Generative AI was placed centre stage at Saleforce’s World Tour event at London’s Excel Centre. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce UKI CEO, gave the keynote address at the event, firmly nailing the company to the Generative AI mask. Bahrololoumi said, “Trust and innovation are the two fundamental values that guides Salesforce’s work with generative AI. AI fuels Salesforce’s primary vision of connecting with customers in a new way with trust at its very foundation. We want to help customers harness this new technology with trust and navigate these new challenges and guide enterprises to customer success.”
“Data is the foundation of AI. We’re in the era of building Trust for generative AI collaboration,” she added. Bahrololoumi suggested there was no other organisation on the planet with comparable customer relationship management and AI integration as Salesforce. Einstein already generates 1 trillion predictions a week for customers. She believes generative AI will change everything for everyone.
Making AI ubiquitous
Salesforce has brought AI into every app, every layout of Salesforce’s platform, every single workflow and all with trust, security and privacy. “It is the technology of our lifetime and coming faster than previous technologies. It only took 2 months for Chat GPT to acquire 100 million uses. Salesforce has never seen that speed of technology adoption before.” Bahrololoumi suggests every business needs an AI strategy and needs to become AI-first.
Salesforce also announced Generative AI functionality for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Bahrololoumi believes this will transform how sellers and service teams work and interact with customers. Sales GPT will embed generative AI in the flow of work, auto-generating customer emails, call summaries, account research, and more. Service GPT will auto-generate service replies, automatically summarise customer interactions into easy-to-access knowledge articles for service teams, and better prepare field service agents before they arrive at service locations.
The company suggests Generative AI has the potential to transform how sales and service professionals in every industry do their jobs. In new research, more than 60% of sales and service professionals believe generative AI will help them better serve customers. Yet, 63% of sales professionals and 59% of service professionals lack the skills to use generative AI effectively and safely.
Laying out Salesforce’s AI credentials
In some detail, Bahrololoumi laid out Salesforce’s credentials in AI. The company has 227 AI research papers published and 300 patents. It acquired new AI innovation, with organisations like Relate IQ and Prediction IO supporting the building of Einstein to creating new technologies such as feature engineering, auto feature selection and auto model selection. She also said the company had invested heavily into large language models (LLM).
At the London World Tour, Bahrololoumi unveiled AI Cloud, Salesforce’s trusted enterprise AI for CRM. “It all starts with our trusted Einstein GPT layer. This allows our applications to harness the power of generative AI with trust and privacy for enterprises most sensitive customer and business data.”
During the keynote address, Bahrololoumi revealed the company is experiencing rapid growth in the UK as companies invest in digital transformation. These investments have continued particularly in light of the innovation cycle around AI. As a result, the company plans to invest $4 billion in the country to continue to drive innovation and support its growing customer base in the region. Commenting on the investment, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said, “This investment sits alongside my key priority to grow the economy. In addition to my pledge to make the UK the best place in the world to start, grow and invest in tech businesses.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business.
Salesforce commitment to generative AI is impressive. The company is now providing trusted generative AI across every application directly in the workflow of work for Sales and Service, in addition to Marketing, Commerce, Slack, Tableau, Flow, and Apex.
The only blot on the landscape of this sunny uplands is the issue of trust. Many enterprises can see the benefits of AI. They can see it is the future and will be key to their growth.
However, they remain cautious. There is an AI trust gap. All companies want to embrace the technology, however, their customers may be less eager. Salesforce’s own research suggests 59% of customers don’t trust companies with their data. Yet data remains the foundation of AI. Hence Bahrololoumi’s clear attempt to deep-dive Salesforce’s whole brand and mantra to facilitating the trust needed for generative AI.
It’s a brave move. Generative AI is still relatively in its infancy. Whether the necessary guardrails have been developed to ensure the technology is not utilised for negative reasons. Only time will tell, whether this corporate direction and investment pays off for the company.
