Decode How to Use Salesforce’s AI to Boost Your Business
By Michael McNeal, Centric Consulting Capability Lead, Salesforce
In the first quarter of 2024, Salesforce released new generative and predictive artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within its evolving Einstein AI ecosystem. We share insights into these new features in this article.
The rollout of Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio shows Salesforce’s commitment to being at the forefront of AI for its customers.
These new tools bring powerful AI capabilities to the Salesforce ecosystem, allowing you to boost efficiency and improve decision-making across your enterprise.
In this article, we’ll help you understand the Salesforce Einstein ecosystem, its capabilities, and how to approach adopting it.
Decoding the Salesforce AI Ecosystem
The Salesforce AI ecosystem is constantly evolving in capabilities as well as product and feature naming. We’re here to help break it down.
“Einstein” is the brand name for Salesforce’s artificial intelligence applied to its AI architecture and platform, products, and capabilities across all Salesforce platforms. This includes both predictive and generative AI technology.
Let’s take a look at the high-level applications of Salesforce’s AI offerings.
Salesforce Generative AI offers generative AI capabilities across multiple functions, such as:
• Summaries for calls, sales information, and service case status
• Email drafting for sales, service, or marketing using personalized data
• Content creation for marketing campaigns and product descriptions
Salesforce Predictive AI offers high-level predictive capabilities in multiple Salesforce Clouds, including:
• Recommendations for service articles, marketing content, and products
• Scoring for leads, opportunities, behavior, and engagement
• Insights for conversations, emails, and campaigns
These AI technologies form part of the Einstein 1 platform. Einstein 1 brings together Salesforce’s:
· Generative and predictive AI
· Customer relationship management (CRM) applications
· Customer data platform (CDP), Data Cloud
· Security architecture, the Einstein Trust Layer
The Einstein platform integrates all these platforms and features and allows you to:
· Unify data. Salesforce Data Cloud enables you to bring together your enterprise data regardless of source and location (including from cloud storage solutions). It performs data unification, identity resolution, and normalization and transformation. The resulting unified profiles can be used to drive any action, interaction, or insight across Salesforce CRM apps.
· Power AI. Data Cloud aggregates and harmonizes data from across your enterprise. This enables enterprise data to power generative and predictive AI that can enhance customer engagement and deliver personalized, AI-powered experiences.
A Quick Overview of Einstein’s Predictive and Generative AI Capabilities
With all of the Einstein features, it can be difficult to know where and how to start with Salesforce’s AI.
The graphics below show examples of Salesforce Einstein AI’s predictive and generative functionalities, which are available across various products in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Einstein Trust Layer: The Unifying Factor
Einstein Trust Layer ties all these applications together so they can talk to each other. It’s an important safety feature that allows users to work securely with generative AI without compromising customer data and while meeting enterprise security standards.
Here’s an example of how it works.
Say you get a prompt to write an email about leads. Einstein Trust Layer will apply the correct context to it as it applies to the target audience (say, prospects or customers) while stripping out all the proprietary information you want to keep in-house. Then it will add back all the people who should be in that target audience.
If someone is using OpenAI, however, sharing this information can reveal a trade secret or other confidential information to the outside world. The kind of protection that Einstein Trust Layer provides is standard with Salesforce’s generative AI capabilities.
Understand Which Salesforce Einstein Features You May Already Have Access To
You may not realize that you already have access to Einstein features with your current Salesforce licensing.
Many organizations already have access to Salesforce Einstein predictive functionality. You can start exploring this before delving into Einstein’s generative AI capabilities, which may require additional licensing and bring with it a number of other considerations.
If you’re ready to start using Salesforce’s generative AI, now is a great time to dive in. The functionality is increasing with each of the three annual releases. Most recently, the spring 2024 release brought the much-anticipated launch of Salesforce Copilot and Einstein 1 Studio.
Salesforce Copilot is a conversational AI assistant available across the Salesforce platform and products. It answers questions conversationally using internal and external knowledge bases and data.
Salesforce Einstein 1 Studio provides Salesforce admins and developers with a set of low-code tools to customize Einstein Copilot. These tools include:
· Prompt Builder: Enables creation of reusable, templated prompts using your data
· Model Builder: Allows a choice of large language models (LLMs) for different use cases, including bringing your own models
· Copilot Builder: Provides the ability to configure and customize Copilot using a library of actions and capabilities
Whether you want to start with Einstein’s predictive or generative AI capabilities, it’s important to have a well-crafted approach.
A Strategic Approach to Onboarding Salesforce AI
To successfully implement Salesforce AI, your organization needs a carefully planned strategic approach.
Here are five key steps to onboarding Salesforce AI:
1. Review Your Salesforce License
Review your Salesforce license to see which features you have access to. You might learn you already have access to Einstein features you aren’t using or to the free version of Salesforce Data Cloud, which can be used with and enhance certain Einstein features.
2. Learn Einstein’s Capabilities
You need an understanding of Einstein and its capabilities within the Salesforce products that you have or are considering. This helps you align Einstein’s capabilities with your business goals and associated use cases.
3. Understand Your Enterprise Data
Know where your core enterprise data currently resides (within and external to Salesforce), the quality of your data (especially the data within Salesforce), and any data gaps that may limit its ability to support your AI strategy. Develop a longer-term data and app strategy to understand alignment with Salesforce AI capabilities and usage opportunities in the future.
4. Develop a Salesforce AI Strategy
Develop a strategy for Salesforce AI that aligns with your organizationwide AI strategy and your business strategy. This will allow you to focus on achieving customer and business outcomes faster with better results across your AI platforms.
A comprehensive strategy will include:
· AI Readiness: Assess your infrastructure, culture and processes
· Workforce Planning: Change management and AI talent management (attract, train and retain AI talent)
· Governance: Security, data privacy, compliance, and usage patterns
5. Prepare Your Organization
Who will own Salesforce AI in your organization? This includes aligning it with other AI efforts, planning for and executing pilots around the selected Copilot, and generative usage — formalizing communications, training, configurations, and feedback loops to learn from the pilots.
While these steps may seem like a significant amount of effort, there is a defined path forward. It starts with determining your readiness for AI.
The Value of an AI Readiness Assessment
If your company isn’t sure if it’s ready to use predictive or generative AI, you should conduct a readiness assessment for AI usage. This considers what you’re trying to achieve with AI.
Ask questions like:
· What are your business use cases?
· What benefits do you want to obtain from it?
· Are your people, technologies, and processes for training and adoption prepared to go forward with AI?
Your assessment should help illuminate crucial areas within your business to focus on as you integrate AI into your processes. Generative AI can also have human resource implications that give an organization pause, such as workers worrying about AI replacing them.
In some instances, you may already have AI capabilities within your products but aren’t using them. In that case, consider how your company can align your products with those capabilities and whether IT teams support the pertinent use cases.
Salesforce’s AI ecosystem includes predictive and generative AI platform groups within all Salesforce CRM apps, which align with the specific Salesforce Clouds. In one such link with Data Cloud, users can create individual profiles from all the data in the Salesforce CRM applications across the enterprise and from other non-Salesforce data warehouses.
Conclusion
With the introduction of Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio, Salesforce’s latest advancements in AI are a big step toward enhancing business process efficiency and decision-making.
As you navigate the complexities of implementing AI across your enterprise, understanding and leveraging Salesforce’s evolving Einstein ecosystem will be crucial for driving innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business.
