Salesforce continues to place great importance on generative AI.
At the National Retail Federation conference in New York on Sunday, Salesforce showed off new retail-focused tools that work across its network. Einstein Platform 1.
These tools are just the latest example of Salesforce’s enthusiastic stance on AI. Last June, Salesforce announced generative AI capabilities integrated into its commerce and marketing clouds that automate tasks like content creation and personalization, audience segment creation, and offer personalization.
Two months later, in September, Salesforce rolled out Einstein 1, its CDP-style data repository, which allows marketers to feed Data Cloud data into generative AI tools, said Jay Wilder, vice -President of Product Marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
New to the AI team
Two of Salesforce’s new AI-powered tools are almost ready for prime time: one for segment creation and another to help retailers coordinate pricing of promotions to different audiences across channels .
Both are in beta and will be generally available next month.
The Segment Building Tool allows retailers to build segments – and, therefore, campaigns and customer journeys – that target customers with messages and offers “based on where they are in their relationship with the brand” in terms of engagement and affinity, Wilder said.
For example, a retailer can identify customers who are occasional shoppers and come in once a season for a single transaction, customers who return regularly (and therefore could be candidates for Salesforce’s referral marketing program), and abandoned customers. .
With the global promotions management tool, marketers can use Data Cloud customer data to predict which prices and rewards will work best for loyal customers and less frequent shoppers.
For example, a company could offer everyone a 20% discount but add 100 bonus points for loyal members, Wilder said. Customers with a high lifetime value, on the other hand, may benefit from early or exclusive access to a product.
Salesforce can also use predictive AI to predict the positive or negative effect of an offering on revenue generation and margin compression. For example, a promotion that ends up eroding a company’s margins may not be worth implementing.
Charmed, (A) I’m sure
While generative AI is clearly an investment priority for Salesforce, the company is taking precautions to ensure that enterprise customers use the technology safely and methodically, according to Wilder.
For example, Salesforce is working to produce AI-driven responses that are “highly tailored” to the look and feel of a particular brand, he said, but without compromising data privacy and security. ‘A brand.
According to Wilder, Salesforce uses what he calls the Einstein Trust Layer to “hide” any personally identifiable information used to query a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, Cohere, Anthropic’s Claude 2, or a Google model. .
Once the response is generated, Salesforce automatically removes a brand’s proprietary information and instructs LLMs not to retain the data or use it to train their models. “It’s a prerequisite for working with customers at Salesforce,” Wilder said.
Salesforce also reviews AI-generated content for bias or “anything that could be considered a toxic hallucination,” Wilder said, and, importantly, it creates an automated audit trail for all processes involving several users.
In other words, he said, it’s important to “keep all your receipts” — and not just for compliance purposes.
“You can analyze that information” to derive broader insights, Wilder said. For example, users can deepen their knowledge Painting (acquired by Salesforce in 2019) or “drill down” where the trust layer detected toxicity or bias to understand how and why those results arrived.
Salesforce has also introduced audit trails in other products. For example, in the marketing cloud, there is a record of every journey, piece of content created, and message sent.
The safeguards put in place by Salesforce could explain why the company’s AI generative content creation capabilities for its marketing cloud have been rapidly adopted by customers since their launch last October, according to Wilder.
“There is a high degree of urgency,” he said. “Brands and businesses don’t want to stay on the sidelines of generative AI just yet. »
