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Salesforce Gen AI Canvases: AI Lightning Layouts for Your Users

By Andreea Doroftei

AI continues to transform the way teams interact with data in both their personal and professional lives. With Salesforce being an early adopter of this technology and making significant investments into generative AI functionality across the entire platform, it’s no wonder that transforming the experience in a whole new way comes in next.

In this post, we’ll deep dive into the new Generative Canvas for Lightning (pilot), how you can try it out, and how your teams can tailor their Salesforce experience like never before…

Meet Generative Canvas

Generative Canvas, an experience suitable for any Salesforce user’s intent, need, and goal when working within the CRM, has been developed with users in mind and is powered by the new Agentforce platform. It respects user permissions to your CRM data, while data privacy is ensured by the Einstein Trust Layer.

The pilot has also been publicly announced during True to the Core at Dreamforce, as Salesforce has not only made this feature available to everyone for free but is also looking forward to gathering feedback to potentially make it generally available in production orgs in 2025. Exciting, right?

A sneak peek – Salesforce is working on Generative Canvas for Lightning, using generative AI to dynamically generate page layouts for specific users based on their role, their profile, and what they’re working on at that present moment.

Generative Canvas for Lightning has just been released in the pilot on the AppExchange, and anyone can participate in the pilot, with the aim of bringing it into production next year.

– Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI at Salesforce

READ MORE: 12+ Salesforce Product Insights from True to the Core ‘24

Get Started

While you might expect a complicated setup, it’s certainly not the case. In order to get started with Generative Canvas for Lightning, you simply need to install the package from this AppExchange listing by Salesforce Labs and make sure Einstein is turned on in your org.

As mentioned above, everyone is welcome to participate in the pilot, but since generative AI functionality sits at the core of this feature, having Einstein turned on is a mandatory prerequisite.

Following this, if you haven’t chosen to install for all users, make sure to assign the readily available Generative Canvas permission set to relevant users before navigating to the Generative Canvas App to continue.

Also, make sure to take a look at the settings wheel in the top right corner of the canvas, either before getting started or after trying the functionality out. This is where you can further customize it, select a different LLM and Grounding Objects, as well as determine the Input Settings, where you can add your own prompts instead of letting users ask their own questions.

Start Creating Your Canvas

Once the setup is finalized, let’s get to building! Customer-facing teams and the information they need to complete their day-to-day tasks are probably where Generative Canvas can bring immediate value – right from the get-go.

For example, the way in which account executives or sales managers obtain information about prospects, customers and their deals is going to be forever changed. With a simple prompt, either written by them or chosen from the recommended ones, records can be surfaced without them having to build reports or list views anymore – all with an automatically generated query. Files can also be uploaded in order to be processed and added to the canvas.

Each widget comes with additional options, such as enlarging or shrinking it, moving it either to the top or bottom of the canvas, providing feedback through either a like or dislike, and most importantly, the option to regenerate it by adding additional instructions to fine-tune the result.

While the Generative Canvas is grounded in your Salesforce data, why should it be limited to existing information? When preparing for meetings, account executives can also ask the canvas to surface news about their prospect or customer. The result will be structured to provide users with recommended conversation starters and the sources from which the information was gathered.

Additionally, going back to the CRM data, why not ask the canvas for potential upsell opportunities as well? Not only will it provide your users with a list, but if asked, it can also share an explanation as to why those specific customers have been identified to be great candidates for an upsell.

Regardless of how many canvases you create over time, you can always share them with your team members for easier collaboration. This becomes especially helpful for account executives and maybe sales engineers getting ready for customer calls or demos. By clicking the Share button, you and your colleagues can add individual users, and as soon as at least one user is selected, you will see at a glance that the canvas is shared.

It doesn’t matter where your colleagues are – whether in front of their computer or on the go – they will have access to the canvas, along with all the information and features within the Salesforce Mobile App. This includes the ability to reposition and rearrange components, and of course, interact with AI features just as seamlessly as they would on their laptop.

Refreshed Lightning UI

It should come as no surprise that Generative Canvas, similar to all other Lightning pages, is also going to adhere to the enhanced Lightning Experience if you decide to turn it on. If you haven’t tried it out already, the new experience does not bring changes to the underlying functionality but rather refreshes the design choices for a cleaner and user-friendly aesthetic, which promotes more efficient navigation and improves accessibility.

READ MORE: Salesforce Announces Refreshed Lightning User Interface

Summary

Though it is still in pilot, Generative Canvas has the potential to fully transform the way all personas, regardless of their team, interact with Salesforce records. While testing the functionality, be sure to check the results for accuracy, provide feedback and, of course, fine-tune your questions accordingly.

Have you already tried Generative Canvas for Lightning? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The Author

Andreea Doroftei

Andreea is a Salesforce Technical Instructor at Salesforce Ben. She is an 18x certified Salesforce Professional with a passion for User Experience and Automation. 

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