and drive loyalty programs.
A sports team, for example, can offer NFTs that accompany a loyal customer’s ticket, and the NFT unlocks early access to exclusive brand experiences. In this case, NFTs help drive loyalty with a brand’s super-community.
Brands can also leverage an NFT within a digital experience, which is really popular among clothing and fashion brands. There’s a pretty amazing amount of clothing changes that are made to people’s avatars in the metaverse — it happens daily, if not more. We see this in gaming too. So, we’re seeing a lot of excitement about this use case, and with rewards delivered in the real world, such as exclusive, in-store opportunities or discounts.
We knew that this emerging space had risks. We partnered with our Office of Ethical and Humane Use and Sustainability teams to make an easy-to-use technology that enables organizations to ‘mint’ (create, in NFT-speak), manage, and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a trusted, sustainable, and easily managed way, the same way they sell their physical products on the Salesforce platform but with an additional layer of trust and safety built in.
We’re creating a safe place with an amazing user experience where customers don’t have to understand the really complicated aspects of blockchain, like smart contracts. We also built industry-leading security and trust features into our Web3 product to protect the brands, as well as their end customers. This allows them to enter the Web3 and NFT space in a safe way, and buy directly from their trusted brand’s website as opposed to third-party marketplaces.
We make it very easy for Salesforce administrators to set up and implement an NFT offering through NFT Management. It uses drag and drop tools, which dramatically cuts down on traditionally lengthy development cycles. It’s all customizable and built to make the process simple and seamless – from setting up an NFT collection to selecting the most eco-friendly blockchain.
And, with our new Web3 Connect API integration, brands can sell or give away NFTs, and all that data comes back into Customer 360 to link customer activity across Web2 and Web3 — with consent from customers, of course – giving organizations a holistic view of each customer across both physical and digital environments. All of this enables brands to build deeper connections with their customers, and drives more value for their NFT holders.
At Salesforce, trust is our number one value. With Web3, we wanted to make sure we were building a product that people could trust. We want to protect a customer’s brand, and they want to protect their end customer.
To make sure these guiding principles were met, we consulted with experts inside and outside the company before launching a customer pilot. After more than 275,000 successful transactions in the pilot, we learned customers primarily see NFTs as a way to modernize loyalty programs and connect with new audiences in Web3.
One of these customers was Scotch & Soda, a fashion retailer, who came to us wanting to increase brand awareness and community engagement while building brand loyalty using Web3 and NFTs. With the help of Salesforce partner AE Studio, we were able to bring their vision to life by using Salesforce Web3 to create and securely deploy their Club Soda 3.0 NFT pilot program in less than two weeks.
This gave Scotch & Soda real-time insight into the 30% net new customers they were able to reach and powered more personalized marketing campaigns with unified data from across Web2 and Web3.
This gave Scotch & Soda real-time insight into the 30% net new customers they were able to reach and powered more personalized marketing campaigns with unified data from across Web2 and Web3.
If Web1 was about democratized access to information, and Web2 was about facilitating transactions and bi-directional communication, Web3 is about enabling more personalized digital experiences. The Web3 era has the power to change how we participate on the internet by enabling people to read, write, and own their data and digital identity. NFTs are one part of an individual’s digital identity.
Brands should be intentional in incorporating NFTs in the right way. They should be able to answer questions like: What is the roadmap we’re going to deliver to NFT holders? How do we manage our communities? What does the artwork communicate or inspire and how do we support the creator community? What royalty should we reward artists with to make sure this is fair and equitable? How do we think about sustainable chains? Do we want to engage in co-creation with our communities?
Another of Salesforce’s core values is sustainability, so that was an incredibly important consideration in our development process. We’ve partnered closely with our Sustainability Team, Ethical Use Advisory Council, external experts from academia and non-governmental organizations, and employees to ensure our strategy was progressive — to lead, and to really push the industry in the right direction when it comes to sustainability.
We’ve made a conscious decision that Salesforce will not support proof-of-work chains and will instead only support proof-of-stake chains, which result in 99% fewer carbon emissions. When brands create the rules and parameters for purchasing in Salesforce Web3, they have the option to select their blockchain based on their preferences, from a list of proof-of-stake chains.
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Salesforce today announced that Air India, India’s leading airline, is using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, and Tableau to transform its customer experiences.
Why it’s important: Eighty-eight percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services — the highest it’s ever been.
Driving the news: As Air India prepares for overall growth and a rapid increase in customers over the coming years, adopting new technologies to enhance passenger experiences is a key pillar of its transformation journey — Vihaan.AI.
What they’re saying: “Understanding our customers and providing the best customer experiences is our top priority. When things don’t go as expected, we want to be able to address our customers’ challenges quickly and holistically. Salesforce’s flexible technologies and unified customer data platform enables us to build the resilience our business needs and deliver the personalization our customers expect.” — Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India.
The Salesforce perspective: “Today, technology is at the heart of any ambitious organization’s business strategy. It is a force multiplier, and a catalyst to deliver growth and increase value. For Air India, this transformation is the beginning of a historic journey and to many — an emotional one. We are honored to be a part of this journey with Air India, reimagining the customer experience and delivering excellence.” — Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO, Salesforce India.
For more Salesforce customer news, visit this page.
Today, Salesforce and OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT app for Slack. Built by OpenAI on the Slack platform, the app integrates ChatGPT’s powerful AI technology to deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance directly in Slack to help millions of companies work more productively.
Why it’s important: The majority of senior IT leaders believe generative AI has the potential to help them better serve their customers, take advantage of data, and operate more efficiently. Eighty-one percent believe generative AI should combine public and private data sources.
Behind the tech: Currently in beta, the ChatGPT app for Slack provides a conversational interface powered by OpenAI’s large language models to get instant conversation summaries to stay informed, research tools to learn about any topic, and provide writing assistance to quickly draft messages.
With the ChatGPT app for Slack, customers can:
The app was built on top of Slack’s trusted platform, and will be available alongside more than 2,600 other integrations in the app ecosystem. This ensures customers have granular controls to safely manage third-party access of Slack data. Any data that the app has permission to access will not be used to train ChatGPT’s language model.
OpenAI has been a great Slack customer, and we’re even more excited for them to be an amazing Slack partner. The ChatGPT app for Slack deeply integrates the power of OpenAI’s cutting edge large language models into Slack’s conversational interface. There couldn’t be a more natural fit. This will give customers new superpowers by helping them tap the collective knowledge of their organization’s channel archives. We’re excited to partner with OpenAI to bring more generative AI powers directly into Slack to deliver productivity efficiencies for everyone.
Noah Desai Weiss, Chief Product Officer, Slack
Fast facts: OpenAI chose Slack as its productivity platform to accelerate employee productivity, connect directly with customers, and support the hyper-growth of the business.
“I love Slack Connect so much. We were very early adopters, and, alongside Huddles, it’s been the lifeblood of our customer communications. I think it’s the coolest workspace communication advancement ever. Injecting our own technology into this product has supercharged our ability to connect with and delight our customers. Life without it with our customers is unimaginable.” – Zack Kass, Head of GTM for OpenAI
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Salesforce Ventures, the company’s global investment arm, today launched a new $250 million generative AI fund to bolster the startup ecosystem and spark the development of responsible generative AI.
Why this matters: More than two-thirds of leaders will be prioritizing generative AI over the next 18 months, but technical and ethical concerns with the technology remain a top concern.
The details: Announced at TrailblazerDX, the fund will initially invest in four companies, including Anthropic, Cohere, Hearth.AI, and You.com.
Soundbites:
This fund will accelerate our commitment to fostering the next generation of innovation and we’re excited to see how these companies reinvent how the world works.
About Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, we’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world’s most tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages our decades of expertise in the cloud and our long-term relationships with key decision-makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give our portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 30 countries with offices all over the world including in San Francisco, Irvine, New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. Follow@SalesforceVC and learn more at http://www.salesforceventures.com.
Quick Take: Einstein GPT will become one of the most ubiquitous generative AI technologies in the enterprise by bringing generative AI directly into the world’s #1 CRM. Einstein GPT delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale.
You’d be hard-pressed to open up a news or business site right now and not find an article on generative AI. It’s a trend that has led many business leaders to wonder: How can I use this emerging technology at my company?
Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of AI and Machine Learning Jayesh Govindarajan has some ideas, each rooted in the deep experience his team brings to the AI space.
“We’ve been innovating with AI for [about] eight years now, and we have implemented the technology at scale,” he said during a recent episode of the Blazing Trails podcast.
Consumer versions of generative AI, like ChatGPT, have dominated the media headlines. But like all new technology, the biggest opportunity to drive adoption at scale is through business. That’s why Salesforce will be one of the most consequential companies in the field of generative AI, with widespread adoption through the world’s #1 CRM delivering AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction.
According to Govindarajan, Einstein GPT puts efficiency, optimization, and opportunity at the heart of generative AI in a way that is “uniquely Salesforce.” Here, Govindarajan shares more on what that looks like.
There’s been a ton of interest in this domain. Much of what we’ve seen regarding generative AI so far has been consumer facing: ChatGPT, Bing for search, Google’s Bard, and others. But we’re focused on using generative AI to change how business gets done.
Our focus has been on bringing generative AI into Salesforce in a way that can be effective for Salesforce Trailblazers innovating on the platform. The question we’re asking is: How do we bring these technologies into our platform in a safe, secure manner that helps users be more productive? Einstein GPT does exactly that.
The questions companies should be asking are: is What is the business purpose? What specific jobs and tasks can generative AI help with? Funny poems and AI-powered search engines are great, but they’re not going to impact the bottom line and they’re not going to transform your ways of working.
AI is only as good as the data that powers it, and Salesforce is where thousands of companies across every industry globally manage their sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT data. That’s an advantage for Salesforce’s customers because they can use their existing data to create and deliver AI-generated content, at scale, conveniently within their existing flow of work.
This is where Salesforce stands apart from the competition. We have the world’s #1 CRM and the world’s most robust customer data set, which allows Einstein GPT to produce AI content in a way that no other enterprise technology company can match.
We have the world’s #1 CRM and the world’s most robust customer data set, which allows Einstein GPT to produce AI content in a way that no other enterprise technology company can match.
Beyond that, we believe there are three things that really work in our favor. One is the nature of generative AI in the workplace — the potential benefits and use cases are endless. And the applications are not open domain or open ended as they are with consumer applications.
The second is our technology. Salesforce can be a powerful multiplier of generative AI experiences because Einstein GPT blends public data with CRM data, and when several million of our customers are all using Einstein GPT, the model gets refined with each instance and becomes more accurate. It’s a cumulative effect and is really a huge differentiator for Salesforce.
The third aspect is, frankly, our expertise in building these systems at scale with trust, with permission from our customers, and with design experiences that keep the human in the loop. For us, this is a next evolution of our work in AI, and is the byproduct of everything we’ve built.
It’s such a team sport, and we have the ability to bring these sort of disparate, cross-functional teams together to define partnerships and policy, build the product, and get the product deployed. We have an exciting journey ahead.
Einstein GPT is the world’s first generative AI for CRM. By pulling transformative generative AI technology into the Salesforce CRM, customers will have the ability to quickly and easily generate AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction.
Einstein GPT pairs Salesforce’s proprietary AI models and trusted data from Salesforce Data Cloud with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners — including OpenAI — to deliver experiences that are real time, time-saving, highly personalized, and at hyper-scale.
For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers.
Our focus around Einstein GPT has been in three areas. First is the generative aspect of the technology. We’re focused on what it can power. Yes, it can write documents, but we’re also working on its CRM impact beyond automated conversations.
The second aspect is bringing it to customers in a trusted, safe, and secure manner. ChatGPT and other systems are extremely powerful, and built on public data sources, but to work in the enterprise, the technology has to be grounded in the data available in that organization. So, being able to blend public and private data together is what makes this a more trusted, more valuable experience for our customers.
Third, personalization. Using generative AI, and applying that personalization to generative context and content that gets created is going to be extremely powerful, especially within Salesforce and the Customer360.
From a user’s perspective, it really reduces the friction of going from an idea to a first draft. That could be writing a document based on six meetings you’ve had. Or, it could be summarizing several conversation streams to look for one or two insights that you can use to improve your approach.
A lot of these are extremely powerful functions that this multitask learning system enables you to go build. If you train it on sales emails, it’ll write great sales emails. If you train it on service emails that are about fixing a modem, it can generate great responses when you ask a question about fixing a modem. These are foundational concepts that we can bring to bear across our clouds.
As an engineer, I’m passionate about Einstein GPT and what it can do for developers: write great quality code in a consistent manner, so every piece of code is not a special and very manual snowflake. I think there’ll be an exponential flywheel effect where the system trains on good quality code and becomes more and more efficient over time.
From a Salesforce perspective, there are three things that really work in our favor. One is the nature of generative AI in the workplace — the potential benefits and use cases are endless. And the applications are not open domain or open ended as they are with consumer applications.
The second is our technology. Salesforce can be a powerful multiplier of generative AI experiences because Einstein GPT blends public data with CRM data, and when several million of our customers are all using Einstein GPT, the model gets refined with each instance and becomes more accurate. It’s a cumulative effect and is really a huge differentiator for Salesforce.
The third aspect is, frankly, our expertise in building these systems at scale with trust, with permission from our customers, and with design experiences that keep the human in the loop. For us, this is a next evolution of our work in AI, and is the byproduct of everything we’ve built.
It’s such a team sport, and we have the ability to bring these sort of disparate, cross-functional teams together to define partnerships and policy, build the product, and get the product deployed. We have an exciting journey ahead.
Imagine that you want to write an email with meaningful content about how customers can use Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to develop new skills. You want it to be based on data, and in this case you likely want to use Trailhead for the content and messaging.
To have Einstein GPT form output that is meaningful and usable, you want to use the compositional abilities of generative AI but on data that you deem fit — in this case, Trailhead data. This is what we call grounding of large language models. You also want the ability to refine the output based on commands. That layer is the instruction-tuning layer, something that enables the engine to understand your asks based on the prompts you type.
The final layer is what’s called the reinforcement learning with human feedback layer, which is, as you use the system, how do you collect that information on usage? What is a good generative output? What is not a good generative output? What generative output needs to be edited before sending it out to the customer? Human judgment of machine output is a very valuable reinforcing signal.
And again, building this into the Salesforce stack means we can tie that reinforcement to the job to be done in context and use that to enhance the overall generative capability that we produce.
The end game is that we can push those signals into the lower layers of the large language models, to make them more accurate, tuned to the task and ultimately highly efficient.
I see this technology as foundational and benefitting customers across industries, both larger enterprise companies and SMBs. This is a big opportunity for smaller businesses who don’t have a big workforce with lots of resources. There’s a lot of data for these businesses which is truly public data; things that you put on your website, things that you are willing to put out as FAQs. Not everything is private data and low hanging fruit for them will be to build generative experiences for outbound and inbound automation — going from a website visit to a qualified lead, as an example. A lot of these initial experiences will likely be SMB first because they’ll move quickly and be fast to try this.
Large enterprises have an opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation with generative AI as well. By augmenting their workforce with assistive technology such as Einstein GPT for Sales and Einstein GPT for Service, they will make their teams more productive. This is why we believe our customers will be interested in Einstein GPT — they all want to drive efficiencies and focus employees’ time on more high-value tasks. That’s also why it’s so important that we address trust as a key component in our stack, with humans in the loop.
