PRESS RELEASE: Salesforce announced Einstein AI is available to all of its customers across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. Part of Spring ‘17, Salesforce’s 52nd major product release in 18 years, Einstein is already being leveraged by customers to deliver smarter, more impactful customer experiences, and by developers to bring AI into the next generation of customer relationship management (CRM) apps.
Salesforce also announced Einstein Vision, a set of powerful new APIs that allow developers of all skill levels to bring image recognition to CRM and build AI-powered apps fast. The result of computer vision breakthroughs from Salesforce Research, Einstein Vision allows companies to unlock powerful insights within photos—from detecting inventory levels and product quality to identifying consumer trends and customer preferences. Now, any developer can leverage pre-trained image classifiers, or train their own custom classifiers, to handle a vast array of specialized image-recognition use cases.
“The world’s #1 CRM is now the world’s smartest CRM with Salesforce Einstein available to millions of users in our Spring ’17 release,” said Alex Dayon, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce. “With Einstein, we are democratizing AI, enabling everyone to achieve new levels of productivity and accelerate growth, directly within the products they use every day.”
Salesforce Customers Champion Einstein
“Sales Cloud Einstein will transform the way Air France-KLM’s sales teams work, empowering them with intelligence to improve lead qualification and help make smarter choices that drive more revenue,” said Henri de Peyrelongue, SVP Commercial Planning, Air France-KLM. “With AI embedded into Salesforce workflows, our sales organization can bring its productivity and effectiveness to entirely new levels.”
“At U.S. Bank, a cornerstone of our customer commitment is to cultivate meaningful relationships with the customers we serve,” said Kate Quinn, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Reputation Officer, U.S. Bank. “Predictive insights from Salesforce Einstein can ensure that U.S. Bank’s relationship managers and loan officers are able to engage with each customer’s unique situation quickly.” Quinn adds, “With Sales Cloud Einstein, our front line employees can be more proactive and know the best next action for each specific customer.”
“Sales reps are faced with an influx of information everyday and often struggle with how to prioritize their time as a result,” said Cristina Schwartz, Director of Sales Automation, Seagate Technology. “Salesforce Einstein will help Seagate streamline and provide recommended next best actions that help reps be more productive and sell smarter.”
AI is Here
Unlike general AI platforms that require extensive customization and armies of data scientists, Einstein democratizes AI with state-of-the-art algorithms built directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform and is delivered through the apps and workflows that millions of CRM users rely on every day. Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein delivers intelligence directly within the context of business. And, because Einstein is built into the Salesforce platform, customers can customize their AI models for their specific needs.
Einstein Makes Salesforce the World’s Smartest CRM
With the release of Spring ‘17, Einstein AI capabilities are now live across the Intelligent Customer Success Platform. Customers like Air France-KLM, Seagate and US Bank are already leveraging Einstein to connect with their customers in entirely new ways.
The Einstein features include:
• Sales Cloud Einstein: With Einstein Opportunity Insights, sales reps can increase their productivity and close more deals with intelligence based on customer sentiment, competitor involvement and overall prospect engagement. These predictive insights serve up recommended next best actions so reps can better prioritize their day and engage with the right customer, at the right time. Einstein Account Insights help reps stay ahead of their business with insights gleaned from the latest news, including M&A activity and company financial results. And with Einstein Activity Capture, reps can connect their email and calendar to Salesforce to free themselves from hours of manual data entry so they can focus on building better relationships with their customers.
• Service Cloud Einstein: Einstein Supervisor Insights combines real-time operational insights with smart data discovery to empower contact center supervisors with omni-channel intelligence and AI-powered analytics to increase agent productivity and customer satisfaction. In addition, Einstein Supervisor can predict customer satisfaction and make specific recommendations to improve the customer experience.
• Marketing Cloud Einstein: Einstein Journey Insights applies algorithms to analyze hundreds of millions of data points to help marketers understand what events and sequences lead to buying decisions so they can optimize campaigns and journeys. With Einstein Segmentation, marketers can uncover clusters of related consumers and target entirely new segments with more personalized and effective campaigns.
• Commerce Cloud Einstein: Einstein Commerce Insights analyzes order history, product data and customer data to power smarter merchandising. Now retailers can better understand purchasing patterns in order to market more effective product bundles, improve in-store merchandising and optimize website and campaign design.
• Analytics Cloud Einstein: A new capability in the Salesforce Platform, Einstein Data Discovery automates the entire analytics workflow by analyzing millions of data combinations in minutes to surface and answer key business questions without needing advanced data science. Business users are then provided with interactive and actionable insights and recommendations right inside Salesforce. With one click, these insights can be turned into a slide presentation complete with charts and graphs that outline key findings and talking points that explain them, enabling any business user to communicate findings quickly.
• Community Cloud Einstein: With Einstein Recommendations and Einstein Trending Posts, companies are able to serve up the most relevant and popular content and people—including files, groups and subject-matter experts—to deliver personalized experiences to community members.
Einstein Vision Empowers Any Developer to Build AI-Powered Apps
Advances in image recognition are enabling companies to discover new insights about customers and develop more efficient processes. New Einstein Vision capabilities that bring the power of image recognition to any app include:
• Visual Search allows consumers to use visual filters to find products that best match their preferences and take photos of products to discover where they can be purchased—in-store or online.
• Brand Detection analyzes user-generated images in communities, message boards and social media, giving marketers a better understanding of their customers to help improve quality of service, extend marketing reach and maximize campaign ROI.
• Product Identification analyzes images to give sales and service reps the ability to remotely evaluate product issues, manage inventory and analyze product mix and selling potential. See here for more.
Salesforce Incubator Welcomes 15 New Startups Building Einstein-Powered Apps
Salesforce is extending the power of Einstein to its ecosystem, welcoming a new group of 15 startups into the Salesforce Incubator. This international group of startups, which cover a broad range of solutions and industries, will use Einstein to bring powerful AI capabilities to the apps they are developing.
The Salesforce Incubator is a five-month program that helps select startups deliver innovative solutions using Salesforce technologies and tools. It includes access to a diverse network of mentors and advisors, exposure to industry events and a physical workspace within the Salesforce San Francisco campus to facilitate innovation and collaboration. See here for more information about this new group of startups.
Continued Ecosystem Momentum
“Accenture and Salesforce share a similar vision on the role and impact of AI,” said Nicola Morini Bianzino, Managing Director – Accenture Artificial Intelligence Lead, Accenture. “With Einstein, Salesforce is delivering AI for CRM, enabling companies to deliver more predictive and personalized customer experiences.”
Pricing and Availability
• All Einstein capabilities within Spring ‘17 are generally available for Salesforce customers.
• Sales Cloud Einstein: Einstein Opportunity Insights, Einstein Account Insights and Einstein Activity Capture are available together for $50/user/month with any Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition and above.
• Service Cloud Einstein: Einstein Supervisor Insights combines Omni-channel Supervisor with Analytics Cloud’s Service Wave analytics app and Einstein Data Discovery. Omni-channel Supervisor is included in Service Cloud Enterprise edition and above. Service Wave is available at $75/user/month, and Einstein Data Discovery pricing is based on the volume of data and number of users.
• Marketing Cloud Einstein: Einstein Journey Insights and Einstein Segmentation are available with any Marketing Cloud license and a Krux license. Pricing is based on data collection volumes and storage and data processing use cases.
• Commerce Cloud Einstein: Einstein Commerce Insights are included at no additional cost with any Commerce Cloud Digital license.
• App Cloud Einstein: Einstein Vision can be used in conjunction with Heroku or any Force.com license at no cost for up to 1,000 predictions/month. The costs for additional predictions is based on prediction volume. Einstein Vision is currently in Pilot and expected to be generally available later this month.
• Community Cloud Einstein: Einstein Recommendations and Einstein Trending Posts are included at no cost with any Community Cloud license.
• Analytics Cloud Einstein: Einstein Data Discovery pricing is based on the volume of data and number of users.
Additional Information
• Learn more about Salesforce Einstein at http://www.salesforce.com/einstein/
• Start exploring Salesforce Einstein with Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/module/ai_basics