Salesforce has introduced a slew of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and data security products and updates this week, ahead of its Dreamforce 2024 event in San Francisco, California from September 17-19, 2024.
Preparing for new regulatory frameworks
On September 10, 2024, Salesforce introduced a new suite of tools to help IT teams tackle key challenges related to strong data governance and security as more chief technology officers (CTOs) use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help them protect sensitive data from hackers.
The product is meant to prepare companies to follow new regulations as lawmakers move to strengthen laws around the use of generative AI. For example, the EU has passed the EU AI Act to ensure the technology’s ethical use and deployment in the region.
Salesforce’s Data Governance for the AI Enterprise suite is integrated with Data Cloud and helps customers meet new AI-related policies.
This suite also features advanced data management through new capabilities like Salesforce Archive for storing large volumes of inactive data and new backup enhancements for restoring lost or corrupted data. Additionally, the Salesforce Out of Region Disaster Recovery protects users who may experience an unforeseen business disruption. It strengthens the Data Mask option to help IT teams de-identify sensitive data to protect individual privacy. These options are also available on its Data Cloud.
From the customer’s perspective, James Ferguson, Principal Security Architect, AWS noted that data encryption was key to the company’s data governance strategy. “The flexibility of data encryption with Salesforce allows us to balance innovation with security,” Ferguson said.
On September 5, Salesforce also added to its Data Security offering with the acquisition of Own Company for $1.9 billion. The latter provides data protection and data management solutions.
Speaking on the acquisition, Steve Fisher, President and GM, Einstein 1 Platform and Unified Data Services said, “Data security has never been more critical, and Own’s proven expertise and products will enhance our ability to offer robust data protection and management solutions to our customers.”
Accelerating productivity
Generative AI is also helping companies to boost sales. At least four of five sales teams surveyed by Salesforce are experimenting with or have fully implemented AI. Moreover, the survey concludes that 83% of sales teams that use AI have grown their revenue over the past year.
Encouraged by these results, Salesforce unveiled new data and AI-powered Sales Cloud capabilities earlier this week. The enhanced platform promises to drive business transformation with new account planning, forecasting, prospecting, and compensation management capabilities.
This offering unifies Salesforce and external data with Data Cloud to help vendors get a complete view of their customers and business. It includes a prospecting center that uses AI to help sellers identify and prioritize their customers across various internal and third-party platforms in one place. The prospecting center also enables customers to use Agentforce agents to help identify leads for agents.
A Consumption Forecasting tool built into the platform helps users project consumption and buyer uSage data while integrating any external data added by customers into the forecast to make it more accurate.
Industry customization
Salesforce’s latest array of AI tools includes Industries AI, which customizes prompts, data models, and capabilities depending on the industry. The tool currently covers over 100 customizable AI capabilities for 15 sectors.
Sellers can also aim to enhance their customers’ experience by using Salesforce’s latest offering of AI-driven field services capabilities. This platform was built after a study found that field service teams spend around 68% of their time manually entering case notes, leaving them with little time interacting with customers.
Salesforce’s new capabilities for agents include Agentforce for dispatchers, which uses AI to address urgent appointments using a conversational interface. A Field Services Operations Home provides an AI-powered home page for dispatchers and supervisors where they can use real-time data to get key insights. A Multi-modal Field Tech Support can enhance technicians’ task completion speed by using AI text and image recognition, while Data Capture helps them seamlessly collect field data.
Lastly, an Asset Service Prediction helps organizations in the field service space proactively address issues before asset problems occur by using an AI model that analyzes historical service data from Data Cloud.
