You may have heard that the Salesforce AI Day, hosted by Salesforce CEO and Co-Founder Marc Benioff, is taking place today. Alongside AI visionaries, the plan is to unveil the future of trusted enterprise AI, alongside live demos and insightful conversations.
The main announcement: Salesforce AI Cloud is claimed to be the fastest and most trusted way for Salesforce customers to deliver generative experiences across all their applications and workflows (which we’ll explain later).
Also being introduced is the Einstein GPT Trust Layer, which aims to resolve concerns over adopting generative AI. With GPT technology taking the world by storm, it’s no surprise that this seemingly magic technology is raising concerns about privacy and the legitimacy of information. What’s more, with this technology being increasingly embedded in the tools we use at work every day, people in charge of platforms are looking for reassurance. Company leaders want to embrace generative AI, but are wary of the risks – hallucinations, toxicity, privacy, bias, and data governance concerns are creating a trust gap.
Both announcements focus on giving you, as a Salesforce customer, choice about whether (and how) to enable generative AI, all while Salesforce continue to solidify trust (a core value) among their customer base. We’re giving you the inside scoop on these innovations.
Salesforce AI Cloud
AI Cloud is “optimized for delivering trusted, open, and real-time generative experiences across all applications and workflows” – in other words, AI Cloud gives those professionals building on and maintaining Salesforce orgs a suite of capabilities that combines AI, data, analytics, and automation (e.g. Salesforce Flow).
To contextualize this, here are some example use cases:
- Sales: AI Cloud will enable sales reps to quickly auto-generate personalized emails tailored to their customers’ needs.
- Service: Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies and case summaries.
- Marketers: Auto-generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
- Commerce: Merchandisers can auto-generate insights and recommendations to deliver customized commerce experiences at every step of the buyer’s journey.
- Developers: Auto-generate code, predict potential bugs in code, and suggest fixes.
From what we are seeing, AI Cloud could be putting the power to configure and customize these – and other – use cases for the Salesforce ‘cloud’ products you use in your organization.
When it comes to the Salesforce platform, every major announcement this year has included some element of “GPT”. First came Einstein GPT (the umbrella brand for GPT technology on the Salesforce platform), with the initial announcement featuring Einstein GPT for Sales, Einstein GPT for Service, and Einstein GPT for Marketing.
Then we saw Slack GPT, which was followed by Tableau GPT. Most recently, Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT have joined the group, each with their own sets of use cases for marketers, merchandisers, and shoppers.
Now, as with every other Salesforce product, it could be that we’re being given the power to craft our own use cases.
Einstein GPT Trust Layer
As part of AI Cloud, the Einstein GPT Trust Layer is a new industry standard for trusted enterprise AI. How? Organizations benefit from generative AI while also being reassured about data privacy and security, by preventing large-language models (LLMs) from retaining sensitive customer data.
Multiple Salesforce executives have expressed that trust and privacy were the primary starting point when designing their generative AI capabilities – a standpoint they believe differentiates them from most of the market.
Salesforce have done work to adhere to data privacy and confidentiality. One example is product description generation in Commerce GPT. The process happens at the time of the query (prompt), where the most limited amount of data gets passed over the wall to the LLMs that power the generative capabilities. This is self-destructive, and as a result, customer data never leaves the Salesforce cloud products where it’s stored.
This separation of sensitive data from the LLM will help customers maintain data governance controls while still leveraging the immense potential of generative AI.
Anecdotes from Salesforce executives follow the same thread – that Salesforce customers are more willing to pilot generative-AI technology when they become aware of the ‘safety net’ that Salesforce have incorporated (as opposed to remaining hesitant if it were an open API call out to other providers).
Generative AI Models + Salesforce: Your Choice
When planning to work with generative AI on the Salesforce platform, you have a number of options:
- Salesforce’s private AI models: In other words, those developed by Salesforce, which are leveraged by customers using features from the Einstein technology layer.
- Combine OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Thanks to the Salesforce and OpenAI partnership, providing out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities to companies through direct access to OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology.
- Combine Vertex AI models: Thanks to the new partnership between Salesforce and Google Cloud, you can build AI models in Vertex AI, then bring them into Salesforce to be used alongside Salesforce data. Vertex AI is a popular choice as it enables analysts to manage machine learning (ML) projects throughout the entire development life cycle, including training, testing, monitoring, deploying, and governing models at scale.
- Bring your own model: As Einstein GPT is open and extensible, you can opt to use it alongside your own external model(s).
While you have multiple options, Salesforce has designed to ensure privacy and security, especially to protect your customers’ data. Their motto here is this: secure interaction, known interaction – in other words, each interaction with LLMs is one your organization is aware of, and it’s a secure one:
No data stored on the Salesforce platform will be exchanged with other systems, unless you decide to create relationships with third-party system LLMs. If that’s the case, the only time information is known to those systems is at the time of the query – following that moment, it disappears.
Moreover, Salesforce also acknowledges that generative AI isn’t right for every organization, right now. If your organization isn’t ready to use it, admins can opt out from within the interface as Salesforce have provided the means for you to choose which capabilities to enable.
Key takeaway: There’s no technology being enabled without you knowing about it, neither is it an all-or-nothing choice.
Summary
Just days after Salesforce announced that they would be adding Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT to their generative AI offering, AI Cloud has been unveiled to glue an impressive number of “GPT” enabled announcements together.
We’ll leave you with why trusted generative AI matters in the enterprise with new Salesforce research that found:
- 73% of employees believe generative AI introduces new security risks.
- Nearly 60% of those who plan to use the technology don’t know how to keep data secure.