Salesforce Drives CRM Innovation with Generative AI

Recently, at the first developer conference, DevDay 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company has approximately 2 million developers using their API to build various use cases, with over 92% of Fortune 500 companies using their products.

Salesforce's Einstein GPT is one of the models built on these APIs, which was launched in March for CRM applications. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff believes it is at the forefront of the game and states that it is already the leading global artificial intelligence platform.

"The entire company has transformed around this next-generation AI. Salesforce is really betting on the future of AI combined with data and CRM," said Sridhar H Hariharasubramanian, Senior Director of Solution Engineering at Salesforce, during an interaction with AIM.

He mentioned that their Einstein AI platform and Einstein Copilot (built on Einstein GPT) generate over 100 billion predictions daily and have found real-world customers for them.

"We believe that applying artificial intelligence on top of enterprise data and combining it with the insights we get from the CRM platform will indeed bring many benefits in providing a better customer experience," he added. All of this will significantly enhance operational efficiency, productivity, and growth for these organizations.

Salesforce's large customer base also adds to their advantage. With an unprecedented 32.94% market share in CRM, they have over 149,665 customers. While the top three industries using Salesforce CRM for sales automation are marketing (2,485), technology (2,338), and education (2,130), they also have over 3,472 AI and ML customers.

Unleashing Enterprise Innovation

"We have generative AI capabilities in our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and our Data Cloud products. We also have our own LLM called Code Gen, which is actually a model specifically tailored for large customers to help them write code and applications without the need for extensive coding," he said.

The platform unifies different applications such as sales, service, marketing, commerce, Tableau, and industry clouds under a metadata framework. This integration strengthens the seamless exchange of information between these applications, providing a more collaborative experience. Sridhar said that the platform's unified architecture reduces dependence on data extraction and loading processes.

For example, Einstein Copilot has been integrated into Tableau, allowing users to request key insights from complex reports using natural language, increasing accessibility for business users.

Building Trust in the Generative AI Era

Salesforce is committed to addressing trust and data privacy-related concerns.

Sridhar clarified that while Salesforce partners with AWS to provide cloud services, all of Salesforce's functionalities will be available on Salesforce's native platform, Hyperforce, ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance, making it an ideal choice for Indian customers.

Another differentiating factor for Salesforce is the Einstein Trust Layer, which addresses enterprise concerns regarding data privacy and security. This layer adds dynamic foundations to avoid inaccuracies by extracting contextual cues from relevant data before reaching the base model.

He further explained that data masking ensures that no personally identifiable information (PII) is shared externally. The zero-retention architecture ensures that OpenAI, as an LLM provider, does not retain customer data, addressing concerns about the use of data for training algorithms. Toxicity detection evaluates the appropriateness of responses, addressing bias issues. "Audit tracking ensures transparency and trust, making Salesforce stand out in the CRM field," he added.

Thriving Indian Market

Sridhar added, "We have seen a lot of demand in India."

The company also achieved an unprecedented 24% year-on-year growth in the Asia-Pacific region in Q2FY24.

He said that the acceptance of Einstein Copilot and other new features is encouraging, as customers are eager to leverage generative AI for driving growth, improving productivity, and delivering better experiences.

"I think at least in the past two to three months, since some of these announcements started coming out, the feedback has been very encouraging. We have had quite serious conversations because Indian customers are clearly aware of these developments."