The Six Five team discusses Salesforce World Tour 2023.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Let’s talk Salesforce. Pat, Salesforce is on World Tour in case anybody wanted to know.
Patrick Moorhead: What does that mean for people? What does it mean? What does Salesforce world tour mean? That they’re going from, I know, sorry, they’re going from city to city, right? A similar way that Mongo does. No, not everybody follows Salesforce, just thought I’d add that.
Daniel Newman: No, I mean they go and they do events in different regions and cities and they announce different things. I mean, look, this has been a, Salesforce by the way, go back to my predictions. One of the companies that has done a pretty good job of talking about a monetization strategy, you’re talking about going back more than half a decade since it initially announced Einstein, which was going to be an AI in the boardroom. Early implementations did not perform to the standard. But with the advent of generative AI, I think it’s pretty safe to say that with customers that have big investments in Salesforce, they’re going to be able to get more out of their Salesforce instances with the utilization of LLMs, Copilot, Genie, Einstein, and its broader portfolio. But what did they announce this week? I mean, basically it was all about Vector and Copilot.
And so what does that mean? Well, first, people that use Salesforce tend to be, at least historically, the idea was always about simplifying the software stack, the software environment, right? The reason you went to a full SaaS-based CRM was because you wanted easy up, easy setup, easy features, and just be able to have the benefit of continuous updates that you get from Salesforce. One of them is going to be about fine-tuning LLMs. And so the company’s offering what it’s calling its Data Cloud Vector Database. This will enable different data types across the enterprise landscape to be utilized in biz apps and workflows. And it will help companies to ideally drive more ROI from their unstructured data. So the Vector is what really enables the unstructured data to be used. So things like emails and PDF documents, video call transcripts, getting them into the data set to be able to provide better responses, say through your sales emails or your marketing outflow. So that’s the first thing.
The second is going to be what they call Einstein Copilot Search. And this is going to be available in a couple of months. It’s going to basically offer enhanced search capabilities that can do better responses to complex queries across the different data sources. It’s going to tie into this Vector Database for sure. It’s going to be able to reply using Copilot to sales inquiries, customer service marketing inquiries, even across e-commerce and IT services. So this will be able to take a combination of an enterprise’s unstructured structured data landscapes. And one of the things that they’re really focused on with their Copilot Search is going to what they call their Trust Layers. You go back to my announcements for what I think is coming next year, and I mentioned trust and responsibility. Well, Salesforce has what it calls its Einstein Trust Layer, and this is where it’s going to be able to offer citations to source material.
So all of the outputs that you get from an inquiry to the Copilot Search are going to be able to provide you source material of where that response came from. Sometimes we call it grounding, sometimes we call it transparency. This is important, and obviously with Vector, it’s important that it’s going to be able to be associated with this grounding. Some companies are turning to a knowledge graph to be able to do this as well, but in the end, Vector is a good start, but everybody’s going to want to be sure that the technology is accurate, not just responsive. And so that’s going to be a big focus ahead, and Salesforce made some strides at their world tour in New York this week.
Patrick Moorhead: Good. Blow-by-blow, dude. I want to dial this out just a tad. So I was increasingly critical of Salesforce’s ability to tell the story with AI of how do I get the data that’s locked on-prem and take advantage of this to the company’s credit. They’re doing a better job with Data Cloud in doing that in services, either with API based or with MuleSoft and going to this what they call an ETL list data. But they’re not doing a good enough job, and I don’t know why they don’t lead with it.
I’d also like to see them be a little bit more publicly overt, that they can pull data in from SAP, they can pull data in from Oracle to be able to connect the front end of the backend that you love that, Dan? And without it, I think they’re just selling to the current customer base, and I think it limits their growth. Not that marketing tech and CRM and stuff like that don’t have growth, they do. But if you’re trying to put the whole stack together, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s Slack and all the other acquisitions that they’ve made, you have to be very deliberate in how you share that data.
And Dan, when I’m talking to CIOs or whoever’s in charge of AI and enterprise, first thing we talk about is the data. I think people are in on the projected benefits, but when it gets to the, how the heck do I do this? If it involves me exporting data that I’ve kept on-prem or on the edge for the past 30 years, it literally, it goes almost nowhere. So good job in progressing AI. Salesforce is one of these companies that I do feel like is taking advantage, and getting credit for some of the AI, but if we truly believe this is a 10, 20 X opportunity here with generative AI for companies who own it, they have a lot more work to do on this.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
