thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Dreamforce 2023 – How right does Salesforce get AI?

Dreamforce 2023 – How right does Salesforce get AI?

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...
Salesforce lets the Genie out of the bottle!

Salesforce lets the Genie out of the bottle!

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...
How vendors help generating value with generative AI

How vendors help generating value with generative AI

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...
The Clash of Titans – The Great 2021 Players

The Clash of Titans – The Great 2021 Players

The year 2021 comes to an end. More than three years have gone by since the last look at the Clash of Titans, an analysis of how the then big 4.5: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe – along with some other players, are shaping the greater CRM and CX arena. A lot has changed since Thomas Wieberneit published his 2018 series that consisted of 4 articles: Platform PlayMicrosoft and SAP weigh inThe War Cry: Oracle and SalesforceThe IaaS Platform Providers It is obvious that the commoditization of the business application continues, and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has even increased since 2018. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. Two obvious reasons for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences needs a consistent technical platform, or we end up with engagements that are fragmented across interactions. This results in inconsistent and poor experiences. The second reason is that it needs a technological platform to enable and grow a thriving ecosystem. Vinnie Mirchandani in January 2020 stated that Enterprise Software Platforms have so far underperformed. Mirchandani looked at Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce. He basically argues, without providing too many details, that the major enterprise software vendors’ platforms are all lacking ambitious goals and do not aim high enough. One of his major points is that none of these vendors has put enough emphasis in empowering, nurturing and growing their respective partner ecosystems to take advantage of the software platforms by augmenting the applications delivered by the platform vendor...
You are a platform player? How to not be doomed!

You are a platform player? How to not be doomed!

These days every significant software vendor and some others, too, is positioning itself as a CX- and/or a platform player. By now, it is well known, what it means to be a platform player, and this is also not the main topic of this post. Just as much: In order to be a significant CX player, one quite simply needs to be a platform player.  Also, regardless of whether one has a platform or not, if everyone is a CX and a platform player, then obviously this is nothing that differentiates one vendor from the other anymore. Customers meanwhile nearly expect a set of solutions by one vendor being built upon one platform – or at least to appear like they are built on one platform. This basically means that “platform” as a thing to emphasize on has reached its zenith. And then, there is an additional problem associated with the platform game. A platform market is a kind of a winner takes it all market. Following the analysis and argumentation of Ray Wang in his new book Everybody Wants to Rule the World, in a platform market there will be only two major players. All other players are becoming insignificant or will vanish. While this sounds somewhat dystopian the point that I want to make is that there will not be a great many successful and strong players in a platform market. To use a metaphor, at one point in time a few vendors will have created enough gravity to become the entity that customers are attracted to. It is also visible that the first vendors have understood this and are acting...