Salesforce announced the public availability of the Einstein Copilot generative AI assistant last week, and now the company is launching more AI products and developer programs at TrailblazerDX 2024, its developer conference. On March 6, the CRM giant launched:
- Einstein 1 Studio, which can be used to customize the Einstein AI assistant.
- A Slack development program.
- Research on how technology leaders and IT workers perceive AI adoption.
Einstein 1 Studio Enables Organizations to Customize Einstein Copilot AI
Einstein Study 1 (Figure A) is a low-code AI toolkit for creating, customizing, and integrating the Copilot AI assistant into an organization's custom Salesforce data sets.
“The Einstein 1 platform is the way every company can build trusted AI applications of the future based on trusted data and metadata,” said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, during a March 4 press conference.
Einstein 1 Studio includes three main features:
- Co-pilot builder: It allows developers to create custom AI actions, telling Copilot what action to take in the course of work. Copilot Builder is now in beta.
- Message generator: It allows administrators and developers to incorporate custom generative AI prompts into their workflows. Prompt Builder is now generally available.
- Model Builder: A platform for creating or importing generative AI models into Salesforce workflows. Model Builder can integrate a wide variety of popular models, including OpenAI and Vertex AI from Google Cloud. It is now in general availability.
All three Einstein 1 Studio features are available globally in multiple languages. Global sovereignty options will be available on a rolling schedule “in the coming weeks and months,” Shih said.
Salesforce's effort to securely use company data with AI
Salesforce's plan is to train developers to work with generative AI, primarily through prompts, and to personalize the use of generative AI with private business data. Salesforce emphasizes that, depending on customer needs and preferences, Einstein Copilot and the custom features built into Einstein 1 will use only proprietary data, without feeding any information into public models. The idea is to feed information that an organization already uses into Salesforce, such as IoT devices or data lakes and warehouses stored with Snowflake or Databricks, into Einstein 1 Data Cloud for AI-powered CRM.
SEE: AI helps build a “data culture,” according to one of Salesforce World Tour Australia's digital transformation lessons. (Technological Republic)
“When I talk to CTOs, they tell me I want to have the flexibility to move forward with the future as this technology develops,” said Alice Steinglass, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Platform, during the press conference. “And I think it's part of a broader strategy of having multiple layers that fit together.”
She defines multiple layers as:
- A layer of trust.
- An open data strategy.
- Great language models.
- AI functionality integrated into the workflow.
The Slack Developer Program offers more options for building Slack apps
Salesforce announced a new developer portal for Slack. The portal is a space to test ideas, explore beta features, access tools, and find resources. The Slack Developer Program is open to developers worldwide starting March 6.
The Slack Developer Program offers three tools:
- Sandboxes, up to 10 Salesforce Enterprise Grid instances at a time.
- New custom functions in Bolt for Python or JavaScript.
- Support for scripting with the Slack command-line interface.
Tech leaders push AI, while some IT professionals struggle with implementation
Salesforce showed research conducted by Vanson Bourne and Salesforce among 600 IT professionals in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States between December 2023 and January 2024.
Overall, the report found a disconnect between the needs of business and IT leaders regarding generative AI. Of the IT professionals surveyed, 79% say business leaders are “increasingly pressuring them to implement AI.” Balancing speed, business value and security when implementing new technology is a struggle for 48% of respondents.
Meanwhile, generative AI is the top technology that IT feels pressure to incorporate quickly, and 88% of IT professionals cannot handle all AI-related requests.
The top five challenges for IT when it comes to implementing AI are:
- Lack of relevant skills.
- Data security.
- Data quality.
- Slowdown of other initiatives.
- Higher cost.
IT professionals surveyed rate security as their top priority when it comes to deploying new devices, while business leaders rate deployment speed as their top priority.
