The Dreamforce hype is over for another year, but unlike some famous trends that wither and fade away, it looks like artificial intelligence is here to stay, and it’s going to have a huge impact on the future of work.
But what will the future of AI look like in the Salesforce ecosystem? In the IBM State of Salesforce 2023-24 report, they interviewed 3,459 executives to determine the biggest trends affecting the ecosystem. You might be able to guess what one of the biggest focus areas was for this year’s edition of the report: artificial intelligence.
While artificial intelligence in the Salesforce ecosystem is nothing new, this new wave of generative AI certainly feels different. After an acquisition spree in 2016, Salesforce rolled out a series of “Einstein” enabled products including features such as Opportunity Scoring, Forecasting, Conversational Insights, and Bots. And whilst I’m sure these products provided ROI to some customers, I wouldn’t necessarily call them ‘game changing’.
Executives surveyed in the IBM report say that they aren’t settling for “incremental gains” with generative AI, and are instead experimenting with use cases specifically to increase profitability – aiming to free up people for higher value, customer focused tasks. Before this new wave of AI in the Salesforce ecosystem, Einstein AI products would have delivered ROI and increased productivity of users, but I doubt many in leadership thought that these products would affect their bottom line.
Other interesting findings show that 75% of CEOs believe a competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced gen AI, with 50% now integrating generative AI into their product and services, and 43% using generative AI to inform their strategic decisions.
This isn’t just talk, generative AI is influencing many companies in the Salesforce ecosystem’s strategies and decisions right at this very moment.
AI In the Salesforce Ecosystem
For companies looking to get a head start on generative AI in the Salesforce ecosystem, there is a lot to consider, and you may be pulled in many different directions – I’ll share a bit more about how to strategize your AI plan in the next section.
But before diving into this, it’s important to take a look at the areas that will be impacted. The four biggest areas I foresee are…
- Internal Salesforce users
- External customer facing tools
- AI-powered development tools
- Implementation of generative AI
1. Internal Salesforce Users
Perhaps one of the biggest use cases for generative AI in the Salesforce ecosystem is the use of the recently announced Einstein 1 powered set of tools. A group of users, identified as “pioneers” by IBM, are the organizations getting the most ROI out of Salesforce. They expect nearly 15% of their workforce will be augmented with generative AI tools within the next year.
For Sales Cloud users, this will include using AI to automatically generate sales emails based on context from the account details and history. Service Cloud users may use a similar feature called service replies to automatically generate responses to customers on a case.
Similar functionality extends through Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Tableau, and Slack.
2. External Customer Facing Tools
Secondly, we have customer facing tools that will sit outside of Salesforce. Examples of these include Einstein Bots and Commerce Concierge, which use bot technology and generative AI to support shoppers on commerce sites.
This channel is clearly a focus for Salesforce, having just acquired Airkit.ai a couple of weeks ago. Airkit.ai is a commerce focused GPT-4 powered bot that promises to solve 90% of customer queries instantly. Founder of Airki.ai, Stephen Ahikian, stated in a press release that customer satisfaction is at a 17-year low, with call teams being more stressed than ever. Something that I’m sure many of us can relate to.
Interestingly enough, the “pioneer” group that IBM identified in their report are focusing much more on customer facing operations, whilst the “pensive” group (opposite of pioneer – yet to fully complete their digital transformation), is focusing more on internal operations.
3. AI-Powered Development Tools
Perhaps one of the most talked about benefits of generative AI is the impact it will have on software development. The discovery that tools like ChatGPT could generate code in any language, including Apex, was pretty exciting (if not a little scary). A discovery that ultimately kicked off the conversation: will artificial intelligence replace Salesforce professionals?
While the answer is ultimately no, there are plenty of tools that can enhance a Salesforce professional’s workflow. Developer focused tools in this space include GitHub Copilot and Einstein GPT for Developers (which has just been released), as well as Admin focussed tools such as Copilot Studio and Prompt Builder. Plus, there’s the upcoming Flow GPT, that will enable admins to build flows simply with a text prompt.
AI is truly firing on all cylinders, and not only has the ability to improve your bottom line through user productivity enhancements, but could mean precious development time is reduced, enabling you to deploy new Salesforce enhancements faster.
4. Implementation of Generative AI
Finally, we get to maybe one of the most underrated topics of all, which begs the question, who is going to implement all of this exciting, emerging technology?
In true Salesforce fashion, they have made sure to build an ecosystem of no/low code tools to support their generative AI revolution. These tools sit under the new Copilot Studio hub, where tools such as the Prompt, Skills, and Model Builder live to essentially allow you to build templated prompts for specific use cases.
Implementation of these features will be shared across the Salesforce ecosystem, and the tools have clearly been designed with internal Salesforce Admins in mind. However, for larger, more complex Salesforce orgs who may wish to use a mixture of LLM models, including their own built on top of platforms such as Amazon Sagemaker, implementation partners may need to be brought in.
Although Salesforce partners will be the initial obvious choice, I doubt many smaller bespoke Salesforce partners will have knowledge on tools such as Anthropic, Cohere, Amazon Sagemaker etc.With 61% of “pioneers” in the State of Salesforce report stating that they are looking beyond the out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities, is this a gap in the market to be filled by Salesforce partners?
Creating Your Salesforce AI Strategy
It’s easy to get excited by the thought of AI and implementing some of these groundbreaking features that came out of Dreamforce ‘23, but you must start with a strategy.
The first plan of action must be to understand the use cases within your organization and how they could potentially be augmented. This post from phData, recommends a 2 step approach for discovery:
- Organizational discovery: That is, looking at what makes your company unique, and what are the priorities for your organization over the next few years. This will at least allow you to focus your efforts on that of the overall company strategy.
- Use-case discovery: This requires you to look at individual roles, processes, and tasks where AI could augment processes, looking at the areas where the biggest problems and pain-points are as a priority.
Once important use cases have been identified, it’s a matter of experimentation. As IBM states in the report:
They also recommend the following action points for generative AI…
Start now and don’t pause. The pioneers are diving in head-first, using generative AI to secure a competitive advantage, but more importantly, to learn more about the limits, challenges, and power of generative AI technology.
Don’t settle for improving current state operations. Generative AI is worth the effort, but organizations that limit their ambition to process improvements and efficacy gains related to current state operations are limiting the power of AI more generally. Full-scale enterprise-level AI, which has been around long before generative AI, has transformational potential that extends well beyond current use cases and will last long after the generative AI hype cycle cools down.
Choose intelligent workflows with holistic impact. Develop a vision for how generative AI can have a holistic impact across the enterprise. Invite your CIO and CMO to a workshop where you can define clear business cases, sources of data and how to mitigate potential risks and barriers that come with transformational technology.
Summary
Artificial intelligence is clearly the technology of the moment, with many thought leaders stating it as the biggest technological shift to ever take place. It’s important not to forget the fundamentals of CRM.
There are many other exciting insights shared by IBM that the top performers are doing to maximize their Salesforce ROI. These include trends such as the Salesforce Industry Clouds, integrating silos of data, investing in a change ready culture, and overcoming enterprise inertia with innovation.
Be sure to download your copy of the IBM State of Salesforce 2023-24 report today to delve further into how these innovations can level up your Salesforce practice.