AI fallout from Salesforce World Tour London 2019

As the excitement of the Salesforce World Tour in London dies down, the excitement in Einstein AI is at fever pitch following the amazing keynotes and demos. Don’t worry if you weren’t able to be there on May 23 2019, we will now recap the key themes and points most Trailblazers were talking about when it comes to AI.

The Wonder of Analytics

Data by itself is not what people want, people want answers. Business users are primarily working with their business applications i.e. CRM, e-commerce, ERP’s, systems where you get most of your work done. Analytics is used by business users to analyse trends and context to understand how the business is operating to make them more productive. AI is used for predictions on the future trends, segmentation, recommendations or intelligent insights to the business users.

Most organisations are working in silos and unable to connect Business Apps, Analytics and AI seamlessly. If these 3 can be combined we can create an intelligent experience, which can be achieved using the Salesforce platform with Einstein.

The ability to connect all 3 is one of Einstein’s key attributes as customers are able to utilise the analytics and AI seamlessly within the business apps being used on a daily basis by their users.

Einstein Analytics Plus licenses allow intelligent experience by:

• Discovering Insights
• Predicting Outcomes
• Finding Recommendations and actioning them

An example of an intelligent experience would be:

When quoting a mega laptop using Salesforce CPQ, we can discover insights by creating a story in Einstein Discovery using recommended discounts on historical quotes. Once the story has been deployed the model can predict outcomes and recommendations.

So in the example above, the additional discount is too high and a Manager approval is required. Einstein recommends the if the quantity is increased to 22 to 46 the additional discount can be increased to 23.2%. The Sales Rep increases the quantity to 25 and the additional discount is reduced to 23%. The sales rep recalculates the quote and no approval is required as the correct discount has been applied. The sales rep has correctly actioned the recommendation and can now send the quote to the customer.

Some of the features highlighted during the keynote were:

Einstein Data Insights

From reports, you can now explore any report with Einstein Data Insights to interpret what the data is saying, with visual representation and an explanation.

Conversational Queries

Type the questions you have in plain English and Einstein will convert it into a structured query that is run against your data and brings back a visualisation that represents the answer.

Einstein Voice for Analytics

You can now use your voice to discuss what you want to know and bring back your answers from your data.

To find out what additional features can be utilised with an Einstein Analytics Plus licence, please visit Einstein Analytics.

AI across industries

Banking and Finance, Retail and Manufacturing are the leading industries investing billions into intelligent solutions each year. Insights, prediction outcomes, next step recommendations and task automation are few out of many tasks delivered across these enterprises by intelligent Salesforce layer - Einstein.

Although Travel and Hospitality industries were considered to be picking up AI and Machine Learning solutions slower than others, they are now demonstrating how AI is playing an increasingly effectual role in the transformation of how customers travel.

Salesforce offers a wide range of capabilities across travel and hospitality sectors: AI-driven marketing and sales, personalised passenger journeys and experiences, digital operational excellence and more.

British Airways present an exemplary start to the journey towards digital transformation powered by Salesforce Customer Success Platform and Einstein summarized in 5 key steps:

By embarking on this journey British Airways have made noticeable progress in their B2B business activity and decision making:

• Account Managers have become dashboard users rather than report creators, and their time spent on reviewing the data has reduced from 30% to 15%

British Airways are optimistic about the future: AI led decisions will support the sales team by highlighting the most promising opportunities, boost personalised customer engagements and consequently deliver the company’s success and growth.

Einstein Voice

Einstein Voice was introduced at Dreamforce 2018. Einstein Voice enables customers to talk to Salesforce. Using smart devices, you can update Salesforce records using Einstein voice assistant. Users have the availability to get personalised daily briefings and drive analytics/dashboard using voice commands.

Einstein Voicebots can be used to create custom chatbots connected to your Salesforce data. So your employees/customer can interact with your business using smart devices.

At Salesforce world tour London 2019, Einstein Voice Assistant was demoed for the retailer PINK:

A PINK customer can go into a retail store, get measured up by a customer service assistant. The customer service assistant can talk to Einstein Voice Assistant and update the customer record with the new shirt size, change of fitting date and schedule a follow-up meeting. Selecting the analyze button within the Einstein Voice Assistant activates einstein to retrieve the customer record from historical data based on the customer service assistant’s previous actions. The customer service assistant can confirm the actions and Einstein Voice Assistant has updated the records and created a task as per the customer service assistant’s requests.

Final thoughts

We have seen some great examples of the capabilities Salesforce are offering and how industries are approaching the AI challenge. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have proceeded from just a buzz word to a well integrated layer across many organisations. From spam filters and email categorization to more advanced voice features or smart personal assistants, AI is certainly here to stay.

Salesforce is a pioneer in enabling the companies to implement AI seamlessly and gain confidence that AI disrupts sales in a good way. Einstein brings intelligent, personal data scientist-like experience to sales reps, managers and executives. Thanks to key messages delivered by Salesforce we drift away from any misconceptions and understand how AI augments rather than replaces the human touch.

It allows us to reconnect with organizations and customers in an optimal and personalised way.