AI for Service and Sales: The Tipping Point for Rapid Innovation

Last month, I attended Dreamforce in San Francisco, hosted by Salesforce. As a principal consultant in the Salesforce practice at Valtree Corporation, I aimed to learn how Salesforce clients are leveraging CRM, Data Cloud, and AI features. My goal was to figure out how we can help Valtree clients extract real business value from their Salesforce investments.

In past years, with the platform and previous Dreamforce announcements, I was skeptical about the value of AI and the numerous “Einstein” branded features. It always seemed difficult for an enterprise to achieve significant ROI by implementing these features. These included scoring leads with a higher propensity to purchase, suggesting the service agent’s “next best action,” providing recommendations for cross-selling and upselling, and offering case resolution suggestions. However, these capabilities require substantial quality data in the CRM and knowledge base to effectively assist users and improve customer outcomes.

In reality, customer data is often unreliable, with many duplicate contacts. Any insights your CRM generates about a customer or lead are hindered by duplicates, missing information, and the absence of key data sources. Your Salesforce knowledge base is often inadequate – if it’s even being used! Building self-service capabilities with chatbots was also challenging, especially when it came to predicting customer questions and creating decision trees and a knowledge base that actually helped customers rather than frustrating them. But after this year’s conference, I was completely amazed by how much has changed. The lightbulb has gone off for me, and I believe we’re at a true tipping point for AI in Customer Service and Sales. Every existing or new Salesforce customer needs to take notice of what Salesforce is now capable of doing. It’s time to pay attention.

Several Salesforce features released in the past year have truly impressed me:

• Agentforce functionality (formerly Co-Pilot) to build AI agents that can assist humans or provide customer self-service in a web chat or app.
• Ingestion of unstructured data (PDF, HTML, Word docs) into a vector database with search indexes.
• Zero-copy data warehouse data can be ingested into Data Cloud.
• Prompt Builder to engineer prompts for an LLM.

During Dreamforce, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop where I built an AI agent in about 90 minutes that could automatically respond to a case (incoming email) using product sheets or company knowledge. I was amazed by how easy it was to set up. All configuration. No need for developers or LLM experts. A product manager with some data orientation can handle this. The most challenging part is mapping external data sources to a unified data model in Data Cloud.

Einstein Copilot Search is particularly powerful for Service and Sales. Here’s how a company could integrate it:

• CRM (Service/Sales Cloud): Contact information, demographics, service case history, sales opportunities, marketing campaign membership, categorization, and segmentation.
• Data Warehouses and Data Lakes: Integrate data from Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Cloud BigQuery, and Snowflake.
• Data Cloud: A unified customer profile where data from various databases, ERPs, and third-party sources is integrated.
• LLM: Use of large language models (LLMs) to enhance customer service.
• AI Agents: Designed to automate tasks, provide self-service, and facilitate seamless handoffs to human agents.

Valtree Corporation can help clients leverage these capabilities to deploy AI-powered solutions that integrate seamlessly with their CRM and ERP data. By using AI agents to streamline customer interactions and enhance sales opportunities, businesses can significantly improve customer experiences and drive growth. OpenTable, for example, demonstrated at Dreamforce how they built an AI agent for their app in just two months with a team of only four people – an effort far more efficient than their previous chatbot projects. Valtree is ready to help your business achieve similar success with AI-driven innovation.