The News: Salesforce announced several artificial intelligence and data capabilities designed to help retail and supplier organizations improve productivity and efficiency. The Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud platform provides tools that help companies unlock and unify customer data and industry market research to make all steps of the route-to-market process more efficient and intelligent. Further, as the Consumer Goods Cloud platform is being integrated with Salesforce Data Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud users will be able to connect account data with broader industry data to create more comprehensive, unified profiles for each customer and generate segments and micro-segments that allow them to plan more precise assortments and promotions at the hyper-local level.
You can read the press release detailing the news at Salesforce’s website.
Salesforce Announces Consumer Goods Cloud
Analyst Take: Salesforce announced in mid-June that it is enhancing its Consumer Goods Cloud with new artificial intelligence (AI) and data capabilities. The goal is to improve productivity in the route-to-market process, focusing on retailer and supplier productivity and efficiency.
The Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud platform provides tools designed to assist companies by unifying and unlocking customer data while also incorporating industry market research. The purpose is to leverage customer data and syndicated consumer research to gain deeper insights into buyers’ preferences to better optimize their retail planning and execution operations.
With the integration of Data Cloud into Consumer Goods Cloud, customers can also take advantage of Salesforce’s Einstein AI tools. For example, Consumer Goods Cloud will be able to utilize Einstein Copilot’s account summarization features to improve the productivity of service agents, such as by providing generated account summaries within the Consumer Goods Cloud service console, removing the need to switch between screens, knowledge articles, and history. By improving access to critical and relevant customer and account data, agents will be able to handle more complex, high-volume inquiries with a more personalized touch.
For example, agents can use Einstein Copilot Account Summarization to get up to speed on their last interactions with a specific retailer, including granular data, such as specific point-of-sale location data for that retailer. These summaries can aid the agent with addressing retailers’ questions about that specific order and suggest additional products for upselling during the resolution process.
Finally, Salesforce revealed new data- and AI-powered features in Consumer Goods Cloud Einstein 1 for Sales that are designed to improve productivity for sales managers, field representatives, merchandisers, and other stakeholders. Users will be able to surface retail execution details and recommendations based on these insights, including specific product handling details, consumption trends, or other product-specific information that can lead to more efficient service or sales actions based on real-time data.
According to Salesforce, Data Cloud for Consumer Goods and Consumer Goods Cloud Einstein 1 for Sales each will be generally available this summer, while Einstein Copilot Account Summarization for Service will be generally available within Consumer Goods Cloud this fall.
Salesforce’s Strategy – Leveraging AI to Surface Granular Insights
Salesforce is actively rolling out vertical-specific solutions or versions of its Cloud offerings, with the goal of fending off competition from other large SaaS vendors, as well as smaller, industry-specific vendors that have entrenched roots in the market. The pitch is that Salesforce has the financial resources and expertise to continuously deliver a more powerful product that can incorporate new features, such as enhanced automation and AI, more frequently than smaller competitors. Furthermore, Salesforce is touting its deep level of transactional data as a key competitive advantage, given its massive penetration across retail, distribution, and manufacturing organizations.
Furthermore, the company’s application of AI to surface granular insights about customers, transaction histories, product details, and real-time stocking and replenishment data can provide retailers and distributors with scalable incremental revenue benefits. In the past, improving sales or operational efficiency at a store level may have led to low single-digit increases in incremental sales at a specific location, but using AI to seek out these types of efficiency and opportunity gains across an entire division or organization can yield massive benefits with little manual effort.
This is where I believe AI’s core value and ROI will come from: automating the tedious processes that are required to squeeze out efficiency, productivity, and opportunities for generating revenue where the previous labor and time costs simply made it impossible to do so efficiently.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
