by twieberneit | Sep 12, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Dreamforce 2023 has started. It is the first post-Covid physical Dreamforce. The event has more than 40,000 participants from all over the world, which is almost small, considering past events. As usual, Dreamforce was opened by a keynote that was accompanied by a flurry of announcements. In an interesting twist, the keynote was accompanied by an analyst watch party held by Salesforce’s analyst relations. There was a “competing” watch party by the CRM Playaz. Not surprisingly, the topic of AI was front, right and center of the keynote after some emphasis on a culture of giving and the celebration of Salesforce as the #3 software vendor worldwide with an expected revenue of $34.8B US while continuing to lead the CRM market by a considerable margin. This is, indeed, quite an achievement. However, the focus of the keynote was set in the watch party by Salesforce’s Chief Enterprise Strategist Bruce Richardson with the following posting in the chat: “gen AI to boost global economy by $4.4 trillion. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, it’s been all over the headlines, and businesses are racing to capture its value. Within the technology’s first few months, McKinsey research found that generative AI (gen AI) features stand to add up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy—annually. Source: McKinsey (August 23, 2023)” Consequently, much of what Salesforce currently does, capitalizes on this opportunity and helps businesses work with this opportunity. The key vehicles for this are the new Einstein 1 Platform and Einstein Copilot that comes together with a low code development environment Einstein Copilot Studio. Einstein Copilot is an “out of the box conversational AI assistant built into the user...
by twieberneit | Jun 23, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The news During the Salesforce AI Day on June 12 as well as the Salesforce AI Industry Analyst Forum on June 20, Salesforce provided a lot of interesting information on how the company addresses the challenge – or should I say problem – of trust into artificial intelligence. Salesforce sees this gap caused by hallucinations, lack of context and data security as well as toxicity and bias. According to Salesforce, this gets compounded by the need for integrating external models into business software. To address this problem, Salesforce has announced its AI Cloud that combines an “Einstein GPT Trust Layer”, Customer 360 and its CRM to offer AI-powered business processes that are built right into the system, based on an AI that can be trusted. The main vehicle is the Einstein GPT Trust Layer that takes care of secure data retrieval from business applications, dynamic grounding to reduce the risk of hallucinations and to increase response accuracy by automatically enriching prompts with relevant business-owned data, data masking, the anonymization of sensitive data to avoid its unintentional exposure of sensitive data to external tools, toxicity detection to make sure that generated content adheres to corporate policy, is free of unwanted words or images, and unbiased, creating and maintaining an audit trail, the external (or internal) AI not retaining, storing, any corporate information that gets sent to it via the request. This trust layer sits in between the used AI models and the apps and the respective development environments. All requests to the models, along with their data, get routed through this layer, ensuring authorization protected retrieval of data, the grounding...
by twieberneit | May 11, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 4, 2023, Zoho held its Zoholics conference in Austin, TX which included a media and analyst track in addition to the customer track. After all, Zoholics is a customer event. During this event, about 80 participants of the former track had ample opportunity to learn about and discuss the latest news at Zoho. We also had the opportunity to listen to – and question – a panel of customers who gave candid answers about their journey with Zoho and challenges they faced. Of course there was plenty of room for mingling and networking with Zoho executives and, of course, with analysts and customers. In addition to the breaks between the tracks, there was a pre-evening reception, a dinner on the event day and a casual brunch at the Zoho farm just outside of Austin. As usual for Zoho, the sessions were less about feeding us with PowerPoint (or Zoho Show, to be precise. Why would Zoho not use a Zoho product?) but about giving good information and a genuine interest in getting feedback. This was evident not only during the sessions but also by the customer panel and an open Q and A with representatives of the Zoho leadership team. Of course, the customers were reference customers. Still, they openly admitted challenges. In one case e.g., it became evident that Zoho’s HR software has scope for improvement, another example was users preferring MS Teams to Zoho Cliq. The sessions covered four grand themes: The release of Ulaa, a privacy orientated browser Zoho’s upmarket momentum A kick-start set of solutions to help solopreneurs and very small businesses to...
by twieberneit | Mar 16, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The hype around generative AI, in particular ChatGPT is still at a fever pitch. It created thousands of start-ups and at the moment attracts lots of venture capital. Basically, everyone – and their dog – jumps on the bandwagon, with the Gartner Group predicting that it is getting worse, before it is going to be better. According to them, generative AI is yet to cross the peak of inflated expectations. Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2022; source Gartner There are a few notable exceptions, though. So far, I haven’t heard major announcements by players like SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, Zoho, or Freshworks. Before being accused of vendor bashing … I take this is a good sign. Why? Because it shows that vendors like these have understood that it is worthwhile thinking about valuable scenarios before jumping the gun and coming out with announcements just to stay top of the mind of potential customers. I dare say that these vendors (as well as some unmentioned others) are doing exactly the former, as all of them are highly innovative. Don’t get me wrong, though. It is important to announce new capabilities. It is probably just not a good style to do so too much in advance, just to potentially freeze a market. This only leads to disappointments on the customer side and ultimately does not serve a vendor’s reputation. For business vendors, it is important to understand and articulate the value that they generate by implementing any technology. Sometimes, it is better to use existing technology instead of shifting to the shiny new toy. The potential benefits in these cases simply do not outweigh the disadvantages, starting...
by twieberneit | Nov 18, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
On November 10, 2022, SugarCRM held its annual analyst day in the beautiful Chaminade resort in Santa Cruz. In attendance was an elusive crowd of 14 analysts and six customer representatives, along with the SugarCRM executives. We gathered to inform ourselves about what is going on, what will be going on, and of course, to listen and talk to customers about how they solve their business challenges with SugarCRM. All of this in plenum- and individual formats along with good space for informal talks. The event Apart from the very important social activities that enabled SugarCRM executives, customers, partner representatives and analysts to mingle and talk, the event consisted of several informative briefings that ranged from strategy and roadmap sessions across the platform to all-important customer interviews. The last session was an open question and answer with the executive team. The customers in attendance have been very diverse, including (for profit) social business, a jet charter and service business, educational, medical businesses, and a governmental organization. Some of them are fairly new Sugar customers, some of them are with SugarCRM for a long time. What all of them have in common is that they have non-run-off-the-mill businesses and processes and that they use at least two of SugarCRM’s solutions. Some key insights that they shared were that they are often able to adapt their systems to changing needs by themselves and that, whenever they needed the support, it was readily available. Two of the stories brought very notable points. One business explained its ability to merge twenty plus acquisitions in less than two years into their system, so that...
by twieberneit | Sep 18, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 14, 2022, Zendesk announced the release of its new customer sentiment and intent functionality: Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist. These new AI based solutions shall “enable businesses to triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale. Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist are the next step in Zendesk’s vision to create accessible CX AI for companies of all sizes. The technology uses proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and applies a vertical lens. This creates models custom to each business capable of identifying the intent, language and sentiment of each customer interaction. This unique approach to applying machine learning creates more personalized and informed interactions to better serve customers. For example, specific inquiries, such as “I’m having problems with payment”, can be automatically sent to an agent who is equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution, while inquiries that include language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way will indicate a highly negative sentiment and be routed to the top of the queue. The new capabilities include: Instantly route and prioritize revenue drivers, ensuring agents are working on business-critical requestsAnalyze distribution of requests so businesses can better plan operations, collaborate across departments and identify improvement opportunities supported by data for more efficient CX operationsAutomatically guide agents on how to best resolve a customer’s issue in real-time, understand context, recommend solutions, and improve coaching and training with valuable insightsContinuously boost accuracy as the AI solutions receive feedback on predictions and recommendationsDetect sensitive information automatically to meet compliance and security needs or extract confidential data like...
