Summary Bullets:
• Salesforce is leveraging generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to address customer pain points such as processing unstructured data and unlocking the value in this data creating unified customer profiles.
• Salesforce Data Cloud will be available on Hyperforce in the UK in July 2024. Salesforce Hyperforce aims to address customers’ growing appetite for compliance, safety, and standardization in the public cloud.
The Salesforce World Tour took place on June 6, 2024, at the Excel Centre in East London (England), with sponsors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, Deloitte, and PWC. The annual event included workshops, demos, and discussions with partners, the announcement of an AI center, and innovations in the Salesforce Data Cloud and Slack platforms. For GenAI observers, the most salient news was the general availability of Salesforce Data Cloud Vector Database, built into the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform, which infuses GenAI into the vendor’s CRM platform, Salesforce Customer 360. The vector database collects, “ingests,” and combines structured and unstructured data regarding end users. This is of great importance to Salesforce’s customers’ customers. According to the vendor, around 80% of customer data is scattered across internal corporate departments in an unstructured configuration, “trapped” in PDFs, emails, chat conversations, transcripts, customer reviews, and so on. This data can be leveraged to create a closer overall relationship with the customer by creating a unified profile of the so-called customer journey. Being able to ground all types of data in Salesforce Data Cloud – where it is processed – unlocks a ton of valuable information and not just to engage with the customer in positive ways: It makes it possible to be agile as possible in case of problems including issues such as product recall, returns, and so on.
During the keynote, it was emphasized that personalization is a critical tenet of customer engagement and one of the advantages of deploying GenAI in customer-facing verticals. “Putting data to work” was one of the highlights of the speech as well as how enterprises can augment employee productivity through upskilling to increase use of GenAI tech internally. Overcoming the fear factor and general mistrust of GenAI is also essential. Although there were no new product launches per se, the vendor announced that Salesforce Data Cloud will be available on Salesforce Hyperforce in the UK. Salesforce Hyperforce is designed to help firms tackle data residency problems by creating a layer where all Salesforce applications are integrated across the same compliance, security, privacy, and scalability standards. The solution is built for the public cloud and is composed of code rather than hardware so that all applications can be safely delivered to locations worldwide. Salesforce Hyperforce provides a common layer to deploy all the application stacks, offering Salesforce’s version of similar solutions available in the market. These solutions allow companies to handle data compliance for an increasingly fragmented technology world. Enterprises serve their employees and customers globally while providing choice and control for residency and compliance.
The event was also a launchpad for the Salesforce AI Center, whose pilot will be inaugurated in the UK to encourage collaboration among AI experts, support Salesforce partners and customers, and facilitate training and upskilling programs. The company said the center, which is planned to be the first of many globally, has capacity for 300 people and is located in Blue Fin Building near Blackfriars, London (England). Recognizing the value of training in the nascent GenAI market, Salesforce has set itself the ambitious goal of upskilling 100,000 developers worldwide leveraging a string of similar centers globally. The London facility will open on June 18, 2024 and is part of a $4 billion investment drive in the UK and Ireland.
Salesforce continues to incorporate GenAI across its portfolio from its data visualization platform Tableau, to Einstein for analytics, and Slack for collaboration. The company claims the Salesforce Data Cloud tool leverages all the metadata in the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform by connecting unstructured and structured data, reducing the need to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) and enhancing the accuracy of the results delivered by Salesforce Einstein Copilot, Salesforce’s conversational AI assistant. Vector databases are not new, but the GenAI “revolution” has brought them to the forefront as enterprises use them alongside retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to link their proprietary data with LLMs, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, enabling them to generate more accurate results. Vector databases are becoming widespread because they power the RAG technique and are used by enterprises to build chatbots for employees needing to access internal company information (e.g., researchers using an AI hub or salespeople pulling information from knowledge hubs). Rivals including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have their own vector databases; Salesforce demonstrates its early investments in GenAI are bearing fruit with the Salesforce Data Cloud Vector Database launch.