Salesforce made a series of announcements for Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Data Cloud. Salesforce is showcasing these innovations at Connections this week. Including new AI and personalization capabilities to help marketers and commerce leaders succeed in the advanced AI revolution.
Headlining the announcements are the emergence of three Einstein Copilots. Einstein Copilot for marketing Cloud, which will be generally available on June 24. There are also two Copilots for Commerce Cloud. One is for Merchants, and a second is for Shoppers.
Where Salesforce Cloud Copilots are different is that they are not individual AI Copilots for each application but are all underpinned by a common data platform. Steve Hammond, EVP & GM Marketing Cloud, described this saying, ”Einstein Copilot is a single conversational AI assistant that’s deeply connected to your trusted customer data. This is high-quality, trusted AI that only Salesforce can deliver. Einstein Copilot can answer questions, create summaries, generate content, and automate tasks. But most important of all, it can do all this from one unified experience.
“There’s one Copilot across every Salesforce app, which means that Einstein Copilot reads all the data and metadata in our platform to get instant insights and to provide assistance from the first moment in marketing to ongoing, engaging experiences and commerce transactions to seamless sales and service. Touchpoints. It is the same system across the board, and Copilot is connecting all of this.”
Salesforce has now delivered Einstein Personalisation to help deliver individual customer journeys based on the data help within Commerce Data Cloud that is collected from all points across the customer’s journey.
Driving into the future with Aston Martin
One customer that is already delivering personalised journeys to its customers is Aston Martin, the luxury car manufacturer. Historically, it had fragmented data silos with information from vehicles and customers disconnected.
Einstein 1 has helped the company to connect the dots across its information silos. The company now uses the Copilot to build campaigns. These can interact with the customer and the shop floor at the same time. It means that during the production cycle, customers are updated. They are also given the opportunity to change the specification at the appropriate point in time. Copilot helps marketing to build collateral such as email. It can integrate the different options that then coordinate the actions through the CROM and ordering process.
The Marketing team can also create the right segment for each campaign in natural language. They merely asked Einstein to create a new campaign for customers who recently ordered the DB 12 car model to track their car while it’s being built. The Copilot will identify which customers are within this segment. It will then check with data from the manufacturing operations which cars are still at a stage where modifications are still possible. That data is available because Aston Martin is feeding telemetry data from its assembly line into Data Cloud. There is no point in sending options to customers whose cars are being delivered.
Matthew Randall, Head of Software and Integration, Aston Martin, commented, “Salesforce allows us to fuse together our trusted data from across our business to deliver tailored quality experiences to every current and future Aston Martin driver. The Einstein 1 Platform allows us to give our customers the personalized, VIP experience they expect as we look to grow and enable our AI enterprise.”
The Copilots
Einstein Copilot for Marketers
Einstein Copilot for Marketers provides a natural language interface to assist marketers in building campaign elements, including marketing briefs, content, and email campaigns. It can also help marketers to generate personalised responses based on customer data and product information from across Data Cloud.
Salesforce gave the following example. “A clothing retailer could use Einstein Copilot for Marketers to efficiently spin up a campaign to entice previous customers to return with targeted product offers. To do so, they would use an AI prompt to build a campaign brief that provides campaign objectives, KPIs, target audience, and initial content for campaign assets. From there, they would create the segment and select audience attributes, hone their email content, and deploy the campaign all from one conversational console.”
Copilot for Merchants
Copilot for Merchants helps Commerce Cloud customers across a range of tasks. Tasks that include setting up storefronts, writing product descriptions through to, using AI to optimise SEO and looking at full funnel conversion. It uses natural language prompts and enables teams to build personalised journeys on commerce stores. The intent is to delight customers and drive higher conversion rates.
Salesforce gave the following example. “An air conditioning manufacturer can use Einstein Copilot for Merchants to quickly create a product detail page for their new HVAC equipment line by using natural language prompts and include AI-generated product descriptions that are optimized for SEO. The merchant can also optimize sales with auto-generated, multilingual targeted promotions that are based on buyers’ locations and past purchases.”
Copilot for shoppers
This Copilot is built specifically for shoppers on a commerce cloud website. It will answer questions the shopper may have about products. Letting shoppers interact with data from the product catalogue or other information available to them.
For example, within Aston Martin a client may have noticed that a new option is available for their new car. Or they have changed their mind. Copilot can facilitate the new option, checking that the car is not too far along the assembly line. And because the shopper can already be given information about their payment preference, much of the painful cart process is eliminated. The payment can even be carried out invisibly if able to. They are effectively enabling the shopping to have a personalised, engaging experience in natural language with Aston Martin, at any time of day and without a customer service agent being involved.
Other new capabilities
In all, Salesforce has updated over 1,000 new features across its commerce solutions in the last year. These latest updates include Data Cloud for Commerce, which enables organisations to take data from different sources. Whether within the Salesforce ecosystem or third-party cloud data stores. The most recent addition to the Zero Copy partner Alliance is IBM. IBM joins AWS, Databricks, Snowflake, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to the list.
To strengthen the Copilots, Salesforce also announced Einstein Personalization. This is an AI-based decision engine. It allows brands to leverage real-time customer data from Data Cloud to deliver marketing campaigns that automatically trigger the next best offers and personalized content.
Hammond explained this by saying, “We are scaling the intelligence for marketers so that they can build one-to-one relationships everywhere from marketing to service to commerce store friends and beyond. Einstein personalization now allows brands to use real-time engagement data with a unified customer profile, from data cloud to build cross-channel marketing campaigns that automatically trigger things like next best offers or even personalised pieces of content.”
Salesforce gave a typical example. “An unknown visitor might land on a bank’s business loan web page, and by the time the visitor navigates back to the home page, they would see personalized content for loans and related offers. As this user engages with suggested content and provides their email or name, their profile would update in real-time so the bank’s sales reps could send the prospect a relevant white paper to aid their search for a business loan.”
Ariel Kelman, President and CMO of Salesforce commented, “Marketing and commerce leaders need a trusted advisor to help them tap into the promise of generative AI. With the Einstein 1 Platform, we’re giving organizations the power to unify all of their data on one trusted platform. This is the key to getting results from generative AI that are actually useful in driving your business forward.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Underpinned by the Einstein Trust Layer and the guardrails that Salesforce have in place over data usage, this is the next stage of AI development. It is already impressive what Salesforce is delivering to existing clients like Aston Martin. As these solutions become more prevalent among its customers, consumers will have a harder time differentiating between a Copilot and a person.
In time, it will be interesting to see whether Salesforce delivers these Copilots to Salesforce Voice solutions. AI is ushering in a new age. For some, it is concerning. For consumers, if they get a better experience when shopping, they are likely to care less. If Salesforce continues to develop its AI capabilities carefully and in a trusted way, it will be able to push the boundaries of what is capable. Possibly stretching into what it sees as the fourth wave of the AI revolution, Artificial General Intelligence.
