By Bernardo Moura, Salesforce Tech Lead at ília
The speed of technological advancement is remarkable, and we see its impact in various ways. During the days I spent at Dreamforce, the largest Salesforce event, held in San Francisco, I absorbed the trends and challenges shaping the Salesforce platform landscape. In this article, I share insights, common concerns, and glimpses of what the future holds for this evolution.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a dominant presence in the market, providing crucial support for data-driven decision-making based on patterns and behaviors, and it continues to evolve at an impressive pace. Efficient data management is the key for guiding a company’s major strategic decisions. In other words, an organization that maintains solid, integrated, high-quality data is well-positioned to trigger successful actions.
Every company aims to achieve the coveted “360-degree view,” but in reality, few can. This often happens due to the existence of various fragmented, not entirely interconnected or integrated systems. Now, imagine the possibility of bringing all this important data together in one place, with an AI behind it that conducts secure and automated analyses and actions. This scenario would simplify the employee’s experience with customers. It would be a dream come true, right? And increasingly, this vision seems to be getting closer to reality.
Einstein 1 Platform AI and Its Challenges
Salesforce’s challenge is to transform Einstein into a Trusted AI Platform, ensuring intelligent and automated integration, always with the utmost reliability. The idea is that all companies can increase their productivity and achieve success with the assistance of AI, without the need to retain or access data invasively. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, addressed concerns about the companies’ data exposure and information used to generate inputs for predictive and generative analysis. He stated, “Your data isn’t our product” and went further to say that this is all part of an AI Trust Revolution. Salesforce even developed a dedicated flow called Einstein Trust Layer to ensure complete data protection.
This predictive AI operates in an ecosystem where it learns certain behaviors and patterns within the tools, developing strategies to continuously improve the success rate, whether in sales or customer service. However, innovation is now focused on AI Generative, with the ability to interpret the customer, understand what was requested, and automatically offer certain products based on the conversation, segmentation, and specific characteristics of that customer. This intelligence can generate documents, formulate specific questions, and even create images to support service and problem resolution. Therefore, we are witnessing significant advancements which make it increasingly easier to understand the customer and know what the Next Best Actions (NBA) and Next Best Offers (NBO) will be for each situation.
Data Cloud is the Current Bet
Another tool that Salesforce is investing in is the Data Cloud, formerly known as the Customer Data Platform (CDP). This platform will function as a data lake and a data warehouse, a centralizing cloud for all data and records, whether originating from Salesforce or even from other systems and legacies. It will be an environment capable of consolidating information from different sources, providing crucial data for operational efficiency and offering Salesforce users a powerful 360-degree view, truly making the platform Omni-channel.
Remember all the AI mentioned above? It will also be able to query information from this cloud containing relevant company data and make predictions and solution offers based on behaviors from even other sources present within the Data Cloud.
Now, the biggest challenge for companies will be ensuring that they have a significant volume of data to work with, and furthermore, that this data is intact and of high quality. AI will rely on the data to propose answers, so it is essential to ensure that everything happening behind the scenes is perfect, to make the most of this functionality.
I am excited about this coming revolution, and you? I believe you are as well, right?
