AI

Agents are assistive and autonomous software systems. Based on user input or environmental conditions, they reason, plan, and take action to achieve given tasks or goals. They are like intelligent digital assistants, equipped with the aggregated knowledge and experience of human experts, and access to all relevant data. Agents are set to become ubiquitous across every area of our lives and to profoundly transform how businesses operate and interact with customers. For example, a service agent can act as your company's most knowledgeable technical support representative, available 24/7 to handle every request. A marketing agent, much like a self-driving car, can use "sensors" (real-time data) to detect changing business conditions and respond proactively (adjust pricing, launch a campaign, and so on). Agentforce, an AI initiative from Salesforce, was announced on August 28, 2024. Described as part of “the Third Wave of AI,” it moves beyond copilots to introduce intelligent agents designed for greater accuracy and reliability, aiming to enhance customer success. This launch marks a practical step toward integrating artificial intelligence into enterprise workflows. Created to support employees and simplify operations, Agentforce helps businesses manage customer interactions and internal processes more efficiently. By automating routine tasks and offering useful insights, Agentforce aims to boost productivity, improve customer service, and support business growth. Agentforce Agents use a multilayered approach to enforce guardrails: Einstein Trust Layer: The Einstein Trust Layer enables agents to use LLMs in a trusted way, without compromising company data. It uses a secure gateway, data masking, toxicity detection, audit trails, and more to control LLM interactions. Instructions: When defining an Agentforce Agent, you can use natural language to provide clear instructions, including what to do and what to avoid, effectively setting the guardrails for its behavior. Shared metadata: Salesforce metadata defines overarching rules that are enforced regardless of whether the data is accessed from traditional applications or agents. This includes permissions, sharing models, validation rules, and workflow automation to guarantee data security and adherence to business practices. Agent Analytics: This observability tool provides insights into agent and action performance, usability, and reliability, enabling you to identify areas for improvement. AI Test Center: A unified testing framework, the AI Test Center supports batch testing for agents, prompt templates, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model use cases. With just a few clicks, companies can scale their workforce on demand using the robust capabilities of Agentforce’s AI agents.  These digital agents can analyze data, make informed decisions, and handle tasks such as responding to customer inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. Here’s what distinguishes Agentforce Agents: Trustworthy: With the Einstein Trust Layer, your data remains secure, utilizing the same metadata, permissions, and sharing models you are accustomed to in traditional Salesforce applications. Powerful: Agentforce Agents leverage industry-leading Salesforce apps to create transformative experiences across sales, service, commerce, marketing, and various other sectors. Data-Driven: By tapping into all relevant data through Data Cloud, Agentforce Agents deliver more accurate and meaningful outcomes. Customizable: Utilizing a suite of low-code tools—such as Agent Builder, Prompt Builder, Model Builder, and Flow Builder—you can easily build, customize, test, and manage these agents. Key features and benefits of Agentforce: 1. Autonomous AI Agents: Agentforce is comprised of self-contained AI agents that can perform tasks independently, without constant human intervention. These agents are trained on large datasets and leverage machine learning to learn and adapt over time. 2. Task Automation: Agentforce can automate a wide range of tasks across various departments, including customer service, sales, marketing, and commerce. This frees up employees to focus on more strategic and complex work. 3. Intelligent Insights: It provides valuable insights and recommendations based on data analysis. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions and identify opportunities for improvement. 4. Natural Language Processing (NLP): It can understand and respond to natural language queries, making it easier for employees and customers to interact with the system. 5. Integration with Salesforce Ecosystem: Agentforce seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. This allows for a unified and cohesive experience. 6. Scalability: Agentforce can scale to meet the growing needs of businesses, ensuring that it remains effective as the organization expands. 7. Customization: Agentforce can be customized to fit the specific requirements of different industries and use cases. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor the solution to their unique needs. 8. Security and Privacy: Agentforce is built with robust security measures to protect sensitive data. Salesforce also adheres to strict privacy regulations to ensure that customer information is handled responsibly. Pre-built Agentforce Agents Here are some pre-built Agentforce Agents for your business needs: Service Agent The Service Agent efficiently handles customer inquiries around the clock, using reliable data to provide accurate and personalized support. It can be quickly set up with templates or customized with minimal coding, ensuring a smooth implementation process. In cases where human intervention is required, the agent seamlessly escalates the issue while maintaining high standards of data security. Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent The SDR Agent engages potential customers 24/7, answering product questions, managing tasks, and scheduling meetings for sales representatives. It offers accurate, data-driven responses and is versatile, interacting across various communication channels and languages, ensuring comprehensive customer engagement. Sales Coach Agent The Sales Coach Agent provides sales representatives with personalized role-playing scenarios to practice pitching, handling objections, and negotiating. It gives feedback on performance and suggests areas for improvement, helping to refine sales techniques. By analyzing deal outcomes, this agent can measure the effectiveness of training and provide insights for continued growth. Personal Shopper Agent The Personal Shopper Agent enhances the customer shopping experience by offering tailored product recommendations. It interacts with customers on your website or through messaging apps, assisting them in finding products and making purchases by suggesting relevant items, increasing customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Campaign Agent The Campaign Agent simplifies marketing efforts by generating campaign briefs, identifying target audiences, developing content, and creating customer journeys. It continuously monitors campaign performance and provides actionable insights to optimize results, ensuring your marketing strategy remains effective and data-driven. Which Agentforce will you build?  Agentforce is a flexible platform that allows you to create custom agents using existing Salesforce tools. This enables you to adapt agents to fit various business needs. Here are a few: Healthcare Agent: Interacts with patients, healthcare providers, and payers to answer questions, provide information, and take action. Banking Agent: Analyzes data, assists customers, and offers personalized service in retail, commercial, and investment banking. Retail Agent: Shares campaign information, reaches out to customers and resolves issues for fashion, grocery, and convenience stores. Operations Agent: Helps operations teams manage plans, resources, and progress. CX Agent: Analyzes customer feedback, suggests ways to improve customer satisfaction, and manages omnichannel experiences. Analytics Agent: Provides data insights, creates visualizations, and recommends data-driven actions. IT Agent: Monitors security threats, shares network information, and resolves customer and employee support issues. Finance Agent: Shares insights on financial reporting and risk assessments, detects fraud, and addresses compliance-related inquiries. Agentforce’s availability and price  Agentforce for Service and Sales will be generally available on October 25, 2024, with select components of the Atlas Reasoning Engine launching in February 2025. Pricing for Agentforce starts at $2 per conversation, with volume discounts available. At $2 per conversation, Salesforce anticipates a significant ROI for customers. Agentforce agents offer a more cost-effective solution by handling routine tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex inquiries. Summary: How Agentforce Agents are transforming business and application development Agents are set to become ubiquitous in every area of our lives. They can reason, orchestrate tasks, and take action, delivering personalized experiences at scale. By combining the language and reasoning capabilities of LLMs with software building blocks, they are transforming how businesses operate and how software is built. Agentforce Agents are leading this transformation with key differentiating characteristics, including: Trusted. Agentforce protects your data using the Einstein Trust Layer and the same metadata, permissions, and sharing models as traditional Salesforce applications. Powerful. Agentforce Agents make use of industry-leading Salesforce applications to deliver transformative experiences across sales, service, commerce, marketing, and industries. Grounded in unified data. Agentforce Agents deliver more accurate and relevant outcomes by grounding AI in all the relevant data made available and unified by Data Cloud. Low-code tools. Agentforce Agents can be built, customized, tested, and managed using a set of low-code tools including Agent Builder, Prompt Builder, Model Builder, Flow Builder, and more. In conclusion, Agentforce is the powerful integration of Humans + AI + Data + Actions, transforming how businesses operate. By combining assistive and autonomous AI agents, employees are empowered to focus on high-value tasks, while AI handles routine work and escalates when necessary. Access to the right data through Data Cloud ensures that agents are intelligent, secure, and scalable, making them capable of delivering dynamic customer and employee experiences.  Finally, Agentforce agents aren’t just passive bots—they take meaningful action across systems, driving efficiency and completing tasks like drafting emails, creating close plans, and initiating customer nurture cadences. This blend of human expertise, AI capabilities, data access, and actionable insights ensures businesses can work smarter and faster.

It is obvious that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform the way solutions are designed. It is time to acknowledge that there is a fundamental change in how one needs to approach architecture. In the past, solutions were developed based on an algorithmic understanding of the problem, guaranteeing consistency in output with the same input. For example, in a CRM system with an account segmentation process, the conventional approach involved defining fields on the account and applying business logic for segmentation, driving other automation in the system. However, in the era of artificial intelligence, models are created using a lot of data, leading to the creation of predictive models. Large language models (LLMs) change the way solutions are designed because they can handle more intricate personalized segmentation and consider a much larger range of data. In order to better comprehend this, let's examine how AI is affecting solution design and delivery by closely examining the following topics. Transforming the user experience The transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI), especially with regard to generation AI, is responsible for its current surge in popularity. Users can interact with technology using natural language for the first time. This represents a significant paradigm shift since it can now receive requests that fully and accurately match the user's intentions. Moving to a Natural Language Processing (NLP) experience Platforms are starting to focus more on NLP (Natural Language Processing) and less on if-then-else scenarios. The user is spared from having to search through numerous fields. Rather, the user receives an English response to their questions. This streamlines onboarding, increasing its speed and effectiveness without requiring agents to undergo in-depth training. Increased productivity AI empowers businesses to do more with fewer customizations translating to increased work efficiency. The challenges of AI While AI provides benefits, it also presents new challenges, such as: Having to account for a wider range of data in a probabilistic context. Performance guarantees are not identical, therefore factors like error management and observability must be re-evaluated. Without direct insight into how language models work, troubleshooting becomes more challenging. Problems like hallucinations, where the model will make things up – while there are solutions to address these problems, none are completely dependable. Prompts can introduce biases and additional security problems into a language model. In an era where data privacy and trust are paramount, it is critical to create approaches for error management and improving the predictability of AI output in order to secure data security and privacy. How is AI impacting engagement with professional services companies? Even while processes have evolved and agility has increased over the past couple of decades, the traditional approach to delivery has stayed mostly unchanged. This is how AI can change the engagement model with professional services firms: Fast-track every stage of the delivery process. The kinds of jobs that people can have and the kinds of skills they need will change dramatically as a result of NLP. If the volume of data generated by the sales team during the discovery phase can be summarized into a handover, it would save the project team and the customer a lot of time, accelerating all the stages of a typical delivery and making the process more efficient. Maximize human potential Artificial Intelligence provides the capacity to generate commodities for manual labor, particularly in professional services engagements. When carrying out an engagement, be it a Salesforce delivery or anything else, a lot of manual tasks are frequently required to keep everything organized and in sync. With the help of AI, we can do away with that and make it a commodity, freeing up the human brain to focus on more difficult jobs and providing customers with greater commercial value. For intricate CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) projects, for instance, the user doesn't have to worry about billable hours for manual tasks—instead, they can concentrate on creating appropriate pricing policies and working with customers. Can AI solve everything? AI is pervasive and has an impact on professional services and architecture. Can it resolve every issue? Or is it just a fantastical idea with dubious practical application? Let's examine this in more detail. AI as a co-pilot People have very high expectations of AI. Consequently, there is always a concern about losing jobs to AI. But the reality is that AI helps people do tasks more quickly and easily, freeing up their time to pursue other interests. Approach AI with an open and curious mindset The revolutionary journey of AI has only just begun, and given the hype and its ongoing progress, it's critical to recognize its potential. Instead of seeing AI as a closed subject, but rather as a new frontier, one should approach it with curiosity and a commitment to improvement. The energy impact of AI It is important to pay attention to how AI affects energy. The extensive usage of AI may result in a considerable carbon footprint. Globally, addressing this challenge—which includes data management, data security, and environmental aspects—is imperative, meaning that solutions must be found as quickly as possible. Language generation is no longer just a human ability Natural language generation capability is no longer restricted to humans. Up until recently, language was thought to be an ability unique to humans. Large language models can now mimic complex ideas and emotion-based communication that were previously thought to be specific to humans, even though they don't fully comprehend the material they generate. This is a fundamentally important change that calls into question the idea that language production is exclusively a human ability. AI is ultimately a tool that requires a human at the helm Even with its advances, artificial intelligence still needs clear guidance on our goals. No matter how complicated the task or its execution, human intelligence, and minds are essential for directing AI to get the intended results. Even though AI can expedite activities and increase productivity, in the end, it is still a tool that needs human guidance. How does AI impact innovation? Problem-solving capabilities The evolution of AI signifies a shift in problem-solving capabilities. AI can be utilized in the context of the current technology landscape, by identifying the low-hanging fruits, and determining what can easily be delivered to end-users. Simplifies intent-based testing Important side discussions are frequently overlooked in team communication, especially when testing is involved. Intent-based testing, which can transform the testing process by guaranteeing that user intent and requirements continuously guide testing efforts, may be made possible by AI's capacity to retain a continuous grasp of intent. AI as a solution to persistent issues AI provides a set of tools to solve enduring issues. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the way that chronic problems in numerous disciplines, like sales pipeline predictability and routing, are approached and improve work efficiency. How does AI impact DevOps? Depth vs. breadth in knowledge When it really gets to understanding and establishing value, it's about depth. In some sectors of the economy, like healthcare, there are generations of expertise where people are retiring after 40 or 50 years of experience. The difficulty lies in archiving that data, incorporating it into a domain-specific large language model (LLM), and utilizing centuries' worth of healthcare-related knowledge at our disposal—all the while being mindful of whether information from the previous century or earlier is still relevant today. Democratizing DevOps Within the DevOps process, the essential phases are plan, develop, build, test, release, and deploy. Testing is the main area of influence. Exploratory testing gives the end user the freedom to simply investigate and identify edge cases. AI has the ability to quickly democratize DevOps, enabling participation from those who have never been able to take part in software delivery. Key security and ethics concerns raised by AI? Large language models give rise to completely new categories of security risks, which the developer community is still learning about. As of this moment, it is unknown how serious these threats are. Regarding the degree of autonomy given to AI-driven processes and the ways in which users can provide feedback, a degree of caution is urged. Simple prompt injection attacks are very successful in tricking the huge language model into going against its instructions. They can even fool the defenses that are currently in place. The conflict between those looking to breach systems and those trying to secure them has long been a part of traditional security. But since we are still learning about and addressing the potential risks associated with generative AI, especially with regard to the newer varieties, we should proceed very cautiously when it comes to defining rights, establishing protocols for monitoring, and including humans at crucial points in the development and implementation of these systems. Want to learn about more ideas, opportunities, and strategies to maximize the value of Salesforce data + AI? As a Gold Salesforce implementation partner with over 300 certified Salesforce professionals spread across 4 continents, our global delivery model has successfully delivered Salesforce RoI to our customers for over a decade.  Connect with one of our Salesforce consultants today for a free consultation

Businesses have a never-seen-before opportunity to learn more about their operations, markets, and customers by leveraging the humongous amounts of data aggregated from a variety of sources – apps, software, websites, and social media. The need to dive deeper into and derive insights from this data has never been greater. Legacy business intelligence and analytics products use structured, relational databases as their underlying technology. Relational databases lack the agility, speed, and deep insights required to turn data into value. Salesforce has transformed business intelligence technology by taking a novel approach to analytics, combining a non-relational approach to diverse data forms and types with advanced search capability, an engaging interface, and an intuitive mobile-friendly experience. Salesforce's Einstein Analytics Platform enables businesses to explore their data quickly without relying on data scientists, complex data warehouse schemas, or monolithic resource-intensive IT infrastructures. Legacy Business Intelligence (BI) tools restrict an organization's agility, and their application is limited to IT and analysts. Interestingly, while Business Intelligence tools have become more sophisticated over time, the core architectural approach to BI and analytics has largely remained unchanged. When an organization sets out to investigate an issue or question, the BI team responds by creating a relational database or data warehouse. Data warehouses comprise relational databases that add and store data in rows and columns, with each piece of information stored as a value in the table. Relationships across tables develop into schemas. Every fresh infusion of data expands the schema by adding new rows and dimensions. Once the structure is established, it is sacrosanct and cannot accommodate new data; adding new data necessitates the creation of a new schema from the ground up. The relational database paradigm remains effective for a wide range of applications, particularly transactional activities involving highly organized data. However, during the last decade, developments in technology, data volume and diversity, and dynamic markets have created a chasm between historical business intelligence and analytics capabilities based on classic relational database design and today's business requirements. The relational database model poses a number of issues in today's corporate landscape: User  Challenges The model limits agility. The waterfall nature of traditional Business Intelligence acts as a deterrent for discovering new ways of doing business, restricts team members' ability to challenge existing processes, and prevents teams with the most access to customers and the market from invoking their curiosity and asking their own questions for exploring innovative modeling techniques to improve the business. It is not representative of the way in which users explore information. Traditional Business Intelligence projects do not have the flexibility to refine the user query or add new data for context. Users ask a question and then wait weeks or even months for an answer; if they learn that the initial question was incorrect, the schema build-out must begin all over again. Another limitation of traditional BI is that it pre-aggregates the data which limits insights. It forces compromise. A typical BI setup balances expected queries and performance. Compromise leads to discontent. For instance, data is rolled up to a higher granularity to improve query efficiency, but this precludes users from answering second or third-order queries. They must then return to IT to figure out the solution or utilize an alternative tool to solve their questions. Business  Challenges The model slows down the business. Creating a BI schema can take weeks or even months depending on its size and complexity. On top of that, this does not include the time internal users must wait in line for BI or IT resources to become available. This delay indicates a poor time to value for BI investments; and imposes severe constraints on the business, which frequently relies on BI insights to move forward proactively which can hamper its ability to act quickly. It is resource-intensive. The current setup of designing BI solutions necessitates an army of professionals from architects and business analysts to data scientists and project managers to manage an organization's BI requirements. Because businesses rely heavily on BI, these teams are frequently well rewarded and in high demand. Pivot business intelligence on its head for agile, end-user discovery. In recent years, a number of new solutions have attempted to address the issues raised above. Many of them, however, have continued to rely, at least partially, on the same design and technological approaches that created the problems in the first place. One example of an emerging innovation is the usage of columnar or in-memory databases, which BI companies have implemented during the last decade. While they made progress, the relational model and its limitations remained a hindrance. Salesforce, on the other hand, has created and launched an analytics platform that challenges traditional business intelligence. The Einstein Analytics Platform rejects most of the preconceived concepts of data warehousing and database design, instead adopting a "Google-inspired" approach to business analytics. It includes a proprietary, non-relational data store, a search-based query engine, powerful compression methods, columnar in-memory computation, and a fast visualization engine. The  Einstein Analytics Platform combines the complexity of heterogeneous data, the fluidity of questions and problems users are trying to solve, and the end user’s need for exploring data with agility, all without any restrictions on time and information. Einstein Analytics was architected from the ground up to allow enterprises to quickly find value in data. The platform was built first for a native mobile app, allowing users to rapidly find answers and take action using their smartphones. Technology principles underlying the Einstein Analytics Platform. Agility Einstein Analytics does not differentiate between data types. It onboards data by embracing any data structure, kind, or source and making it available quickly, eliminating the need for a lengthy ETL procedure. Speed Heavy compression, optimization methods, multi-threading, and other techniques enable extremely fast and highly efficient queries on massive datasets. Search-based exploration It uses an inverted index to search data similar to Google search which provides query results in seconds. Actionability When a user gains insight or makes a key decision, they may immediately take the next best action straight from within Einstein Analytics. Columnar, in-memory aggregation In Einstein Analytics, quantitative data is stacked up in a columnar store in RAM in the Salesforce Cloud rather than the row structure of a relational database on disk. Interactivity Fast, intuitive visualization encourages user adoption and contextual understanding, offering genuine self-service analytics to all business users. Open, scalable cloud platform Einstein Analytics is an extensible platform with easy-to-use APIs and its scalable architecture compliments existing BI systems and allows businesses to have deep relationships with third-party tools and systems. It is also deeply integrated with Salesforce so you can see your Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data like never before, collaborate, and take action from within Salesforce. Mobile-first design Einstein Analytics is an open, scalable, and extendable platform. Einstein Analytics' architecture, which includes simple APIs, allows for extensive integration with third-party applications and complements existing BI systems. It is also deeply linked with Salesforce, allowing you to see your Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data like never before, collaborate, and take action directly from Salesforce. Security The Einstein Analytics Platform is built on Salesforce's tried-and-true, multilayered approach to data availability, privacy, and security, with the added benefit that data on the Salesforce platform does not need to leave Salesforce servers to be available for analytics. A unique approach to Business Intelligence that offers faster time to value. In order to provide an open, agile, self-service solution for enterprise business intelligence, Salesforce has brought together a number of unique approaches, including a non-relational inverted index data store, a quick and potent query engine, an intuitive and compelling visualization, mobile-first technology, and the trusted, scalable, high-performance power of the cloud. Given that numerous companies have made significant investments in business intelligence technology, Salesforce developed Einstein Analytics to enhance current offerings, facilitate seamless integration with external data tools, and allow businesses to easily tailor their analytics programs. The goal of enterprises using BI solutions to accelerate time to value is supported by this new BI analytics platform. Additionally, Einstein Analytics facilitates enterprise-wide adoption, supports a unified data governance strategy, and frees IT teams from labor-intensive and low-value data retrieval and preparation tasks so they can concentrate on more strategic endeavors. The open Einstein Analytics Platform positions Salesforce and its partners to continuously innovate and add layers of intelligence to help business users gain insights even faster, through automated analytics, as the world enters the third phase of computing — from today's systems of engagement to tomorrow's systems of intelligence. The basis for true business intelligence in the future is Einstein Analytics, which is quick, flexible, perceptive, and capable of not just capturing past customer and business behavior but also anticipating future trends. If you want to harness the true power of business intelligence for sales, marketing, and customer service, connect with a trusted Salesforce Consulting partner. Our certified Salesforce consultants can empower you with the tools and insights aligned with your business needs and help you get started. To find out more, schedule a free Salesforce Einstein Analytics demo today.

In June 2023, the world’s foremost Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product company announced the launch of AI Cloud, a path-breaking enterprise AI solution. This dependable, open, and business-ready platform is intended to boost organizational productivity by embedding generative AI experiences into all Salesforce apps. This significant achievement demonstrates Salesforce's continued commitment to trusted AI, as well as its ambition to enable businesses regardless of size and industry to digitally transform and provide a 360-degree view of their customers. AI Cloud includes purpose-built tools and functionality to deliver enterprise-grade AI and is Salesforce's latest multidisciplinary endeavor to add AI capabilities to its product line. In many respects, it is a continuation of the company's generative AI program, which was introduced in March 2023 and endeavors to integrate generative AI throughout the Salesforce technology stack. AI Cloud hosts and serves text-generating AI models from a variety of partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cohere, Anthropic, and OpenAI, on Salesforce's cloud platform. Salesforce's AI research group offers first-party models, which support services such as code creation and business process automation. Customers can also introduce a custom-trained model to the platform, storing data on their own infrastructure. Generative AI Across Salesforce Products Salesforce-built models in AI Cloud enable new capabilities in Salesforce's marquee products – Salesforce Data Cloud, Mulesoft, Tableau, and Salesforce Flow. Einstein GPT in CRM Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein, Salesforce's AI engine, which now makes over 210 billion AI-powered predictions per day. By merging proprietary Einstein AI models with ChatGPT or other leading large language models, customers may use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger powerful, real-time, tailored, AI-generated content.  Here’s a look at how Einstein GPT helps teams to boost productivity. Einstein GPT for Sales: Automate routine sales tasks such as drafting emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for follow-ups. Einstein GPT for Service: Automatically generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate tailored agent chat responses to boost customer satisfaction through personalized and faster service engagements. Einstein GPT for Marketing: Generate tailored and targeted content in real-time to engage customers and prospects via email, mobile, social media, and advertising. Einstein GPT for Slack: Get AI-powered customer insights such as smart sales summaries via Slack and reveal user behaviors such as knowledge article updates. Einstein GPT for Developers: Leverage Salesforce’s proprietary LLM to boost developer productivity by using an AI-powered chat assistant to generate code for languages such as Apex. Einstein Trust layer What is the key differentiator of AI Cloud? Salesforce is promoting Einstein Trust Layer, a cutting-edge moderation solution that prevents text-generating algorithms from storing sensitive data such as consumer orders and contact information. The Einstein Trust Layer is a powerful set of features and safeguards that protect your data's privacy and security, increase the safety and accuracy of your AI output, and encourage responsible AI use throughout the Salesforce ecosystem. The Einstein Trust Layer, which includes capabilities such as dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection, is intended to let you harness the power of generative AI while maintaining your safety and security standards. A rising number of global corporations have prohibited or restricted the usage of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, citing privacy concerns. Einstein Trust Layer is tailor-made for such enterprises that have stringent compliance and governance constraints that prevent them from adopting generative AI tools. The first question that arises in everyone's mind is how much can we trust generative AI. The Einstein Trust Layer is purpose-built around trust and security and designed to enable these enterprises to approach these new technologies safely and securely. The Einstein Trust Layer acts as a bridge between an app or service and a text-generating model. It detects when a prompt may include sensitive information and automatically deletes it before it reaches the model. This layer can also screen for toxicity (eg. racism or other types of discrimination), whether in a prompt or the model's response. Users who link third-party models to AI Cloud such as Google's Vertex AI can use Einstein Trust Layer. Salesforce's partnership with OpenAI ensures cooperative content moderation by leveraging OpenAI's safety tools and the Einstein Trust Layer. Salesforce is providing a set of prompt templates and prompt template building tools to set AI Cloud apart from other managed AI service offerings available today. The Einstein Trust Layer’s optimized AI prompt templates leverage harmonized data to contextualize outputs generated by the models in alignment with the organization’s needs, improving the quality and relevance of the created content. The Einstein Trust Layer reduces the time and cost to adapt a generative AI model for a particular use case. For instance, a customer could design a template that instructs a model to draft emails in accordance with a particular style, or one that retrieves specific information from a Salesforce record. AI Cloud marks a fundamental shift in the automatic creation of email content – one that is grounded in CRM data. AI Cloud represents the powerful combination of data, customer relationship management, and AI. As prompts become smarter and better, AI Cloud is poised to become an invaluable tool for businesses delivering greater value to customers across the Salesforce technology stack. Trusted AI begins with secure prompts. A prompt is a series of instructions that guides a large language model (LLM) to produce relevant results. The more contextual the prompt, the better will be the outcome. The Einstein Trust Layer allows you to safely enter AI prompts with context about your business while its data masking and zero data retention capabilities ensure the data's privacy and security when delivered to a third-party LLM. Seamless privacy and data controls. Utilize the scale and cost-effectiveness of third-party LLMs while ensuring your data's privacy and security at every stage of the generating process. Data Masking Before providing AI prompts to third-party LLMs, automatically mask sensitive data such as personally identifiable information and payment information and customize the masking settings as per your company's requirements. The availability of the Data masking capabilities of EinsteinGPT varies by feature, language, and geography. Dynamic Grounding Generate AI prompts with business context securely from structured or unstructured data by taking advantage of multiple grounding methodologies and prompt templates that can be scaled across your organization. Secure Data Retrieval Allow secure data access and contextualize every generative AI prompt while retaining permissions and data access limits. Your data is the real product. Salesforce allows customers complete control over the use of their data for AI. Whether you use Salesforce-hosted models or third-party models such as OpenAI, AI Cloud does not retain any context. Once the output is generated, the LLM forgets both the prompt as well as the output. Eliminate toxic and harmful outputs. Scan and evaluate each prompt and output for toxicity and empower employees to share only suitable content. Ensure that no output is shared unless a moderator or designated content approver accepts or rejects it, and save every step as metadata to leave an audit trail to promote compliance at scale. Securely Unlock Enterprise-Grade Generative AI with AI Cloud Einstein, Data Cloud, Flow, Tableau, and Mulesoft all benefit from AI Cloud's capabilities. Salesforce AI Cloud empowers organizations to unlock the future of their AI journey with a solution that is trustworthy, open, and intelligent. Developing trust and embracing openness The Einstein GPT Trust Layer enables businesses to employ generative AI with confidence by facilitating the deployment of relevant models for a range of tasks. This trust layer allows enterprises to use a variety of large-language models (LLMs) while adhering to their trust and openness standards, which prioritize data privacy, security, and compliance. Leveraging capabilities of Third-party Large Language Models (LLMs) Salesforce's AI Cloud promotes open development by integrating third-party LLMs such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cohere, and others. These LLMs are hosted within Salesforce's secure infrastructure, so user prompts and responses stay within the Salesforce environment. Salesforce has also formed a trusted partnership with OpenAI, utilizing their Enterprise API and security capabilities, as well as the Einstein GPT Trust Layer, to secure data retention within Salesforce. Salesforce's own large language models such as CodeTF, CodeGen, and CodeT5+, assist companies in reducing talent gaps, lowering implementation costs, improving team efficiency, and detecting incidents that require immediate attention. Bring Your Own Model With AI Cloud, companies that have trained their unique models elsewhere to integrate seamlessly with their desired infrastructure. These custom models, whether built with Google's Vertex AI, Amazon's SageMaker, or any other platform, can connect directly to AI Cloud over the secure Einstein GPT Trust Layer. Organizations can maintain control and privacy over their information by storing it within their trusted perimeter. Enterprise Ready Solution Salesforce predicts that by the end of 2030, Generative AI will drive $15 trillion in global economic growth and increase GDP by over 25%. These are remarkable numbers and Salesforce believes that AI Cloud will propel businesses to new heights, with efficiency and productivity being the key differentiators. Prompt Template and Builders With AI Cloud, Salesforce has created a user-friendly solution that generates AI prompts that rationalize data and ensure that the content provided is in complete alignment with an organization's unique context. As a young company (we are only a decade old!), we are driven by the immense potential of emerging technologies such as Generative AI to deliver value to our clients and help them bring their ideas to fruition. To fully explore the potential of AI Cloud, connect with a trusted and certified Salesforce implementation partner. Our Salesforce AI services help marketing, sales, service, commerce, engineering, and IT teams work seamlessly with generative AI.  To know more about how we can tailor unique scalable solutions for you by leveraging the power of generative AI to enhance the customer experience, connect with an  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxyQDcap4Ic – video

While the secret to understanding customers lies in your data, making sense of that data is a totally different ball game. Evolution in technology and concerns around user privacy have mushroomed new challenges for marketers to know their audience and deliver data-driven experiences. An AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) addresses these challenges and more. CDPs can connect with a single storehouse of data – one that is proprietary, trusted, and acquired with consent. Salesforce’s own CDP, Marketing Data Cloud, takes things up a notch. It puts marketers in control of the entire customer journey, allowing them to connect, unify, and act on data across all marketing touchpoints and enhance the customer experience across teams and departments – from sales, marketing, service, commerce, and more. Marketing Data Cloud from Salesforce accomplishes four primary functions: It connects. Connect all your customer data across apps, channels, and devices with out-of-the-box connectors, at scale. It harmonizes. Aggregate all your data into a single customer profile, autonomously. Data across multiple channels and teams all integrate seamlessly using configurable rules. It engages. Empower all departments with unified customer profiles and update them in real-time via AI-powered analytics. It delivers an experience. Data activated from Marketing Data Cloud drives real-time, tailored, timely customer experiences. In this article, we talk about eight use cases of how Marketing Data Cloud applies these aspects to resolve common challenges faced by marketers, along with their colleagues in sales, service, and commerce. From enhancing engagement to winning customer loyalty, these data-driven methodologies ensure a robust CDP can make every interaction count.  The Engagement Booster Engage your customers at the right moment with real-time data. Benefits: Better engagement with improved efficiency KPIs: Email Click-Through Rates, Conversions, Revenue Data Involved: Customer engagement data, web data, sales data, web and app visits, browsing history. CONNECT. CDP connects data from all sources within and outside of Salesforce. HARMONIZE. The customer's unified profile is created in the CDP. It includes all their engagement activity from across multiple channels and departments. And automatically updates the data in real time with every interaction. And if a customer opts in, CDP can automatically send personalized texts with tailored offers at the right time. ENGAGE. Geolocation data from a customer’s phone activates an engagement action. And when they walk into a physical store, a tailored offer is sent to their phone via the Salesforce messaging app to nudge them to make a purchase. EXPERIENCE. A customer is out shopping for a new smartphone that they have been eyeing for a while. To their surprise, they get a discount on the exact same product that they wanted to buy, right when they get to the aisle. The Smart Advertiser Make every dollar spent on ads count. Benefits: Higher Efficiency KPI: Return on Ad Spend Data Involved: Customer loyalty status, purchase history, case history, email interactions, browsing history, and geo-location history. CONNECT. CDP connects all customer data within as well as outside Salesforce – loyalty, purchases, case history, engagement data, demographics, and affinity data. HARMONIZE. CDP pulls out the customer’s unified profile and creates AI-powered segments.  Segment-level data insight from ad partners is incorporated to refine customer segments further for eg, customers looking for specific products and services. ENGAGE. CDP activates these segments on popular ad platforms to hyper-personalize ads for customers, all this while protecting the customer’s privacy. At the same time, CDP also suppresses ads to customers with unresolved service cases, customers who already purchased the item or returned it, and those unlikely to engage. EXPERIENCE. Customers view ads of products or upgrades, precisely what they had in mind and within their preferred price band. The Shopper Styler Drive Increase revenue with hyper-personalized e-commerce. Benefits: Higher Conversions KPIs: E-commerce Revenue Data Involved: Purchase history, browsing history, activity behavior, loyalty status, case history, and email interactions. CONNECT. CDP pulls data from all touchpoints between the customer and the brand such as purchase history, buying preferences, loyalty data, service engagement, website, and app engagement, and more. HARMONIZE. Leveraging the customer’s unified profile, CDP derives intelligent Insights on new metrics such as “propensity score” to predict the customer’s likelihood to buy a particular product. These insights enable marketers to make faster, data-driven, decisions. CDP can drive tailored shopping experiences and promote those products. ENGAGE. Commerce Cloud leverages insights from Data Cloud to provide tailored shopping experiences to the customer on their brand’s online store or app. And with the help of the customer’s propensity score, data points such as reward points, recent purchases, and recommended products are automatically served up. CDP can automatically activate relevant and timely actions in the customer’s journey. Actions like clicks and cart abandonment can initiate a background process that anticipates the customer’s needs and encourages action.   EXPERIENCE. When a customer visits their favorite mobile accessories brand’s website or app, they get personalized product recommendations. And if they abandon the cart before checkout (for whatever reason), CDP can automatically fire a reminder email with a discount incentive to nudge them to complete the order. The Website Winner Improve conversion with personalized experiences. Benefits: Increased engagement, higher conversions KPIs: Bounce rate, browsing history, average time spent on a product, session duration. Data Involved: Purchase history, engagement data, loyalty status. CONNECT. CDP draws together customer data across marketing, commerce, sales, and service interactions. HARMONIZE. After unifying all the customer data into a single customer profile, CDP identifies a customer’s past purchase behavior, including their recent purchases. CDP then places the customer in the post-sale segment focused on helping them to derive immediate value from their latest purchase.  ENGAGE. Based on the customer’s recent purchase data, CDP fires a personalized text via the Salesforce messaging app, with a link to the brand’s website to prompt them to learn more about the product and its usage. And as soon as the customer lands on the website, the page is dynamically populated with relevant how-to articles, care instructions, and other relevant and personalized content. EXPERIENCE When the customer clicks on the link to the website, they land on a webpage populated with relevant content based on their recent activity. This includes product-related articles, videos, images, and additional offers. The Cross-Seller Intelligent predictions for your customers’ next purchase. Benefits: More upsell and cross-sell opportunities, higher conversions KPIs: Sales, Product popularity, Average cart size Data Involved: Purchase history, browsing history, engagement data, loyalty status. CONNECT. CDP connects sales, loyalty, and service data to generate unified customer profiles and offers intelligent insights to reveal opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling based on the data. It can also suggest customer lifetime value (CLV), propensity scores, engagement scores, and more. HARMONIZE. CDP-powered insights create a new metric called affinity score which predicts a customer’s affinity towards other products. CDP then leverages this data to define new customer segments based on the insights. ENGAGE. CDP then activates this customer segmentation data across multiple customer engagement platforms. Customers get personalized emails, texts, tailored web and app experiences, and personalized ads on their preferred channels. EXPERIENCE. As customers browse an online store or app, personalized product recommendations are automatically served up. Customers can view these items and complete the purchase. The Insight Viewer Analyze marketing performance. Benefits: Optimized performance, Deeper Insights, Improved average time for ROI. KPIs: Product Views, Sales, ROI. Data Involved: Purchase history, cross-channel activity, Engagement, and Campaign performance. CONNECT. CDP connects data from all touchpoints across marketing, sales, service, and commerce, to create unified customer profiles. Analytics tools such as Tableau and Marketing Cloud Intelligence leverage this data to augment audience discovery and measurement. HARMONIZE. Marketing Cloud Intelligence helps marketers optimize campaigns and customer journey performance. Tableau provides deep customer insights to help teams discover new customer segments and behaviors that drive adoption and increase their lifetime value.  ENGAGE. CDP drives the wheel of optimization. Marketing Cloud Intelligence uses data from CDP to refine campaigns. Tableau serves up intelligent audience insights, identifying high engagement areas. These insights then flow back to CDP to drive hyper-personalization in every moment. EXPERIENCE. As customers enjoy their purchases, brands stay connected with personalized offers on their preferred channels. As data is being gathered and analyzed on the go, brands can measure and optimize campaign performance, discover new segments, and act on high-value actions. The Service Solver Convert service cases into happy customers. Benefits: Customer Satisfaction KPIs: Service Cases Created, Duration of open cases, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) Data Involved: Purchase history, Sales data, Service Data, Engagement data, Browsing activity. CONNECT. CDP pulls in comprehensive service data like service cases, customer service feedback, lifetime value, loyalty data, and more.   HARMONIZE. Service data in CDP augments the customer segmentation process. This helps marketers refine their engagement strategy based on customer service interactions. ENGAGE. In a scenario where a customer has an open service case, CDP gets notified and pauses all marketing activities tailored for that customer until the case is closed.  Additionally, because CDP is receiving all service data, the customer service team has access to the customer’s profile enabling them to be aware of their problem as soon as they reach out to a service rep, and then quickly resolve the issue. EXPERIENCE. Customers get their order related issues resolved in a matter of minutes. When a new case is logged, the service team quickly reaches out to the customer, being aware of their order and having access to their unified profile. Not only does the customer get the issue resolved quickly, but they automatically get a personalized email or text with a 10% discount voucher for their next purchase to make up for the mistake. The Loyalty Earner  Reward customers at every stage.            CONNECT. CDP connects data from a brand’s loyalty system into a customer’s unified profile, along with marketing, sales, and service data. HARMONIZE. Based on interactions with customers in a particular segment, CDP automatically places them into the relevant loyalty tier giving them access to tiered marketing offers and deals automatically. ENGAGE. CDP activates this segment across multiple engagement platforms and customers in this segment automatically start receiving personalized content. The content (which includes product recommendations and offers) is linked to their loyalty status and encourages them to aspire to be in the next loyalty tier for further exclusive benefits such as rewards, discounts, preorders, and more. EXPERIENCE. A customer’s latest purchase of mobile accessories automatically moves them to the next tier of loyalty status. This gives them access to exclusive discounts and offers. It’s time to build your own customer data strategy, and if you have one, you can always refine it. Our extensive experience in Salesforce consulting services can help. With a robust CDP, marketing teams can connect every interaction throughout the customer journey with a unified source of actionable, real-time data. They can truly understand their audience and deliver personalized engagement that drives revenue and builds lasting relationships. And that’s not where the value of CDP ends. In fact, it is just the beginning. Every department and team across sales, service, and commerce can also benefit from the power of a CDP. Powered by Customer 360, Marketing Data Cloud unifies all customer data across all channels and departments to create a single, unified customer profile that is updated in real-time with every interaction. With a unified view of your customer, Marketing Data Cloud empowers marketing, sales, service, and commerce teams to make every moment count. With a robust Customer Data Platform, your business can interact with your customers not as disparate departments, but as one brand with one voice. A brand that understands and engages with confidence, relevance, and trust. Whether it is prompt Salesforce support, hyper-personalized product recommendations or hyper-segmented targeted advertising, with Marketing Data Cloud you can make every customer interaction count and unlock the true power of real-time customer data. Want to learn more? Connect with our Marketing Data Cloud specialist today.

It’s an exciting time for knowledge workers. Many new work opportunities are opening up quickly in the AI-related workspace.  Artificial Intelligence and the game-changing technology of generative AI are helping to create a range of new career options, starting from prompt engineers, and use case designers, to AI trainers. Our team of experts has compiled a list of a dozen new and upcoming AI-related roles, along with tips on how to prepare for these roles. Everywhere. For everyone. Yes, that’s the scope of leveraging AI technologies in business. And that includes the job market as well. The holistic view According to a McKinsey report, generative AI has the potential to add over $4 trillion in value to the world’s economy pan-industry. This includes manufacturing, retail, financial services, telecom, construction, high tech, healthcare, and pharma. It will impact job functions such as sales, marketing, customer service, engineering, HR, and research and development. While AI holds limitless promise for transforming businesses in the way they work, there is also an underlying current of uncertainty and fear around AI taking jobs away. In this article, we quash that myth and talk about how this new disruptive technology will, in fact, create a variety of new career opportunities for the global workforce.  For instance, lucrative roles like prompt engineering, the art of creating effective prompts for GPT interfaces, and AI roles such as AI product manager are currently trending on popular job portals. Salesforce recently sponsored an IDC-authored white paper where they surveyed 500 organizations that are currently using AI-powered solutions. The whitepaper concluded that over the next 12 months, we will witness a sharp rise in demand for data architects, ethical AI specialists, AI product designers, and AI solution architects. The report also predicts nearly 12 million new jobs will be created within the Salesforce ecosystem alone over the next six years. Now that’s a number business leaders and HR departments cannot ignore. What you can do now AI needs people to be at the helm of affairs for it to work effectively and deliver on the promise it holds. And the global workforce, across all levels across all industries, has the golden opportunity, at this very moment, to sharpen their existing skills and acquire new ones to grow with the economy. The exciting thing about AI tools and solutions is that they are still in the early stages of deployment and are mostly democratized. So, if people have the will, they can learn on their own how to augment their current value. And the requisite resources are already there. Platforms such as Trailhead (from Salesforce), Coursera, Udemy, etc offer free and paid courses to certify you on AI-related skills. AI will eliminate redundancy and create new roles Let’s understand one thing very clearly. Yes, AI will probably eliminate repetitive tasks such as scheduling social media posts, going through resumes, examining data, answering common customer service questions, and composing and sending follow-up emails. But all this will free up a lot of time for workers to spend adequate time on strategic, creative, and productive tasks in their existing roles. With the adoption of AI, workers will now have time to do actual work. If you’re a sales professional or work in customer service, you can now allocate more time to what matters – interacting with customers to nurture those relationships. If you work in marketing, you can spend more time crafting marketing strategies or working on creative projects. And if you work in legal or healthcare, you can leverage AI technology to research and analyze agreements or help interpret CT scans and X-rays. While new AI jobs in engineering or data-related fields are obvious, new roles in healthcare, financial services, legal, construction, etc will evolve with the evolution of smart AI. AI will be like the sky, the background of everything else that happens over it. 12 new roles that may be created with the advancement in generative AI Curious about AI and how it can augment your current skill set and role? Here are 12 opportunities to look out for. Some of these are already in the initial stages of existence while others are what our experts believe, will crop up in the near term. Do you see yourself in one of these in the future? Prompt engineer Prompt engineers are masters at composing prompts for AI tools such as GPT tools or chatbots. Writing great prompts is key to unlocking the effectiveness of generative AI. Some AI ambassadors refer to it as AI whispering. After all, you are basically guiding the AI tool to provide you with a creative answer to your prompt or question. AI trainer AI trainers work in the background to ensure the learning algorithms driving AI do what they are supposed to. AI gets better as it gets more and more data to play with. AI trainers prepare these data sets to teach the learning algorithms how to think and respond to user inputs (prompts) in a more human-like language. AI trainers also refine the data and direct engineering teams to achieve more relevant and accurate outcomes. In a nutshell, AI trainers teach AI tools on how to think, communicate, and be useful. AI learning designer As AI technology evolves rapidly (and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg), businesses will need workers to optimize individual learning at scale. AI learning designers assist businesses in training their workers on AI tools and systems, including training them on how AI copilots can complement their work. Not only that, they will go one step further to refine the very ways in which people learn. Businesses that have better learning frameworks and strategies will be in a better position to adapt to emerging AI technology. AI instructor As businesses continue to invest in AI tools and systems, they will also need people to train their employees on how to use them. AI instructors help people further their careers by teaching them the necessary AI skills even if they are currently not involved in AI. An AI instructor’s responsibilities include developing a curriculum, creating teaching methodologies, conducting hands-on classes, and providing a more holistic AI education. Sentiment analyzer While AI can understand and interpret natural language, it is still not human and does not possess empathy. AI cannot recognize nuances of language, particularly when we have so many, and cannot interpret human emotion. This is why a sentiment analyzer’s role is important. They leverage a sentiment analysis program to establish if data extracted from a public source such as social media comments or feedback is positive, neutral, or negative by identifying its emotional tone. Stitcher A stitcher’s role is a generic one. They use AI to stitch together a variety of skills across multiple roles into a single role. For instance, they leverage AI to combine modular apps and tools into a single workflow that delivers unique value to customers. Interpersonal coach This role, as the name suggests, is based on a soft skills development function. Interpersonal coaches help the digital workforce and the ones working with AI, to grow their interpersonal skills such as social intelligence, empathy, mindful listening, and managing face-to-face interactions. It’s similar to a soft-skills trainer, except that it's more focused on helping people who work in the background or mostly with computers. Workflow optimizer This role is critical for companies as it deals with the soul of any business – data. They leverage data and system intelligence to have a 360-degree view of a business and identify areas where AI could help workers be more productive. A workflow optimizer uses AI to analyze how people and teams work and identify productivity gaps to boost overall efficiency. AI compliance manager AI is still at a nascent stage and the regulations and guidelines are fluid and ever-changing. As they continue to get more refined and standardized, an AI compliance manager’s job is to make sure his company’s AI processes abide by existing regulations, guidelines, and ethical standards. They ensure that their organization’s data management practices are aligned with privacy laws and mitigate AI’s potential legal impact on the company. AI security manager AI technology can become dangerous if it gets into the wrong hands. The function of an AI security manager is to ensure AI systems are used with honesty and integrity. They also ensure sufficient guard rails are in place to protect against any threats and vulnerabilities. Chief AI officer The newest entrant in the C-suite league, the CAIO’s primary function is to guide and manage a holistic AI strategy for the organization. This includes ensuring the development and deployment of responsible and trusted AI systems across the organization. Chief data and analytics officer This role entails overseeing everything related to data and analytics in an organization.  Depending on the size of the enterprise or the scale of AI being used by the company, this role is sometimes shared between two people, a chief data officer and a chief analytics officer. How to prepare for new AI careers With all of these AI opportunities opening up, it’s time to buckle up, commence training, and start having fun with some of the free AI tools. View these tools as someone who can help you to improve the way you work and how you do it. With so many online learning platforms available at our fingertips, we can quickly start educating ourselves on AI-related technologies and upgrade our current skill set. At Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Implementation Partner, we believe that if we embrace change and the opportunities that come with it, we open doors to new possibilities. The need of the hour is to be curious and bold. Connect with an expert today. Our team of certified Salesforce Consultants would be happy to guide you.

Salesforce Chatbot enables businesses to offer personalized and prompt service using AI-powered bots available natively in the CRM. Now you can supercharge customer case resolution with clicks not code by automating mundane, time-consuming tasks by linking AI with your CRM data. This empowers service teams to do more by leveraging AI-generated responses to customer queries. Before going into how AI chatbots can be pivotal in customer service, let’s educate ourselves on the basics. What is a chatbot? A chatbot (derived from “chat robot”) is a software program that can simulate human conversation (voice or text) and can solve a problem. Businesses typically use chatbots to augment customer service to complement traditional service channels such as phone and email. Just like software can be configured and customized in any way you want, chatbots can also be customized and used in ways that are aligned with your goals. We are already familiar with bots for customer service that are used with popular messaging platforms like SMS and WhatsApp. With AI chatbots, users can interact with a computer program to find answers quickly. Most notably, chatbots can enhance customer relationships by responding to queries faster at their convenience by being available round the clock. With 24/7 availability to serve up responses, chatbots free up time for service teams so that they can work on more complex issues that require a touch of empathy. How do chatbots work? Chatbot development has evolved leaps and bounds over the last decade or so, as developers have adopted sophisticated techniques and technological advancements in machine algorithms to enable chatbots to contextually understand user questions and offer more useful responses. While bots today still aren’t equipped to handle all user queries, they can easily respond to commonly asked questions or execute simple, repetitive tasks without any human intervention. One such example is when a chatbot parses customer input, identifies keywords or phrases, and then scans the organization's data to retrieve relevant articles based on those keywords or phrases. Chatbots typically follow a pre-defined decision tree, which is why they are often referred to as rule-based chatbots. Rule-based chatbots execute pre-defined actions based on user input. Rule-based chatbots are based on click actions, like a user responding with a binary input like a “yes” or “no,” or by recognizing specific keywords. You would have come across instances when you typed a question into a website’s pop-up box and got an answer that had no relevance to the question. That usually happens when although the chatbot recognized keywords in your input, it did not understand their context. This is where AI chatbots come in. What is an AI chatbot? The level of sophistication involved in chatbot technology cannot be overstated.  With inbuilt natural language processing (NLP) capability, chatbots can engage in human-like conversations with users effortlessly. Engineering teams are relying on NLP to build AI chatbots that can understand human speech and text better. With NLP, it is now possible to better recognize user intent and consequently provide better, more intelligent responses. With the latest disruptive tech of generative AI, chatbots can interpret context in written text, which allows it to work on its own. In simple terms, AI chatbots can understand language outside of pre-defined rules and offer responses by relying on existing data. This allows users to navigate the conversation and allows the bot to follow. By drawing on huge data sets and the processing power of the machine, AI- chatbots can leverage deep learning algorithms to significantly improve their quality of understanding questions and offer more accurate responses. When chatbots connect with technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and NLP, they can train themselves to simulate human conversation better by: Maintaining the context of the interaction. Managing a personalized conversation. Refining responses based on the changing customer needs. AI chatbots get better with every interaction. They do this by connecting with deep learning algorithms and drawing on enormous amounts of conversational data stored in the CRM database. 3 Benefits of Using AI Chatbots in Salesforce: Businesses, irrespective of size and the domain they operate in, can derive the benefits of process automation, particularly a function that delivers direct value to their customers. With chatbots, you are available to your customers round the clock, giving them 24/7 access to your business. They are also able to get quick responses to common questions anytime, from any device. Reduce Human Intervention As a business leader, you would be aware that not every customer query needs you to dedicate human resources to respond to that query. Just like a knowledge base or a library of FAQs in Service Cloud can offer relevant and accurate information to customers whenever they need it, a chatbot can automate this process by understanding their queries and serving up the right answers. Chatbots can be very useful in increasing the deflection rate of customer support cases. Reduce Costs and Improve Productivity Leveraging chatbots to automate mundane, repetitive tasks and straightforward processes gives your internal teams more time to focus on more critical and creative tasks. This leads to a significant reduction in manpower especially in your customer service teams. The ROI of using a chatbot to free up agent time so that they can focus more on doing what’s most important- nurturing customer relationships, is a figure you cannot ignore. Your internal team performance will witness a significant improvement as well, since your service agents are focused on solving complex problems where human intervention is necessary, translating to higher-quality customer service. Time is a commodity that is available in limited quantity to every organization, and chatbots allow service teams to do more with less. If you wish to scale up your business without the associated costs of additional resources, you should look at AI-powered chatbots. Entrusting many of the repetitive, mundane tasks across departments to an AI chatbot and having the provision to escalate a case to a human agent as and when required will boost the morale of your teams, improve staff retention, and allow them to shine in their work. Customers Notice Innovation Customers often compare 2 or more brands that offer the same products or services that they are looking for. And if your business is completely human powered it means customers sometimes will have to wait for their turn for a human agent to be available to get their issue resolved. If your competitor is offering chatbot-powered customer service which allows customers to self-serve and find answers quickly, they will notice the difference in service availability which will compel them to choose the latter. Let’s look at an example. A visitor to your website asks the chatbot for pricing information and more details about a particular product or service. The chatbot can immediately dive into Salesforce data and serve up the information instantly to the website visitor.  Compare it with getting a message “Please wait a moment while we find an agent to talk to you.” Let’s look at another scenario. The website visitor wants to book a demo to see how your product actually works. All he needs to do is type – “I want to book a demo”. The chatbot can immediately open a calendar for him to select a convenient time and date and once the visitor has made a selection, the bot can immediately check rep availability by diving into the booking system which is also connected to Salesforce, and then confirm the appointment. All this without ever leaving the chat conversation. The use of chatbots in customer service has increased dramatically over the last 5 years and with the advancement in AI technology, it is going in only one direction. Why Should You Consider an AI Chatbot for Salesforce? Looking to invest in chatbot technology? Heard and read a lot about them and their benefits in the context of business but don’t know where to start? There are several ways of approaching this, with so many options available in the market. If you are starting out, the best way to do this is within your single source of truth – Salesforce. And the reason is very simple. A Salesforce native chatbot can leverage customer data, product and service data, and knowledge base, to engage customers and serve up relevant and accurate answers. A Salesforce native chatbot can also trigger automations at appropriate events within Salesforce making it very productive and tightly aligned with your business goals. Salesforce does come with AI-powered bots called Einstein Bots. Einstein Bots are powerful, and available out-of-the-box in Salesforce. They require a Service Cloud license along with a chat or messenger license with each license offering 25 bot conversations per user per month. Einstein Bots also come with an inbuilt Salesforce Messaging App allowing businesses to engage in text conversations with customers via SMS and WhatsApp. AI Chatbot from Salesforce is a powerful tool to re-imagine customer experiences, automate processes, and improve productivity. With round-the-clock availability and immediate responses, AI Chatbots from Salesforce transform the way businesses connect with their customers. To learn more about AI Chatbots for Salesforce, connect with an expert today.