by Marshall Lager | Sep 23, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |
Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to...
by twieberneit | Sep 19, 2024 | Blog |
Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce just wrapped up, Hubspot’s Inbound event is still on, and there is one key theme that overarches all three events. And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front. Or that Mark Benioff apparently tore up his keynote in the last moment. It is also not that Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan found that the sales process is broken and that customers know more about you as you about your customer. No, the theme is … drumroll … you will have guessed it … AI agents. Oracle’s Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on IT, security, and database-oriented agents. For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM – both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both. For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it’s AI Agent platform. And Hubspot announced Breeze, its AI to power the customer platform, which, you guess it, includes agents. CEO Yamani Rangan talked about marketing, sales, and service agents. Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah then spent considerable time in his keynote, talking about agent.ai, Hubspots “professional network for AI agents”. What struck me watching all three keynotes – Ellison’s, Benioff’s and Shah’s – is the change from last year’s messaging to this year’s messaging. Last years it was...
by twieberneit | Sep 16, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news Dreamforce 2024 has (almost) started and the announcements are pouring in. Unsurprisingly, many of them are about AI, generative AI, Slack, and of course, agents. One of the major announcements that Salesforce made these days is about the release of Agentforce. According to Salesforce, Agentforce is ”a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction. Agentforce enables companies to scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. Agentforce’s limitless digital workforce of AI agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. The future of AI is agents, and it’s here.” The platform is intended to bring chatbots to the next level by graduating them from co-pilots that “rely on human requests” to autonomously operating agents that retrieve the right data on demand, build action plans and execute these plans without intervention. The bigger picture According to Salesforce’s Trends in AI for CRM report, a staggering amount of 41 per cent of employee time is spent on low impact work. On top of this, 65 per cent of desk workers believe that generative AI will allow them to be more strategic. Salesforce also maintains that “every company has more jobs to be done than the resource available to do them.” Zendesk postulates that the number of interactions in customer service will grow by a factor of...
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...
