Salesforce Einstein: Translating Data Into Better Experiences

Rewind back to a decade when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in its infancy and for most organizations using AI was complex and cost-prohibitive. And only a handful were able to use it in a meaningful way.

Since its inception, Salesforce, the herculean CRM provider, has been all about making things simpler, easier, and effective for its users. And they wanted to take the complexity out of AI, all while giving Salesforce CRM an intelligence booster.

Enter – Einstein!

And today, AI is a norm and is already transforming digital experiences for the savvy customers of today.

“AI is now an imperative, not a nice-to-have.” – Marco Casalaina, General Manager of Einstein, Salesforce.

We couldn’t agree more!

AI is a definitive way to translate data into better experiences. It is part of a data-driven approach that aims to optimize processes, increase competitiveness, build better customer relationships, and drive better outcomes for businesses. Big thanks to tech giants like Salesforce who made AI a trump card for success in the ever-changing digital world.

Research highlights that the global AI market is expected to get to $267 billion in value by 2027^[i].

Let’s dive into the story of Einstein, how Salesforce is constantly keeping Einstein ahead of the curve, and what the future holds.

The Story of Einstein

In 2014, Salesforce recognized the emerging AI trend and the role AI could play in the future of business. They stepped up their game and started heavily investing in it by acquiring machine learning businesses like MetaMind, PredictionIO, and RelateIQ. In 2016, the company spent around $4 billion on acquisitions!

This step looked way too risky an undertaking to some, to the point that the company’s stock dropped by 4%!

However, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, had a vision that he wanted to bring to life – to create an AI platform that would transform the way businesses communicate with their customers forever. As a result, Salesforce unveiled Einstein.

When Salesforce released Einstein, the AI bandwagon got a lot more crowded.

While many other AI platforms attempt to perfect AI-powered tools, Einstein takes the ‘little bit of everything’ approach to a full spectrum of different powerful tools.

Salesforce’s Strategy of Building AI-Powered Organizations With Einstein

With Einstein, the aim was to provide business insights to help steer teams towards action rather than analysis. Rather than asking if sales are improving or decreasing, Einstein helps users ask questions directly from the CRM and get the visualized answer in the form of a chart. In 2016, Einstein’s AI capabilities were in other clouds too but they were limited. Einstein’s AI capabilities were mainly directed towards Sales Cloud and the complex needs of the sales teams.

But Salesforce knew the importance of AI for different teams across the organization. Organizations were looking for better ways to optimize CRM data related to sales, service, marketing processes, etc. And Einstein became an essential element for their transformation.

That’s why at the time of Einstein’s launch in 2016, Einstein general manager John Ball, said, “You will see [Einstein] powering AI across all of our clouds and there are many features coming.”

Salesforce’s understanding of savvy customers’ needs for personalization was spot on and they had a clear vision of integrating Einstein with all its offerings. It wasn’t just a stand-alone offering but an integral part and foundation of its platform approach.

Today, Einstein has expanded to more than 40 features embedded through core Salesforce Cloud solutions. And Einstein is fully integrated with Salesforce Customer 360 to improve organizational operations at every level.

Besides being a core part of all products, the Einstein Platform can cater to distinct business operations so that admins and developers can develop customized smart assistants.

By introducing Einstein, Salesforce changed the way organizations can make their business decisions better, with visualization tools and actionable insights.

How Salesforce is Continuously Refining Einstein

Our tech landscape has been growing leaps and bounds. And the ever-changing nature of technology has brought forth many new challenges.

Salesforce has been keeping up with the present and future needs of organizations and that’s why with every release Einstein AI is growing and getting smarter.

When Einstein AI was introduced – machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision stood out as the pillars of Einstein.

Since then, Salesforce has introduced numerous capabilities across clouds and added more with each release. If we consider the two recent releases by Salesforce, each one had important things for Einstein and how things work in the new digital era.

In May this year, the Summer ‘21 release introduced capabilities such as:

• All features of Einstein Search would be generally available at no extra cost.
• Einstein Discovery for Reports would let you see what’s changed in your data analysis between report runs.
• Ease of building customized recommendations with Einstein Recommendation Builder.
• Einstein Vision and Language APIs could be used to enable your apps with image recognition and natural language processing.
• Guided set-up to use Einstein Lead Scoring accurately when scoring different types of leads separately.
• Einstein Case Wrap-Up would enable support agents to predict case field values when agents finish customer chats.

In October, the Winter ’22 release unraveled many new amazing capabilities in the Einstein space, such as:

• By default, Einstein Search will be turned on in Lightning Experience, thus, ensuring a smarter search experience for everyone at no extra cost.
• Einstein Discovery will enable you to use your externally built models for better predictions. This makes it easy to upload and deploy models into Salesforce.
• Einstein Bots can swiftly process multiple languages so that you can launch one bot in many languages.
• The Einstein Key Accounts Identification feature is now generally available. This enables you to rank your best accounts to help you optimize your account-based marketing efforts.
• Einstein Automate to build intelligent workflows.
• The Einstein Conversation Insights Enhancements feature will enable sales teams to automatically match the voice and video calls to the right opportunities.

And we can definitely expect that each release that we’ll witness in 2022 would have something in store that enhances Einstein AI in a whole new way.

How Can Einstein be an Ally to Your Business Operations?

Let’s take a look at how Einstein can completely change the way your company runs its operations and understands and interacts with your customers.

• Better Sales Operations: Einstein’s array of features provide comprehensive insights to sales teams on accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Also, powerful lead scoring assists sales reps to follow the right leads and boost conversions.
• Improved Service Experience: Einstein improves customer service experiences by allowing Salesforce to extract customer insights automatically in real-time utilizing a blend of machine learning and AI capabilities.
• Amplified Marketing Efforts: Einstein facilitates the users to foresee the best channel, content, and timing to send your marketing message to your target audience. Also, it assists you in creating personalized campaign content.
• Better Analytics: Einstein platform amplifies the strength of your CRM to identify various data points. These data points help to produce predictive recommendations and predictive insights so that you can make better business decisions.

The Statistical Picture of Einstein

Einstein is packed with multiple features that make daily operations easier, help brands understand purchasing patterns, customer behavior, etc, and devise smarter business strategies around it.

Let’s look at these numbers by Salesforce that showcases the impact that Einstein is making.

• Einstein Platform: Over 80 billion predictions^[ii] are made every day across all Salesforce products.
• Einstein for Service: There is an increase of 300% in Einstein Bot sessions since February of 2020, a 680% increase compared to 2019^[iii].
• Einstein for Sales: There is a 32% increase in converting prospects to buyers using Einstein Lead Scoring^[iv].
• Einstein Search: Over 1.5 million natural language searches per month; 1.5 natural language searches every second; 100+ million personalized keyword searches are done per month with Einstein Search^[v].

What Does the Road Ahead for Einstein Look Like?

According to research, Salesforce will generate $21.1 billion in revenue in 2021 and $25.55 billion in revenue in 2022^[vi]. And with it, the growth of Einstein is expected to continue at a much faster rate, which further highlights the importance of Salesforce making more AI innovations.

And we’re sure that we would see new powerful voice integration capabilities with Einstein across different Salesforce products. Another area where we will be able to see more of Einstein is the healthcare industry. Salesforce is working to develop and train predictive healthcare models to personalize therapies and provide precision medicine depending on each patient’s unique case.

We believe Einstein will play a key part in the future to enable organizations to truly embrace digital transformation.

Statistics References:

^[i] Datasemantics

^{[ii], [iii], [iv], [v]} Salesforce: Press Release

^[vi] CRM Science