Salesforce has unveiled new generative AI tools to improve retail operations for consumers, merchandisers and marketers.
The new tools are integrated with Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud, supported by the Einstein 1 platform. Einstein 1 connects to retailer or shopper data, integrating with extended language models (LLMs) to provide real-time context, brand voice consistency, data governance and security, the company said .
Tools include Einstein Copilot for Shoppers, a generative AI assistant designed for more personalized interactions with consumers that lead to faster product discovery and purchase.
For retail traders, there is Page Designer to create e-commerce sites using natural language prompts and returns information in order management to evaluate behavior in returns transactions and suggest changes to product display details to reduce returns.
For marketers, Salesforce launched Global Promotion Management to synthesize marketing data with predictive insights to better predict future pricing and build more effective rewards programs. Salesforce also unveiled Referral Marketing, which provides pre-built templates and an AI-powered “likely to refer” tool for brand referral programs.
Salesforce unveiled the new tools at the National Retail Federation’s NRF 2024, an annual global conference for technology innovations in retail.
Shopping with AI
New retail tools integrate accordingly Salesforce AI Portfolioshowing how the CRM provider is building on its mission to integrate generative AI for better customer experiences and better business outcomes, according to Opus Research analyst Dan Miller.
“I expect to see a lot more, proving that GenAI and LLMs are not static things but constantly evolving resources,” Miller said.
Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is a fitting addition that shows how businesses are becoming more comfortable with Generative AI to interact with customers. He said a companion voice assistant would be a good idea.
“This shows that retailers and other businesses are less concerned about LLMs slipping up and providing bad information or hallucinations in response to customer queries,” Miller said.
Studying consumer tastes for better automation
Einstein Copilot for Shoppers also brings more convenience to the consumer. It can connect both remote and in-store digital experiences to gather customer preferences, acting as a “high-touch concierge” who can be trained on “tastes, styles and trends,” according to analyst Liz Miller at Constellation Research. This way, Einstein Copilot will be able to guide shoppers to highly suitable items that they had not noticed before.
“That’s where we dreamed of AI,” Liz Miller said.
With this technology, brands can ultimately turn anticipation of customer behavior into automation, using AI models to analyze interactions between consumers and Einstein Copilot as well as create triggered actions. These “automated brand experience actions should be taken as part of marketing, sales and even proactive service opportunities,” said Liz Miller.
“This Copilot for Shoppers generates a new mountain of data that must be ingested, analyzed and transformed into actions,” she added.
Inventory management
The Page Designer and Return Insights in Order Management tools are also good examples of how generative AI can create and present data insights in a way that is more intuitive to humans, according to Dan Miller of Opus Research.
“Offerings for merchandisers also showcase the power of a conversational user interface for business research as a replacement for traditional reporting,” he added, saying that Return Insights and Order Management are a good addition for the post-holiday rush.
This is where we dreamed of AI.
Liz MillerAnalyst, Constellation Research
Having organized and up-to-date inventory reports will help retailers inform their product display and promotion decisions, avoiding mistakenly offering out-of-stock products or mislabeling descriptions. In this way, Salesforce “brings a clear view of the inventory into the body of data to enable teams and retailers to react and respond to inventory and business realities,” Miller said.
“Salesforce does a good job identifying use cases where data, analytics and AI can be applied quickly to achieve documentable results,” she said.
There is still much to be done as retailers deploy new tools using AI.
“These use cases are just a few of many discoveries that will spread quickly,” said Dan Miller.
Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is in pilot phase and will be generally available in summer 2024. Page Designer is currently in pilot phase. Information about returns in order management is generally available. Global promotion management is in pilot phase and will be generally available in spring 2024. Referral marketing is generally available.
Mary Reines is a news editor covering customer experience and unified communications for TechTarget Editorial. Before TechTarget, Reines was an arts editor at the Marblehead Reporter.
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