Salesforce announced Einstein (their Artificial Intelligence engine) in 2016, after ten company acquisitions to make it a reality. Since then, the Einstein brand has been attached to many Salesforce ecosystem features and functionalities. Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and more all have Einstein branded components for everything from lead scoring to segmentation to case assignment.
Pre-2023, the buzz around AI and Einstein in the Salesforce world had dropped from its peak and possibly some users working with the AI tool overlooked the real machine intelligence powering their work. Then ChatGPT launched – showing the entire world what’s possible with a true AI model. ChatGPT writes everything from content and emails to sql queries and jokes. The frequency with which the tool is unavailable due to high demand tells us at least how much folks are enjoying playing with it.
At TrailblazerDX ‘23 (March 7), Salesforce will announce EinsteinGPT, which likely is their direct integration between the Salesforce platform and OpenAI’s GPT model.
Marc Benioff, and Salesforce more broadly, announced the teaser via Twitter on February 8, 2023. Sans official press release, Marc has shared a few cryptic clues on what to expect. You can’t help but be reminded of Apple’s famous “But wait there’s more” product launch announcements. Is Benioff’s tweet the least of what we can expect from Saleforce’s version of ChatGTP or the most?
His tweets include phrases such as: “It generates Leads, closes deals” and “No more boring reports, now it’ll write them for you with jokes included.” And the tweet he sent out in Spanish translated as: “The CRM that knows your customers better than you do and can even predict their next move.”
Natural Language Models that use Natural Language Processing are smart. Their conversational approach to machine human interaction is oftentimes amazing and have been evolving for several decades. Salesforce’s “but wait, there’s more” Tweet leaves us all wondering how far beyond Einstein, Genie, and Snow the new EinsteinGPT will take us.
We know better than to speculate based on Salesforce’s marketing materials, however, it does look like EinsteinGPT will be focused primarily on Sales Cloud (for now). What “Generate leads, closes deals” means remains to be seen! As a marketing professional, your job is probably still secure in the short term. However it is safe to say that if Salesforce’s EinsteinGPT is going to capture and warm leads, marketers better ramp up to focus on other challenges in the sales and marketing arena. Likewise the growth of tools like Tableau, Salesforce CDP, and automations in general give us both platforms to grow our skills around and opportunities to re-focus on other steps in the sales and marketing process with the belief that computers are increasingly able to handle some of our current workload.
Automation, computer-aided everything, and human-like computerized interactions are here and probably here to stay.
What is obvious is that this technology has reached a level of maturity that is becoming disruptive in a multitude of marketplaces. And OpenAI is not alone; Google has similar technology which it has been unwilling to launch just yet due to concerns about the quality of the results, as well as its reputation.
But back to Salesforce ChatGPT.
Salesforce’s hint about writing reports is also intriguing. Could this be an extension of Einstein Search, which has the ability to retrieve answers to basic queries using natural language processing? If you haven’t experienced this feature in your Salesforce org’s search, try typing a name of an individual in your company. Salesforce’s Einstein Search will return results of every instance of that name in your database - not just instances in leads or contacts or opportunities (whichever tab you are currently working in).
Whatever Marc and Salesforce have in store for us in the future, all eyes will be on Trailblazer DX, taking place on March 7. It is interesting that the launch may happen at a Salesforce developer conference when the power and implications of Salesforce ChatGPT will impact a far wider user base in the Salesforce ecosystem.
This built-up anticipation just goes to show that the world has been waiting for this kind of technology. We’ve all known about artificial intelligence – ever since the original Terminator movies. AI has been portrayed on the big screen as the savior and the demise of humanity. Likely right now many people are viewing it from the far end or the other of that spectrum. Even though we are told AI is the ‘next big thing’, there hasn’t been much that’s tangible for the general public. Finally, the world is now able to see the true power of AI, and how it might influence their daily lives in the future.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, AI is all around us (ChatBots, Maps, Siri, Alexa) – however, this is mainly proprietary technology, built by app companies behind closed doors. It isn’t an accident that what you tell Alexa to do in your home impacts the advertisements and recommendations you see on your devices. Let’s face it. Marketers are always collecting data to reach prospects when they are in the mood to hear about our products and services.
OpenAI is a little different, although it will be embraced by marketers as well. OpenAI’s mission is to create a public AI model to power the next generation of developers and the applications they build. Salesforce’s low to no code evolving model has functioned for some time to make customization of its tools and platforms more accessible without a computer science degree.
Your ‘everyday Joe’ has access to one of the most powerful AI models to help them perform manual tasks, either by using the free beta version or the subscription version of ChatGPT Plus.
Although OpenAI’s GPT model has taken many industries by storm, Salesforce users can safely say that the Salesforce ecosystem is very excited about the possibilities that ChatGPT will provide.
When the beta launched on November 30, 2022, it didn’t take long for people to realize that ChatGPT could generate code, pages, rules, and much more. Which begged the question: Will Salesforce Developers and Admins become obsolete in the near future? At Summit Technologies we doubt it.
Although there have been existential questions flying about, there is a clichéd response that seems to summarize a widely held opinion: ChatGPT won’t replace developers, but it might replace those who fail to use AI to assist them. Embrace change or get left behind.
Since the initial release, there have been other use cases that Salesforce professionals have been learning about – everything from summarizing text, generating mock data, writing up proposals.
Coincidentally, on the same day that Marc Benioff announced the new integration, we also saw the release of one of the first Salesforce ISVs to announce an integration with GPT. PipeLaunch have announced their beta integration, which will tie the GPT model into their sales application, helping sales users to generate prospecting emails and overcome objections. Marketing content developers get a chuckle out of having ChatGPT generate messaging. Not only can it write a basic email but when asked can rewrite said content with everything from humor to sarcasm. Take caution, however, when employing AI to write anything. When in doubt AI just makes things up. No one wants to send out a marketing email that is just inaccurate.
Just look at Google, for example. They’ve pumped billions of dollars into their DeepMind subsidiary over the years, and it’s one of the leading global AI research bodies. But as soon as ChatGPT was released, the question was raised: could this kill Google Search? In response, Google declared a Code Red, and presumably started working on releasing their own version. Google’s own version was announced this week, as they introduced “Bard”.
However, Bard failed to live up to ChatGPT yesterday, after it provided factually incorrect information in a promotion ad. This sent Google’s stock into freefall, losing over 100 billion in market cap. When has a competitor such as OpenAI generated such a response as this in the lifetime of the internet?!
To make matters worse for Google, Microsoft has already integrated GPT into Bing - the step child of the search engine world. As a result, it has threatened Google’s 20-year dominance for, perhaps, the first time ever.
There’s no doubt that the ChatGPT release by OpenAI has taken the world by storm, and could usher in a new age of true AI-powered applications that go far beyond what we have ever seen before. The difficulty we are all having logging in and playing with ChatGPT shows that there is a demand, even if it is only curiosity based.
But how will Salesforce integrate this artificial technology into their platform? Could this be a premature launch to get ahead of competitors (such as Microsoft and their Dynamics platform), or could we see a simple but powerful integration that can deliver instant value, just like Microsoft has done with Bing.
Stay tuned to Summit Technologies as we not-so-patiently await more information to share with you.