Salesforce has launched a new generative AI product called EinsteinGPT that it says will be context-aware and available throughout its application suite including in Slack, Tableau and its customer relationship management (CRM) offerings. It uses existing Salesforce AI models and combines them with the GPT-3.5 large language model from OpenAI that also in part powers Microsoft’s latest CRM AI offering Dynamices 365 Copilot.
The company says EinsteinGPT will be opened up to work with any large language model, allowing customers to bring their choice of technology to the platform, delivering AI-generated content across sales, service, marketing, commerce and IT at hyperscale.
To ensure it reduces the risk of mistakes or misinformation seen from other generative AI tools Salesforce says there will always be a human in the loop when it comes to EinsteinGPT-generated content, requiring final approval from a human before a generated message can be sent, a report published, or information shared.
Announced during the Trailblazer DX developer conference, the new generative AI tool has been designed to work across every Salesforce cloud. It can be used to generate personalised emails for customers that pull in live sales, weather and other data and tailor responses to the individual customer needs without any human input. The tool can also be used to respond to customer queries using real data from company datasets and is restricted to training on company-specific data.
Building on existing Einstein AI models first introduced in 2016 and the Data Cloud launched last year to unify a company’s customer data, it can connect that data to OpenAI’s models “out of the box” or allow a company to use its own proprietary model. It gives employees access to natural language prompts to direct the Salesforce CRM as required.
Unlike ChatGPT and associated public tools, which are restricted to data produced in and before 2021, EinsteinGPT will have access to live customer data from Data Cloud and other approved sources.
Salesforce EinsteinGPT part of a ‘profound technological shift’
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalised ways,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. “Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”
The company confirmed during a press conference there would be a direct feedback loop with OpenAI as the Microsoft-backed start-up uses Salesforce products in its go-to-market solutions including creating a commercial version of ChatGPT. OpenAI also uses Slack, the corporate messaging tool owned by Salesforce and has developed a ChatGPT bot that will be made public.
“We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”
The AI tools will be coming to sales, service, marketing and for developers working with the Salesforce platform including opening access to the Salesforce Large Language Model. The tool appears on the side of the screen and is context aware. It can auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails or scheduling emails on one section then generate knowledge articles from past case notes and personalise chat replies in another. It can also dynamically generate personalised content for customers and provide summaries of sales opportunities after users engage with knowledge articles.
To avoid the risk of misinformation or the AI producing irrelevant information, Salesforce says it is employing a series of core principles for the development of AI that will lead to a longer roll-out for EinsteinGPT but lead to a better overall product. The core areas include: accuracy, safety, honesty, empowerment and sustainability.
The news from Salesforce comes off the back of Microsoft announcing plans to integrate its own generative AI tools into its Dynamics 365 cloud platform and customer relationship management tools. Announced on Monday, Dynamics 365 Copilot follows in the footsteps of Microsoft’s other AI tools – the original GitHub Copilot automated coding tool, and Copilot for web, which is how the company refers to its newly AI-infused Bing search portal.
Anita Schjøll Abildgaard CEO and Co-founder of Iris.ai, said: “There is clearly a gold rush happening in generative AI right now, with big tech players looking for new methods for integrating generative into their new systems seemingly every day. The excitement is definitely welcome, but adoption needs to be done with due consideration.
“It’s important that technology begins as a solution to a specific problem, rather than falling in love with the technology and figuring out its practical applications later. To ensure generative AI’s adoption continues in a sustainable measure, organisations need to take steps back and assess how generative models can better serve their operations, rather than crowbarring it in wherever they can.”
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