Salesforce goes big with GPT

When Salesforce launched EinsteinGPT as a tool to create personalized content three months ago, social media was more concerned about the name of the product than what it could do. The company seems to have taken the cue now and launched two more generative AI products for customized consumer and commerce experience. 

Thankfully, they’ve refrained from naming these after Philip Kotler (just kidding!). The two tools are simply called Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT. May we humbly request you to rename the original to something like Content GPT as associating the name of a scientist with an email writing tool just doesn’t seem kosher. 

Now that we’ve crossed the naming convention challenge, let’s look at what the company announced at the Salesforce Connections 2023 in Chicago. The latest additions are also aimed at improving employee productivity across the entire spectrum of customer relationship management and retention.  

More of the same or is there anything different?

The Marketing GPT model aims to use data from Data Cloud and generate personalized emails, smarter audience segments and marketing strategies that are customized. Offerings include segment creation, generating market intelligence using the Data Cloud, creating email content and then going after identifying resolution, segmentation and engagement models. 

As for Commerce GPT, Salesforce is aiming to target brands that are looking to provide a personalized shopping experience to its customers. Which means the tool would provide a full suite of CRM offerings while the AI model would generate insights and recommendations based on the data it captures from Data Cloud. 

For David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, both these innovations have been fuelled by trusted and harmonized first-party data. He believes that this effort could potentially revolutionize how enterprises interact with customers while also dramatically enhancing employee productivity. What’s more, there’s no talk of replacing humans! 

Salesforce itself says customers are wary of accuracy

The company claimed that research it had undertaken internally indicated that marketers do accept that technology will help them save five person hours a week. Of the 1000 respondents, more than half said they already use generative AI while a quarter plan to adopt it soon. However, a good chunk represented reservations around accuracy and quality of output. 

Which is probably where Salesforce’s association with Google Cloud comes in handy. Per this strategic partnership, the two companies would use Data Cloud and Vertex AI to understand customer behavior in order to let enterprises run effective campaigns and deliver personalized experiences to the end customer. 

Under this partnership, the companies will be integrating Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery to create unified customer profiles. It will offer data access across platforms and clouds, reducing associated cost and complexity. Further, new integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will allow customers to bring their own model from Vertex and use them across Salesforce’s platform.