Salesforce Tuesday released what it described as the next generation of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Einstein, which contains a new out-of-the-box conversational AI assistant and a new way for organizations to build applications.
Speaking at Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco, Marc Benioff, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the company, said that today “it’s squarely about one thing, this AI opportunity. There is no question that (it) is going to change everything and probably anything.
“The decisions that we make, in terms of how we shape how our companies are using these technologies is very important. We can see we can have higher levels of customer success and productivity and growth and transformation and strategy with this new technology. There is no question.”
Slated to reach the pilot stage this fall, the two new components have been christened Einstein Copilot, which Salesforce said allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive “relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure proprietary company data from Salesforce Data Cloud,” and Einstein Copilot Studio.
The latter, it said, provides a simplified ways for the building of AI-powered apps that contain “relevant prompts, skills and AI models to accomplish specific sales, service, marketing, commerce and IT tasks.”
According to the company, both will “operate within the Einstein Trust Layer, a secure AI architecture natively built into Salesforce that allows teams to generate higher-quality AI results by grounding responses with customer data, while preserving their company’s data privacy and security standards.”
The reality, said Benioff, is that “every company will undergo an AI transformation to increase productivity, drive efficiency and deliver incredible customer and employee experiences.”
The company also launched the Einstein 1 Platform, which it said contains advancements for Salesforce Data Cloud and Einstein AI capabilities built on the metadata framework and “gives companies the ability to safely connect any data to build AI-powered apps with low-code and deliver entirely new CRM experiences.”
Parker Harris, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at Salesforce, said a company’s AI strategy is only as good as its data strategy. “We pioneered the metadata framework nearly 25 years ago to seamlessly bridge data across applications. It’s the connective tissue that fuels innovation. Now with Data Cloud and Einstein AI native on the Einstein 1 platform, companies can easily create AI-powered apps and workflows.”
In a press briefing on Monday, Patrick Stokes, the company’s executive vice president of product and industries marketing, said, “as customers, and businesses are driving towards these AI strategies, they may not have the platform that they really want or that they really need. They have platforms that are disconnecting all of their data. They have different applications. They’re building data lakes, they’ve got lots of disconnected data, they’ve got disconnected API’s, many, many different vendors and this is all leading to low productivity.
“The Einstein 1 platform is integrated, it’s intelligent, it’s automated. And most importantly, it is an open platform, meant to support many, many different data providers, large language model providers, and independent software vendors.”
There were also a number of other product announcements at the conference, which included:
Salesforce and Google are expanding their partnership so that organizations can access data available from both. It will, a release stated “allow them to bring together context from Salesforce and Google Workspace, including Google Calendar, Docs, Meet, Gmail to power generative AI experience across platforms. With these integrations, users will be able to seamlessly work across platforms through Salesforce and Google Workspace’s GenAI assistants, Einstein Copilot and Duet AI, in Google Workspace.
Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expanding their existing partnership with new Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) and Bring Your Own Large Language Model (BYO LLM) integrations between AWS and Salesforce Data Cloud. “These integrations build on AWS and Salesforce’s existing generative AI partnership, allowing customers to seamlessly and securely unify their data across Data Cloud and AWS services … to leverage the broad set of foundation models available in Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker securely within the Salesforce Platform,” a release stated.
The launch of new Einstein features for the company’s Net Zero Cloud to make “corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting easier for companies as they navigate a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.” With Einstein, according to a release, Net Zero Cloud will suggest responses based on prompts that are in line with specific reporting framework criteria to help companies streamline the ESS reports authoring process. Einstein for Net Zero Cloud is expected to be available next spring.
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