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 trust is the foundation of the data driven supply chain
In the course of the last year or three, I have written a few times about the supply chain and how it affects the customer experience, sometimes badly so. In my last article ‘the impact of the supply chain on the customer experience’, I explained some of the issues and laid out a couple of high level solutions. Let me elaborate a little on what I wrote then. Of course, there are challenges in two main areas: The demand sideThe supply side The customer expectations are quite simple: A customer expects that things just work, that the vendor, and information given by the vendor, is reliable, accurate and comes timely; that deliveries after order are coming reasonably fast and that there is transparency about the order and delivery status. This is all quite abstract, so let us fill this with life. An example to the contrary goes as follows: You buy something, e.g., some whiteware, from a brand with a very high reputation; you are asked for upfront payment (several thousand dollar, remember, high reputation), get an approximate delivery date two months out – along with a warning that there may be a delay of a month or so. So far, so good. I could live with that although even the two months should be explained … Now, imagine that one month into the wait time you get an e-mail notifying you about a changed delivery date, pushing it out by a month. Well, not nice, but also not out of the range of expectations. After all you got told so. However, the next month you get a similar...
Platform Partners: A Question of Trust
The enterprise software world is one where few, if any, companies can stand alone. Cloud computing has greatly increased the availability and usability of business applications. However, no vendor can claim to supply a complete homegrown solution. The SaaS world is one of partnerships. Partnerships are best when all the partners are trustworthy.Business software customers still need to pick a brand and stick with it for a while. That brand—the platform—represents a serious investment of time and trust. Sure, you own your data, and changing platforms is supposed to be easy. But ask anybody who’s done it whether they would want to do so again next year.Platform customers have to weigh more than just the price and features of each platform provider. They must also consider what the future holds for that platform and its partners. None of the big platforms are likely to disappear or merge anytime soon, but their fates and fortunes are not constant. They also have histories and reputations. Increasingly, they have prominent social and/or political stances as well. Those issues matter enough to some business owners and investors to affect their decisions. There are also simpler matters, like whether the customer likes the feel of the software environment, or has concerns about possible changes. Can I Trust You? In the end, these decisions boil down to variations on a single question: “Can I trust you with my business?” Contracts and commercial laws deal with businesses that act in bad faith; this is more about responsibility, reliability, and safety. Examples: Will you continue to support the applications I use?Is my data secure?Do you have good...