Offering Analytics and AI Capabilities for Data-Driven Decision Making

Have you been following our series of articles on AI and Salesforce? If so, you will know that Generative AI capabilities have the potential to completely transform our experience of the planet’s leading CRM (and the whole world!). Salesforce now markets itself as an AI CRM and while artificial intelligence has been part of its roadmap for a while now, it was from mid-2023, particularly at Dreamforce that we saw the explosion of releases around AI. It seems that every other week we hear of a new AI innovation from Salesforce. Perhaps the functions experiencing the greatest transformations are Sales, Service, and Marketing, and some of the biggest news of May 2024 was the launch of Einstein Copilot for marketers and merchants at Connections conference in Chicago!?

Consistent themes surrounding almost all Salesforce AI innovations revolve around saving time and manual labor. In this article, we zone in on one of AI’s greatest superpowers: empowering data-driven decision-making. Read on to find out more!?

The Role of AI in Data-Driven Decision-Making Processes

Embedded within the Einstein 1 Platform is Salesforce Data Cloud. As we all know, AI is only as good as its data source and the power of Data Cloud is it helps you pool all organizational data into the Einstein 1 Platform. This unified data model gives your teams the ability to make data-driven decisions at speed, scale, and with an increased level of personalization. Data-driven decision-making examples include giving salespeople an in-depth view of customer or prospect preferences to offer the right advice in a heartbeat. Similarly, service agents can resolve cases in record time with easy insight into the customer they are dealing with.

Leveraging Data Analytics and AI for Business Growth

Examples of companies using the power of Data Cloud and data-driven decisions to expand their business include Formula 1 and Xerox. Formula 1 has been able to engage and thrill its massive fan base by providing individualized fan journeys and bespoke offers via leveraging Data Cloud. According to Salesforce, the results of this are 88 % fan satisfaction while first contact resolution is at 86%.?

Similarly, Xerox, a global giant in office technology, is utilizing the power of Data Cloud to give them a more comprehensive view of clients. This helps Xerox make more informed decisions on market segmentation, campaigns, and cross-selling opportunities.?

Above are just a couple of examples of data-driven decision-making in business and the capabilities of AI to enhance organizational growth.

?

Salesforce and AI Driving Digital Transformation

We all know that true digital transformation is about so much more than simply getting off paper and digitizing your processes. For digital transformation to work for you, it really needs to be able to help you scale up business processes at speed while not sacrificing personalization or quality of output. Salesforce AI tools have the ability to do just this while Data Cloud draws together data from multiple different sources into one central location. Let’s recap some of the Salesforce AI capabilities lighting up digital transformation.?

Salesforce Einstein AI

Einstein is Salesforce’s comprehensive AI solution. Einstein AI for Salesforce holds many moving parts including sharpening up the Customer 360 experience, deploying Salesforce Generative AI to create Chatbots and other intelligent assistants, as well as helping you develop apps at record speed. Crucially, Einstein provides business leaders, marketing professionals, and salespeople with deep insight into customer and prospect behavior at unprecedented speed. C-Suite Executives and middle managers alike can draw on real-time insights and use Salesforce to drive unique customer journeys, tailored to the needs of specific organizations.?

Salesforce Workflow Automation

Salesforce automation software has long been highly regarded for its ability to fast-track company workflows. With Einstein, this automation ability is essentially on steroids! Do your sales team members struggle to write emails while managing meetings? Einstein can craft personalized messages for you based on personalized customer data and have them sent out automatically to the relevant contact. Similarly, marketing is transformed by AI Salesforce automation through the automatic personalization of outreach messages and campaigns.?

Salesforce Tableau Dashboards for Real-Time Data Insights

Tableau was acquired by Salesforce back in 2019 for billions…now this data visualization software is working in tandem with Salesforce and AI to provide businesses with real-time insights on customers to make smarter, more effective business decisions. With Tableau dashboards you can make accurate predictions, get recommendations for customers, and answer tough business questions. Salesforce Tableau integration takes the power of your CRM to another level by making some of your most important data more visible. The results? Well, Salesforce claims up to 29% faster insights as of 2022, but with recent developments in AI, this is likely faster.

Einstein Copilot for Marketers and Merchants

This one was mentioned in the opening of this article! Dropped as recently as May 22, 2024, these new features for Einstein Copilot give marketers and merchants intelligent AI assistants to provide insights into audiences and customers. These AI assistants are there to guide marketers through key tasks such as creating briefs and content as well as setting up campaign objects. Similarly, they can actually help merchants with a variety of tasks, for example setting up effective promotions and creating SEO-optimized storefronts. With better data, marketers and merchants have their hands held throughout key business processes and decisions with the help of a trusty AI guide!

Data-Driven Decision-Making with AI and Salesforce: Wrapped

Ultimately, AI takes what have always been some of Salesforce’s greatest strengths: automation combined with personalized data to another frontier. Einstein functions have the ability to supercharge existing Salesforce functionalities and integrations at an unprecedented scale while removing superfluous manual work. At its best, this can result in the ability to scale up your business operations whilst not sacrificing any of the quality. Your business leaders can make better decisions to increase customer satisfaction, ramp up the caliber of products and services, and boost employee morale.

This doesn’t mean data-driven decision-making with Salesforce and AI capabilities is all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, according to a recent Salesforce survey, more than half of respondents don’t trust the data coming from AI in general or think they can get what they need from this technology. A major question remains: will Salesforce be able to safely navigate into a new AI dawn, leveraging its Trust Layer to remain the Gold standard of CRM data? In contemporary times, at least 80% of business leaders think they can use AI to increase their business revenue and drive down costs but the technology still isn’t fully trusted. Is Salesforce’s silver bullet the ability to bring together all the efficiency of AI without risking any of the trust of businesses??

At the moment, technology has evolved to enable us to potentially thrive off making AI-powered decisions, but will there come a time when AI makes the decisions for us? Stay tuned to human history…