Commerce GPT is the next addition to the AI capabilities that Salesforce are adding under the Einstein GPT ‘umbrella’. With Commerce GPT, Salesforce aims to deliver an AI-connected user interface that accelerates new storefront creation and guidance towards goals for merchandisers, and conversational commerce for shoppers.
Customers now consider omni-channel shopping experiences as the standard, expecting the many ways to interact with brands to be at their fingertips. Interfacing with more than just the storefront, messaging platforms are prime for conversational commerce. This includes prompt-based exchanges that generate a rich messaging experience, for example, by pulling in catalogs without the shopper needing to switch channels. The guiding ethos is that anywhere a customer wants to interface with a brand needs to be a transactable and elegant moment.
The question on many minds is: how can you adopt AI in a meaningful way for your organization? The use cases that Commerce GPT encourages rapid user adoption, and Salesforce have “fundamentally rebuilt Commerce Cloud” with AI, Data Cloud, and CRM combined. Let’s take a look at what the next evolution of Commerce Cloud has in store for users…
Goals-Based Commerce
Automate growth and conversion strategies while maximizing user productivity.
This tool empowers businesses to set targets and goals, and then provides actionable insights and proactive recommendations on how to meet them – for example, to improve margins or to increase average order value (AOV).
By typing prompts, Goals-Based Commerce will understand the user’s intent, and recommend storefront design, merchandising setups, and promotions (that can be executed using Marketing Cloud). This is powered by the magic combination of Data Cloud, Einstein AI, and Flow.
Especially helpful for organizations outside of retail who are embarking on eCommerce for the first time, Goals-Based Commerce will be able to provide valuable insight into merchandising styles and promotions to accomplish business goals.
We can see the side panel with suggested goals in the image below:
Availability: In pilot in October 2023, and GA in February 2024.
Dynamic Product Descriptions
Accelerates building multiple versions of descriptions and translations.
With Commerce GPT alleviating the work of creating product descriptions, new storefronts are faster than ever to ‘stand up’. It can also automatically fill in missing catalog data for merchants and revolutionize the customer experience with auto-generated product descriptions tailored to every buyer.
With one click of a button, descriptions are rapidly generated from public market data, and past products (i.e. your trusted Salesforce data, powered by Data Cloud). Once the merchandiser reviews and approves, the descriptions are embedded.
Generated translations are an incredibly time-saving use case. The translations that Commerce GPT generates are not just basic translations; instead, they have the same nuanced brand voice, and use localized phrasing specific to the country or region.
Salesforce indicated that this is the first use case in a portfolio content generation of offerings for commerce they will be releasing. In the future, they hope to release capabilities that connect more deeply to personalization (i.e. personalized experiences for shoppers, with approval from merchandisers at every stage of the creation process).
Availability: GA in July 2023.
Commerce Concierge
Deliver a life-like, “white glove” experience to shoppers.
This application experience built on top of Commerce GPT uses bot technology and generative technology to help brands deliver a 1:1 shopper experience on any messaging channel.
Shoppers expect to have many ways to interact with brands at their fingertips. Interfacing with more than just the storefront, messaging platforms are prime for conversational commerce. Prompt-based exchanges help shoppers discover products effortlessly. Generate a rich messaging experience, for example, by pulling in catalogs without the shopper needing to switch channels. The goal is to make these interactions faster, and more natural.
We’ve come far from when personalization centered around products – how they relate to each other, driving what you can recommend – to personalization that focuses on the customer at a 1:1 level.
Availability: In pilot October 2023, and GA in February 2024.
Final Thoughts
Let’s return to the question: how can you adopt AI in a meaningful way for your organization? As we’re seeing today, the use cases that Commerce GPT caters to encourages rapid user adoption from both merchandisers and shoppers. And most of all, Salesforce is minimizing barriers by providing the tools right within the user interface, as well as in the messaging apps of the shoppers’ choice.
Remember, the ethos guiding Commerce GPT is that anywhere a customer wants to interface with a brand needs to be a transactable and elegant moment.
Interestingly, other providers in the digital commerce space have also made generative AI announcements. So, how does Salesforce differentiate? There are two primary ways that are worth noting:
1. Data Cloud
Data Cloud, Salesforce’s CDP offering is at the foundation that connects different ‘clouds’ across the platform. It’s capable of ingesting and storing real-time data streams at massive scale, and combines it with Salesforce data. It also takes care of data unification, identity resolution, and activation (i.e. putting segments to use). This paves the way for highly personalized customer experiences.
You may be thinking: “do we need to invest in Data Cloud to take advantage of Commerce GPT?”. That’s a sensible question. While Data Cloud is at the foundation, not all customers have to have purchased/licensed Data Cloud. Customers will be able to use GPT functionality regardless of whether they are using Data Cloud directly – but of course, this all becomes even stronger with Data Cloud as a personalization and data unification platform.
2. Data privacy and security
A looming concern for many organizations. Salesforce designed with trust and safety as a primary driver, and are staying abreast of where the landscape is moving, including potential regulations. As we’ve seen with the Google Cloud partnership, Salesforce recognizes that customers could have data in external systems, and are providing ways to securely transfer data in and out of the Salesforce platform.
With Commerce GPT and Dynamic Product Descriptions, for example, work has been done to adhere to data privacy and confidentiality, ensuring that the most limited amount of customer data gets passed “over the wall” to external systems (e.g. LLMs), which only happens at the time of the query.
Salesforce heard directly from their customers that this security ‘safety net’ made them more willing to pilot GPT enabled products, versus if there was an open API call out to other providers – bringing peace of mind alongside the AI enhancement.
