According to Salesforce, the company is enabling the use of generative AI app integrations, different language models, and the power to tap into customer data insights from the Customer 360 and Data Cloud. In addition, Salesforce says Slack GPT will work with Einstein GPT, the company’s generative AI for CRM, to leverage conversational data to make users more productive.

The Slack integration will essentially provide an AI assistant directly in the platform, giving users access to AI-powered conversation summaries, writing assistance and more.

The new AI capabilities come as the company is launching a new “AI-ready” Slack platform, enabling organizations to build no-code workflows that embed AI actions with simple prompts at each step, the company says.

According to Salesforce, organizations can also integrate a large language model (LLM) from OpenAI or Anthropic, or use the LLM of their choice from companies funded by Salesforce Ventures’ generative AI fund. In the future, Salesforce will offer its own proprietary LLMs.

The company says Slack GPT will be customizable to an organization’s unique needs, and they can integrate an LLM of their choice, build their own AI-powered no-code workflows, or simply bring AI into the Slack experience.

For native capabilities, Salesforce is launching conversation designed to help users get up to speed on unread Slack messages. In addition, users can ask Slack GPT to join a huddle and get a summary with next steps.

Slack GPT will also feature an AI assistant built contextually into Slack’s message composer and recently launched Slack canvas that allows users to help write messages, adjust their town, and more.

Customers will be able to extend the functionality of third-party or in-house LLMs they already use in Slack and can create no-code workflows that automate work across Slack, LLMs and other software tools by connecting a generative AI app to a workflow.

In addition, organizations can integrate generative AI apps from ChatGPT and other platforms without input being used to train those models.

Salesforce lays out several use cases for Slack GPT:

• Slack GPT for Sales: Sales teams could auto-generate account channel summaries, customer recommendations, and prospect messages to work quickly and save time.
• Slack GPT for Service: Service agents could solve cases and respond to customers faster with AI-generated solutions and responses, and auto-generate case summaries to share team knowledge in channels and canvases.
• Slack GPT for Dev/IT: Developers could instantly auto-scan channel activities and summarize root cause analysis, saving hours on incident management.
• Slack GPT for Marketing: Marketers could auto-generate copy and images for blogs, email campaigns, social, and advertising directly into a channel for team collaboration.

According to Salesforce, a Claude app for Slack is now available, and the ChatGPT app for Slack is in beta. Workflow Builder with Slack GPT will be available this summer, and native API capabilities and the Einstein GPT app for Slack are in development.

The post Salesforce to Bring Generative AI To Slack with Slack GPT appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to the company, the new innovation leverages the full power of Salesforce and Service Cloud, including AI, real-time data and automation to help organizations across industries streamline field operations while improving customer experiences.

Field Service Mobile Powered by Einstein GPT Benefits 

Specifically, Field Service Mobile powered by Einstein GPT – available in beta in late 2023 – will help frontline service teams onboard new employees quickly and help them be more efficient in the field. In addition, customers can solve common issues with self-service tools.

Einstein GPT will help frontline workers save time by automatically composing reports on after-visit summaries, and the AI assistant will also augment self-service tools by suggesting knowledge articles and generating step-by-step guides to address customers’ technical issues. In addition, new employees can surface learnings from their training and help pass on important skill sets.

Field Service Mobile also now lets teams swarm customer issues and work orders in the Slack, and use pre-built solutions from the company’s Component Library within Field Service Mobile to tailor mobile experiences for tasks like finding nearby spare parts and managing timesheets.

Asset Service Management powered by Data Cloud

Salesforce also announced Asset Service Management powered by Data Cloud, available in beta by December, which is designed to help keep complex equipment up and running by leveraging real-time data and predictive usage-based maintenance that helps utility service providers proactively schedule network upkeep. According to the company, this can help prevent maintenance issues and extend the lifespan of expensive equipment.

Contractor Management Tool

In addition, a new Contractor Management with Flex Worker Management tool is now generally available, allowing companies to scale their contractor workforce and deploy them based on skills, distance and available tools. Municipalities, for example, can hire contractors for seasonal work and send contractors to specific maintenance calls based on experience and skill set.

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According to Salesforce, Einstein GPT for Commerce will combine real-time data with generative AI to improve purchase recommendations and personalize the shopping experience, and a new page designer for Composable Storefront aims to help merchants and marketers create unique commerce experiences on headless sites.

Einstein GPT for Commerce will run on Salesforces’ proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners, as well as real-time data from Salesforce Data Cloud, the company says. This will unify all of a company’s customer data to help customers automate and tailor recommendations in Commerce Cloud, the company says.

According to Salesforce, Einstein GPT for Commerce can build personalized product listings or engagement for each individual customer without preloaded product descriptions of information inputting on the back end.

Per the company’s news release, customers in different locations will see a different product description for an umbrella without the retailer having to manually add pre-written version of the copy for each season into Einstein GPT.

Merchants can also design custom-tailored promotional offers and leverage auto-generated messaging to customers over WhatsApp, SMS and email, Salesforce says.

In addition, a new page designer for Composable Storefront will help control the site experience and create better landing pages with a drag-and-drop editor and reusable components that eliminate the need for a third-party content management system.

Salesforce first announced Einstein GPT earlier this month to help automate tasks in Salesforce CRM, and also launched a new ChatGPT app for Slack.

Included in that launch were Einstein GPT for Sales, Einstein GPT for Service, Einstein GPT for Marketing, Einstein GPT for Slack Customers 360 apps and Einstein GPT for Developers.

In addition, the company also announced a large investment in generative AI, launching a new $250 million AI fund to bolster the startup ecosystem and encourage the development of responsible generative AI.

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The CRM giant’s survey of more than 500 IT leaders finds that 67% are prioritizing generative AI for their business within the next year-and-a-half, despite some concerns over ethics, accuracy, security and other issues.

Salesforce released its report as the company announced integrations with ChatGPT creators OpenAI, including Einstein GPT, a new generative AI tool for Salesforce CRM designed to help customers generate AI-created content for sales, marketing, commerce and IT interactions. In addition, the Slack owners are launching the beta of a ChatGPT app for Slack designed to deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools and writing assistance.

According to the research, 57% of leaders call generative AI a “game changer,” with respondents saying the technology can help them better serve customers, take advantage of data and operate more efficiently.

Even 80% those respondents who called generative AI “overhyped” say the technology will help them better serve customers, reduce team workload and help their organization work more efficiently.

Specifically in IT, early use cases of the technology have included creating scripts, coding, identifying vulnerabilities, and automations of other mundane tasks. The report reflects how the technology can help make work more efficient, but it also shows how IT leaders should pump the brakes on widespread implementation of generative AI.

According to the report, IT leaders remain skeptical about the ethical implications of generative AI, with 59% saying AI outputs are inaccurate, and 63% saying there is bias in generative AI outputs. In addition, the technology is not viewed as sustainable, as 71% of IT leaders say generative AI would increase their carbon footprint through increased IT energy use.

When asked about top concerns of ChatGPT-like AI, security was the most cited, with 71% of IT leaders saying generative AI will introduce new security risks to data. Other concerns included a lack of employee skills (66%), difficulty integrating generative AI into current tech stacks (60%) and the lack of a unified data strategy (59%).

Due to those concerns, technology leaders need to take steps to equip their organizations with the tools and skills to successfully leverage generative AI. According to Salesforce, 55% cite accurate, complete and unified data, while 54% say they need enhanced security measures to protect the business from cybersecurity threats that might rise from the use of generative AI.

The company says organizations should work together and share their knowledge to help improve the technology and make it a reality across the enterprise. According to the research, 81% of senior IT leaders say generative AI should combine public and private data sources, 82% say business should work together to improve functionality, and 83% say businesses should collaborate to ensure the ethical use of the technology.

Last month, Salesforce released its give guidelines for responsible development of generative AI, which are listed here:

Accuracy: We need to deliver verifiable results that balance accuracy, precision, and recall in the models by enabling customers to train models on their own data. We should communicate when there is uncertainty about the veracity of the AI’s response and enable users to validate these responses. This can be done by citing sources, explainability of why the AI gave the responses it did (e.g., chain-of-thought prompts), highlighting areas to double-check (e.g., statistics, recommendations, dates), and creating guardrails that prevent some tasks from being fully automated (e.g., launch code into a production environment without a human review).

Safety: As with all of our AI models, we should make every effort to mitigate bias, toxicity, and harmful output by conducting bias, explainability, and robustness assessments, and red teaming. We must also protect the privacy of any personally identifying information (PII) present in the data used for training and create guardrails to prevent additional harm (e.g., force publishing code to a sandbox rather than automatically pushing to production).

Honesty: When collecting data to train and evaluate our models, we need to respect data provenance and ensure that we have consent to use data (e.g., open-source, user-provided). We must also be transparent that an AI has created content when it is autonomously delivered (e.g., chatbot response to a consumer, use of watermarks).

Empowerment: There are some cases where it is best to fully automate processes but there are other cases where AI should play a supporting role to the human — or where human judgment is required. We need to identify the appropriate balance to “supercharge” human capabilities and make these solutions accessible to all (e.g., generate ALT text to accompany images).

Sustainability: As we strive to create more accurate models, we should develop right-sized models where possible to reduce our carbon footprint. When it comes to AI models, larger doesn’t always mean better: In some instances, smaller, better-trained models outperform larger, more sparsely trained models.

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In addition, the company is also making a large investment in generative AI, launching a new $250 million AI fund to bolster the startup ecosystem and encourage the development of responsible generative AI.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based SaaS firm says Einstein GPT–currently in a closed pilot program–is a generative AI tool for Salesforce CRM that gives customers the ability to generate AI-created content for sales, service, marketing, commerce and IT interactions.

The company says Einstein GPT pairs Salesforce’s proprietary AI models and trusted data from Salesforce Data Cloud with generative AI technology from partners, including OpenAI, which ingests, harmonizes and unifies all of a company’s customer data. The end goal is to help organizations automate certain functions and create real-time, personalized experiences.

According to Salesforce, Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customers, generate targeted content for marketers and auto-generate code for developers.

Included in the launch are Einstein GPT for Sales, Einstein GPT for Service, Einstein GPT for Marketing, Einstein GPT for Slack Customers 360 apps and Einstein GPT for Developers.

For sales, Einstein GPT can automatically generate emails, schedule meetings and prepare for next interaction, and service professionals can use it to generate knowledge articles from past case notes and generate agent chat replies.

For marketers, Einstein GPT can generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web and advertising. For developers, they can use the generative AI tool to improve productivity to generate code.

The company also launched the ChatGPT app for Slack, currently in beta, that can deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools and writing assistance directly in Slack. The app combines knowledge found in Slack with the intelligence of the conversational chatbot, giving customers the ability to work more efficiently.

According to Salesforce, the ChatGPT app for Slack gives users a conversational interface that can generate conversation summaries, information on any project or topic and message drafting capabilities.

The company says OpenAI chose Slack as its productivity platform and has leveraged Slack’s software development kits and tools to build the ChatGPT app for Slack, and has been piloting the app.

The company’s announcements come just a day after Microsoft announced the AI-powered Dynamics 365 Copilot, which is similarly designed to help sellers, marketers and other professionals generate content and automate mundane tasks.

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The expansion includes products in select Industry Cloud base licenses. Salesforce says the new offering with enable businesses to complete more tasks with fewer resources, boost efficiency and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

With companies facing uncertain economic times with inflation, supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, any new efficiency helps, says Salesforce. Industry-specific automation can replace tedious, manual tasks.

At least 86% of senior IT leaders say the experience an organization provides its employees and customers is as important as its products and services. Meanwhile, four out of five senior IT leaders agree that improved customer-facing and employee technologies are critical for their organization to compete.

A study from Salesforce’s MuleSoft and Vanson Bourn showed that 91% of organizations say they they need automation technology, but only 23% have fully implemented automation across business functions.

Salesforce Flow for Industries

Users of Salesforce’s Flow for Industries can create intelligent process automation unique to their specific industry. According to Salesforce, these new tools help customers with the following:

• Create better customer and employee experiences: OmniStudio enables organizations to build branded, dynamic customer interactions and employee workflows fast. Flow easily connects them with enterprise data and applications, without code.

• Easily manage rules and actions: Business Rules Engine allows organizations to simplify and automate processes such as pricing discounts, care management or financial planning with declarative setup, management and evaluation of rules. Using a no-code interface, organizations are empowered to build, test and execute rules before they are integrated.

• Save time and resources: Document Generation gives organizations the ability to automatically generate and share documents using a no-code template designer, while Intelligent Form Reader uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically read and extract document data, unifying the end-to-end management process, and freeing up time for higher-value work.
• Simplify data management: Data Processing Engine helps organizations create definitions to transform data across multiple sources then surface that to customers within a workflow.

The Flow for Industries suite of automation products is generally available now. These tools are free to base license holders.

Learn more about the new Flow for Industries on Salesforce here.

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According to Sumsub, its platform can help convert more customers, speed up verification, reduce costs and combat digital fraud. Sumsub’s solutions, built on the Salesforce platform, are now available on Salesforce’s enterprise cloud marketplace.

With this new integration, clients can more effectively onboard users with Sumsub’s digital verification solutions to help verify ID documents. Different types of checks are available, including ID documents, liveness, video identification, KYB, proof of address and more.

In a statement, Peter Sever, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Sumsub, called the new offering an opportunity to offer the company’s global identity verification solution to an even wider audience of businesses around the world.

“Sumsub is happy to help more companies create verification flows tailored to their business demands, onboard users and stay protected from fraudsters along the way,” Sever said.

Woodson Martin, general manager of Salesforce AppExchange, called Sumsub a “welcome addition” to Salesforce’s enterprise cloud marketplace.

“Sumsub is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they power digital transformation for customers by delivering robust identity verification and anti-fraud,” said Martin. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to connect customers with the right apps and experts for their business needs.”

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The end product is the integration of the IBM Digital Health Pass with the Salesforce Work.com Workplace Command Center, which is designed to give customers one unified hub to make data-driven decisions and safely bring employees back to offices and reopen other public spaces.

The solution is designed to help enable individuals to share their vaccination and health status on their smartphone in a verifiable and privacy-preserving way.

For example, once a vaccine is administered, an individual would be issued a verifiable health credential via the IBM Digital Health Pass that would be included only in that individual’s encrypted digital wallet on their smartphone.

Work.com helps customers survey the wellness of employees, visitors and travelers, along with scheduling tests and vaccinations and other contact tracing features.

It’s a suite of solutions that includes technologies for employee wellness, shift management, manual contract tracing, vaccine management and more recently, vaccine management.

Meanwhile, the Digital Health Pass from IBM – built on Blockchain technologies – is designed to enable organizations to verify health credentials for employees, customers and visitors based on criteria specified by each organization.

For example, once a vaccine is administered, an individual would be issued a verifiable health credentials via the Digital Health Pass that would be included only in that person’s encrypted digital wallet on their smartphone, according to IBM.

“At the start of the pandemic, many organizations deployed simple COVID-19 screenings, such as self-reported health surveys, to support re-entry to workplaces and other institutions,” said Paul Roma, general manager of IBM Watson Health, in a statement.

“Now, as testing becomes more widespread and vaccine distribution gets underway, we are expanding the availability of IBM Digital Health Pass with Salesforce to help organizations verify an individual’s vaccine status and any other relevant health credentials.”

“With Covid-19 vaccines becoming available, companies and communities around the world are focused on how to safely reopen and get back to public life,” said Bill Patterson, executive vice president and general manager of CRM applications at Salesforce, in a statement.

“Our partnership with IBM will give organizations a single platform designed to provide safe and continuous operations, deepen trust with customers and employees and do everything possible to support their health and wellbeing.”

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In an announcement, the companies say combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be “transformative for customers and the industry,” creating an operating system for companies to succeed in digital environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated companies’ cloud migrations and digital transformation, as has the need to deliver connected experiences for customers.

A combined solution will give organizations a single unified platform for “connecting employees, customers and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows,” according to the announcement.

According to Salesforce, Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud and will be the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, allowing organizations to be more productive, make smarter decisions, and create connected customer experiences.

When the transaction closes, Slack will become an operating unit of Salesforce, expanding its reach in the enterprise both alongside Salesforce and for any company undergoing digital transformation. The deal isn’t expected to close until 2022.

Slack will continue to be led by CEO Steward Butterfield, according to the announcement. In a statement, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff said Slack’s leader has built “one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history.”

“This is a match made in heaven,” Benioff said. “Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes.”

In his own statement, Butterfield commented on the “massive” opportunity the deal has on the cloud revolution.

“As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility,” Butterfield said. “Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”

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According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and billing, partner relationship management and business-to-business commerce capabilities to help organizations take control of their revenue growth across every channel.

Revenue Cloud is part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, making it easy for companies to “connect their sales, partner, operations and finance to create a single source of truth for revenue and customer transactions from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.”

According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud can help businesses:

Read Next: Salesforce Report: Strong Digital Operations Are Helping Businesses Survive Pandemic and Beyond

• Transform the buying experience: Give customers the ability to seamlessly jump across different sales channels with direct sales, partners and digital storefronts. Now, a customer can fill their online cart with a specific configuration of products or services on their own and then reach out to a sales rep to ask a question or request a discount. Their rep will already have a complete understanding of the customer’s existing product history and online interactions at their fingertips for a smooth transaction. Our new CPQ-B2B Commerce connector allows businesses to customize digital storefronts for complex B2B selling and add customizable, configurable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience.
• Accelerate new revenue streams:Revenue operations teams can quickly spin up new monetization strategies, such as launching a subscription product or implementing consumption pricing. New technology from our recent acquisition of Vlocity provides industry-specific solutions for unique workflows related to revenue, like managing ad inventory or content syndications for media companies. With new Multi-Cloud Billing, companies can create revenue streams from other clouds on a single platform. For example, field service reps can upsell products or create revenue from onsite services with billing and payments handled on one single, unified system. And with Revenue Cloud Quick Starts, businesses can launch a subscription offering from start to finish in eight weeks instead of months.
• Improve revenue efficiency: Automation removes the burden from teams who are tasked with manual approvals, data reconciliation and transcriptions of orders from one system to another. Automatically validating sales orders and consolidating invoices prevents issues such as underbilling for services or incorrectly tracking changes to a contract, which can lead to lost revenue in the sales cycle. Instead of manually downloading outdated order forms, the new Customer Asset Lifecycle Management tool shows a simple, visual dashboard of everything a customer has purchased, keeping track of all contract amendments over time and open balances to provide a deeper understanding of the customer relationship. Real-time tracking against valuable KPIs like customer lifetime value, net revenue retention and monthly recurring revenue help teams align and make strategic decisions on where to cut costs or what kinds of customers to target. Integrations to ERP systems make revenue data actionable by adjusting go-to-market strategies or providing discounting guidance.

The new solution comes as many business’ revenue cycles were thrown into limbo when the COVID-19 pandemic hit earlier this year. Deals stalled and sales channels were disrupted as customer needs changed. Meanwhile, other companies couldn’t meet demand for their products.

According to a Salesforce study, 80% of business buyers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its product or service, and 74% have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.

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