3 ways to external data for your Salesforce+AI

What?

This is a plain English "how-to" on sending your External + Salesforce data to AI for better results. We will cover 3rd party databases, APIs & files/unstructured.

Who?

Salesforce admins, architects, business leaders, and anyone who wants to integrate external data into their Salesforce AI initiatives.

Why?

To give Sales/Service the insights hidden in your Salesforce + External data.

-> Improve win rates. Reduce support costs.

What can you do with it?

• Enrich Customer 360: Combine Salesforce data with External databases (e.g. Snowflake) for a comprehensive view.
• Drive Sales Insights: Integrate 3rd party data services (e.g. Bloomberg) to empower your sales team.
• Supercharge Service Ops: Leverage unstructured data from systems (e.g. SAP) for deeper support context.

3 Ways to Integrate External Data for Salesforce AI

Federate Data: Salesforce Lightning Connect(OData) or Data Cloud

Salesforce provides two powerful ways to directly integrate data from external sources like Snowflake or SAP:

OData/Lightning Connect:

Use Salesforce's OData Connect (or Lightning Connect) to federate ('Use data where it lies') from external databases like Snowflake, SAP and others that support OData standard.

Great for pulling in usage data, telemetry, or other structured information from systems outside of your CRM - without duplicating it into your Org.

Salesforce Data Cloud:

For a more robust, enterprise-grade approach, Salesforce Data Cloud offers data virtualization and ingestion capabilities.

Access data from across your organization, and make it available within your Org with advanced data modeling to represent it as objects in Salesforce.

Data Cloud can serve as a centralized hub for all your data, making it seamless to feed information into your AI models.

GPTfy can integrate data using OData/External Objects, and support for Data Cloud is coming soon.

2. Integrate Data Services via APIs

If you use external data services/APIs like Bloomberg's, pull that data on-demand into Salesforce and send it to AI Models/LLMs.

Great for enriching your customer profiles or other data elements, and for incorporating real-time intelligence into your sales and service processes.

Use GPTfy's "API Data Source" feature to send additional data to AI along with your Salesforce data. Common ones include DnB, Explorium, GovWin, Kensho, Bloomberg and Serper.dev.

3. Unlock Data in Files with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

For unstructured data trapped in files like PDFs, documents, and Knowledge bases(HTML), a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern does the trick.

RAG combines semantic search results extracted from files in a vector database, with an LLM to provide conversational results hidden in your organization's textual information.

It works well for providing case resolutions, whitespace analysis, bringing best practices from your internal knowledge base.

You can declaratively bring RAG to your Org with GPTfy. It works with leading RAG solutions such as Google Dialogflow, AWS Textract/Pinecone based, and Azure's.

TL;DR / Summary

To truly benefit from Salesforce+AI, you may have to go beyond the CRM data - External databases, data services, and unstructured information - significantly increase the value you can deliver to your users.

OData/Lightning Connect, Salesforce Data Cloud, APIs, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) let you bring a comprehensive, AI-ready data foundation.

GPTfy lets you do it with clicks, securely, and in matter of hours and days.

Check out our seamless connectivity, declarative configuration, and built-in RAG capabilities, to enrich your Salesforce data with additional info from Snowflake, SAP, Bloomberg, and more.

Ready to check it out? Get a demo to see if GPTfy is right for your requirements ??

Resources:

Demo Videos on Salesforce and AI: https://gptfy.ai/resources/demo/

PDFs and Datasheets on Salesforce & AI: https://gptfy.ai/resources/guides/

Get a GPTfy trial: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3u00000R8JY6EAN

#Salesforce #AI #DataIntegration #ExternalData #GPTfy #LightningConnect #DataCloud #RAG #Snowflake #SAP #Bloomberg