Putting the AI in Trailblazer

This year, Dreamforce drew more than 43,000 people to San Francisco for the annual celebration of all things Salesforce. Matthew McConaughey, Spike Lee and Viola Davis drew celebrity sized crowds to their sessions. Dave Matthews dropped into the keynote for a couple of quick songs, while the Foo Fighters played to a packed Chase Center in a benefit for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.  

But the biggest celebrity of the event was Salesforce’s Einstein (the toolset, and maybe the mascot) and the emergence in a shockingly short amount of time of generative AI as part of the Salesforce ecosystem. Twelve months after first being announced, Einstein 1 and Data Cloud were elevated to core tools, deeply embedded across the entire portfolio of products. 

The speed of change and the evolution of product capabilities signal that we have reached an inflection point with exciting new opportunities.

Not just generative AI, YOUR generative AI

By now most of us have seen the magic of a ChatGPT prompt delivering an answer to our question with awe inspiring speed. But since the emergence of Large Language Models there has also been controversy (and lawsuits) about where the information that feeds the product is coming from. Widely available information on the web is not always accurate and the same set of information is available to all.

This has become a concern for businesses of all kinds. Accurately answering questions about your own product, at the deepest levels, often requires proprietary information and deep knowledge not generally available. The announcements at Dreamforce moved to address these concerns, adding features like Article Answers that allow you to load your knowledge base and FAQs into AI based tools to provide the most accurate knowledge base possible. Couple this with the ability to train AI to generate content in the voice of your company and you have the key to providing service and content at a speed and scale never before achievable; all while being grounded in your company’s specific data and brand identity

Keeping your information, yours

Trust was another key theme of Dreamforce this year, with surveys showing that currently 59% of customers don’t trust companies with their data. The advent of AI may elevate this concern for consumers who view AI as an emerging, and potentially unsecure, technology in the hands of companies holding their personal data.

For companies the question is similar, when sharing my proprietary knowledge with AI how do I keep it from being shared with my competitors? The answer to both group’s concerns is Salesforce’s Trust Layer, which allows AI to access enterprise data only within a closed loop. This delivers the most accurate learning while ensuring that private data can’t be accessed beyond the edges of your environment. With the Trust Layer in place, we should see the intersection of increased data security and distinctly elevated quality and quantity of personalized content.

Google ‘Salesforce and Google’

In the Data and AI keynote Salesforce dropped the last surprise nugget of the conference when Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, announced that Salesforce would be the first partner for Google’s Duet AI. This allows Google’s generative AI to have access to data and context from the Salesforce instance. Imagine a salesperson creating a letter or presentation in the Google Productivity Suite and seamlessly including real-time data and insights from Salesforce. But it’s also a two-way feed, allowing the AI to summarize a Google video call with a prospect and place the relevant information back into Salesforce. In both cases, reducing administrative work will free up the salesperson to focus their attention on growing the customer base.

The Wrap-up

Although this barely touches on the depth of knowledge available across almost 1,700 Dreamforce sessions, the three highlights above represent exciting changes in the Salesforce ecosystem. These changes have the potential to alter the way we work – with Generative AI reducing time on everyday tasks, delivering insights grounded in your company’s data and constructing a more personalized and effective experience for your customers.

Salesforce will be rolling out updates starting in Q4 2023 and continuing until they change the game again at Dreamforce 2024. We can’t wait to get our hands on the new features and start exploring what’s possible. Let us know if we can help your team by contacting us.