Google, Salesforce Bring AI to CRM

Everyone appears to be enamored with artificial intelligence these days. The latest to join this bandwagon of AI-based solution building are two of the world’s largest 900-pound gorillas who straddle the universe of customer relationship management and internet search. Google and Salesforce claim their AI offering can predict changing customer needs. 

The strategic partnership would allow companies to use their data with custom machine learning models to anticipate customer needs. Those who sign-up will have access to Google’s BigQuery tooling, Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Vertex AI – the former’s fully managed AI platform that is supposed to be the one working the magic. 

A report published by TechCrunch quotes David Schmaier, Salesforce’s chief product officer to say that the association allows the companies to democratize AI in order to provide customers with the options of which one they want to use. Just so readers remember, this ain’t new as Google and Salesforce have a partnership on analytics and big data that they signed in 2017. 

Now Salesforce can call itself a data company

For Salesforce, the deal comes at just the time when they are repositioning themselves as a data company for which they had come out with several generative AI tools such as EinsteinGPT that performs CRM tasks such as writing mails. Albert Einstein might just be turning in his grave thinking what the world has reduced him to. 

The company has also launched SlackGPT that responds to natural language questions about its content, servers and channels. In addition, Salesforce also invested in generative AI options in the hope of getting their hands on to the next product. Remember, Salesforce Venture, the corporate investment arm, had launched a $250 million fund to invest in building this ecosystem.

A step forward for Google’s Cloud capabilities 

From Google’s point of view yet another association with Salesforce provides it with a much-needed shot-in-the-arm for the big data analytics division as well as the AI services center. Of course, one may argue that Salesforce’s customer base isn’t all that big, but then Google might see this as an opportunity for more such enterprise-level tie-ups. 

All of this would go a long way in enhancing Google’s cloud business. Though it may have posted its first quarterly profits since inception, the fact still remains that the company continues to languish beneath Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) when it comes to cloud infrastructure markets – an area that is considered to be the next growth opportunity. 

What exactly does it mean for customers?

At ground level, the association means that Google and Salesforce can integrate Data Cloud and BigQuery, which essentially means bringing together a data integration layer and a service that helps companies create unified profiles of customers quite easily. It allows them to use some part of their platforms and clouds as though they’re located at one place. 

In addition, the association between Data Cloud and Vertex AI will let enterprises bring any of their trained AI models across the Salesforce platform with the added benefit that the owners can retrain the AI models on customer data that they obtain from the CRM giant. In fact, Salesforce has provided a few use cases of this opportunity. 

They say a fashion retail store could connect CRM data around purchase history with non-CRM data like social media sentiment. The custom AI model can then predict the likelihood of a buy based on these data sets. A financial institution can club both these data sets to anticipate the customer’s spending habits and investment preferences.  

Of course, it remains to be seen whether customers would actually believe that this magic wand can actually help them stay ahead of the game by anticipating customer habits? The officials are quite confident that enterprises would require such intelligence to stay ahead in the future. How the customers feel about it, only time will tell.