Salesforce Einstein Celebrates Its First Birthday with New Features
Salesforce Einstein launched just one year ago this week. As it celebrates its first birthday, it’s worth taking a look back at the first year and looking at a couple of enhancements they’re adding as a birthday surprise. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Einstein isn’t actually a product at all, even though Salesforce markets it like one. Instead it’s a set of artificial intelligence technologies that underlie the entire Salesforce platform and attempt to add a smart layer wherever possible.
Salesforce Einstein has made significant progress in its first year. It has been infused into all of Salesforce’s products, giving the platform new capabilities.
To illustrate this, the company added three new capabilities today. The first is Einstein Forecasting, a tool that uses machine learning and data mining to analyze Salesforce CRM data and based on existing information makes predictions about future sales performance, generating reports in plain language. Salesforce claims this eliminates the need for separate forecasting tools or spreadsheets to generate this information. The second is opportunity scoring, a tool designed for sales management to keep on top of the sales pipeline. It takes advantage of data mining and machine learning to surface the biggest deals most likely close in the pipeline. Finally, it added a new feature specifically for sales staff, which helps manage their inbox by surfacing the most important emails. It essentially acts as a smart email assistant, using natural language processing to find the emails that matter most from the onslaught we all face on a daily basis, and also offers a best action or suggested response to give an even bigger head start on conquering email.
The company says it has gone from zero to 475 million AI-fueled predictions per day in just the first year. They currently have 7000 developers working on AI programs on the platform, and announced a $50 million fund from Salesforce Ventures to encourage even more. While many companies in AI look to replace workers, Salesforce says Einstein is about enhancing the employee and making their lives easier. Employees spend so much time in the sales, marketing and customer service functions on administrative overhead.
Salesforce is adding an intelligence layer with the goal of automating many of those administrative tasks, such as prioritizing important emails (something I could use as a journalist), entering information automatically from sources such as online forms or pulling in news that could have an impact on your sale (like say a catastrophic hurricane in the area). For customer service or marketing, it could be adding smarts, for example, to locate all of the pictures related to an event or subject. Whatever the task Einstein tech is attacking, Salesforce is trying to reduce the friction and put the tool to work for the user, rather than the reverse, which is how software has worked from the beginning of computers. AI flips the typical software workflow on its head. At its best, manual data entry would be reduced or eliminated, and the software would work for the employee. Salesforce isn’t alone in this goal, of course, but it’s trying to take advantage of it to enhance its products.
At just a year old, there is still a long way to go for this set of tools and technologies to meet that lofty goal, but in the first year Salesforce has been able to demonstrate the power of adding this kind of intelligence to its products. In the coming years, it is going to have to figure out ever more ways to put the power of AI to work for its customers.
