Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

In a flurry of announcements today, Salesforce announced AI-powered Einstein Copilots for marketing and merchants, building on the Copilots for retailers and shoppers announced earlier this year. The Copilots are built on the Einstein 1 platform, can communicate with each other (bringing marketing and commerce closer together) and have full access to Salesforce Data Cloud.

“Welcome to the AI enterprise,” said Ariel Kelman, Salesforce President and CMO, in his keynote at Salesforce Connections in Chicago. Kelman identified four waves of AI — Predictive (e.g. lead scoring), Generative, Autonomous and AI General Intelligence. “We are starting to enter the third wave,” he said, where AI will begin to take actions on its own. Copilots are a step in that direction, although there is — for now, anyway — a human in the driving seat.

Headed for the AI enterprise

He went on to identify five steps that should lead to the AI enterprise:

1. Building the 360 view of the customer.
2. Unlocking and activating data.
3. Deploying trusted AI copilots.
4. Delivering AI-powered analytics.
5. AI-powered collaboration.

On the last point, Slack AI tools for recapping and summarizing Slack interactions and importing actionable data from Data Cloud into Slack were demonstrated during the keynote.

The strategy for Einstein Copilots is clearly to give business users in marketing, commerce and other functions the ability to have complex tasks, like creating personalized customer journeys, executed by AI — directed by the business user through natural language prompts.

Einstein Copilots for marketing and merchants

The Copilot for marketing can automatically generate marketing briefs and content and create email campaigns. Via Data Cloud, it can ingest and execute on a brand’s own datasets, including customer data, even if the brand is storing its data in AWS, Snowflake, Databricks or other repositories.

By having Copilot automate a lot of routine tasks as well as time-consuming projects like data connection and analysis, the aim is to afford more time for marketers to thoughtfully engage with their audiences.

Einstein Copilot for merchants is part of Salesforce’s commerce offerings. It will respond to natural language prompts to create online storefronts, improve product discoverability, write product descriptions and make product recommendations.

Dig deeper: Salesforce announces new tools for retail marketers

Other announcements

Einstein Personalization. This is a new AI-powered decision engine that will surface next-best-actions and personalized content for individual customers based on customer data from Salesforce Data Cloud.

Data Cloud for Commerce. This will allow retailers to bring inventory status, product descriptions and transaction data together with customer data to optimize processes like bundling offers or sending abandoned cart or back-in-stock notifications.

Einstein Copilot for Marketers will be generally available in summer 2024. Copilot for Merchants will be available in beta in fall 2024. Data Cloud for Commerce is generally available in summer 2024 for B2B commerce customers and fall 2024 for B2C commerce customers. Einstein Personalization will be available for restricted general availability in summer 2024.