The News: Salesforce announced Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service, its offering aimed at government and other public sector entities, which incorporates CRM, trusted AI, and data capabilities to help workers automate administrative tasks and provide faster service to their constituents. Built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform, the offering is designed to leverage data and automation to improve worker efficiency, reduce or eliminate repetitive tasks, and improve the ability of workers to interact with systems, data, and the people they serve. You can read the press release announcing the news on the Salesforce website.
Salesforce Announces Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service
Analyst Take: Salesforce announced Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service, its offering geared toward public sector organizations that includes CRM, trusted AI, and data capabilities within a single product. Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service is designed to help government employees automate administrative tasks and provide faster service to constituents, leveraging the organization’s internal data and AI provided by Salesforce.
Key features incorporated within the offering include conversational and generative AI. Government contact center agents and case managers gain access to conversational and generative AI, which can be used to summarize vast amounts of data within their workflows (Caseworker Narrative Generation); transcribe and provide next-best-step guidance for contact center agents during calls (Service Cloud Voice); and automatically collect and summarize data and insights from various sources (Einstein Activity Capture). Each of these capabilities is designed to create less manual work for employees while helping them to surface and utilize key insights from within their data.
Offering Includes Data Cloud, Enabling Public Sector Organizations to Leverage All Their Data
Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service also includes Data Cloud, which is designed to capture, connect, and harmonize an organization’s entire corpus of data into a common data model. This can be used to create unified constituent profiles that serve as a single source of truth for the organization, enabling the organization to personalize outreach and interactions.
A new feature being offered is Interaction Notes for Public Sector, which allows caseworkers to take detailed notes of their meetings and conversations with constituents or other case participants, specify the confidentiality level of the notes, add action items or next steps, and then search for and filter summaries to find notes from previous interactions, all in one place. This feature takes a common practice deployed at many public sector agencies and helps to organize information that can often be lost when managed through manual processes.
Another interesting aspect of the announcement is the mention of Salesforce’s Vector Database capability, which is designed to help manage and ingest both structured and unstructured data that can be used to inform AI models and potentially lead to better generative AI output. For public sector organizations, which often have a lot of unstructured data such as call records or transcripts, being able to surface insights from this data and then incorporate them into AI models should help improve operational efficiency by enabling users to analyze and act on a greater amount and range of data.
Ultimately, Salesforce’s offering appears to be well tailored to the specific challenges faced by public sector workers. Further, by incorporating a range of functions and underlying technology (CRM, AI, and Data Cloud) into a single offering, it should make the procure process somewhat simpler for buyers, who may want to reduce or limit their IT stack burden.
FedRAMP-Certified Tools Help Promote Efficiency and Productivity Gains While Meeting Regulatory Requirements
Beyond the Public Sector Einstein 1 for Service offering, Salesforce also offers several Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)-compliant tools to help government agencies drive efficiency and productivity while meeting regulatory requirements. These tools include:
- Salesforce Field Service is now available on Government Cloud and is FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 5 authorized.
- Privacy Center is now available on Government Cloud and is FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 5 authorized.
- Security Center is now available on Government Cloud and is FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 5 authorized.
- GovSlack, a version of Slack designed to support key government regulations for processing and storing sensitive data, is now FedRAMP High authorized.
Like other SaaS vendors, Salesforce has realized the value of providing government-certified versions of its products, recognizing the vast number of potential customers that are under significant pressure to modernize and make their organizations more efficient and productive.
Government and public sector organizations are often faced with distinct challenges with which private sector organizations do not need to contend. First, they may have more difficulty hiring new and highly skilled employees due to budget challenges and in some jurisdictions, very strict rules around compensation and hiring. Many public sector agencies also suffer from a technology skills gap and must rely solely on the expertise, skills, and experience of vendors to deliver a product or service under a tight procurement framework.
On the flip side, public sector organizations are often tasked with serving disparate audiences, with widely varying needs, interaction preferences and capabilities, and end-user technology platforms. That is why SaaS vendors need to take care to make sure that the functions and features delivered consider the specific audiences, processes, and challenges faced by these organizations, while adhering to all relevant data security and governance regulations and requirements.
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.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Salesforce Announces New Innovations for Field Service Workers
Salesforce Shows Next-Gen Contact Center Innovations at Enterprise Connect 2024
Salesforce Announces Public Beta Availability of Einstein Copilot
Image Credit: Salesforce
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.
