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Yesterday I attended Salesforce World Tour in London, with the CRM supplier heavily pushing its latest AI features, as it seeks to be a central platform for company data and interactions across Sales, Service and Marketing. The UK is Salesforce’s second largest market outside North America, with a broad industry focus, and its flagship UK event certainly attracted the crowds! Salesforce was keen to show off both its latest innovations and its close relationship with UK customers, most notably car manufacturer Aston Martin who featured heavily in the keynote.
One of the big announcements was the launch of a new London AI center, part of a $4bn investment in AI innovation and growth in the UK over the next five years. The new collaboration space will house up to 300 people with 8 meeting rooms, and while just an initial pilot, the plan is to scale the concept. Salesforce also unveiled a number of new product innovations across its Data Cloud, Slack, Field Service and Sales Cloud solutions. I won’t give a full rundown of all the product announcements, but I thought I would share some observations from the event and talking to a number of end user organisations and Salesforce executives.
The main message that really stood out (other than the expected overwhelming mentions of AI), was the focus Salesforce is putting on enabling any data to be pulled into its platform, analysed and actioned upon. This is all being delivered through its Data Cloud solution, which featured heavily across a number of presentations and on the demo floor. Any data from either Salesforce apps, or third-party sources like Databricks and Snowflake can easily be integrated, with a big focus from Salesforce on building connectors into a number of applications. The new Data Cloud Vector Database can unify and integrate data across PDFs, emails, and other unstructured formats such as call transcripts, online customer reviews, and support tickets, which are all pulled together into customer profiles.
Salesforce want organisations to use their platform to unify and harmonise their data, and were keen to stress their added value over public AI solutions by enabling more contextual responses (through better use of company proprietary data that you wouldn’t get with ChatGPT for example). Data Cloud is seen as the solution to deliver enhanced value for all its other Cloud solutions, bringing more sources of data together and enabling that cross-data analysis regardless of what Salesforce tool you are using. Its Einstein Copilot, which is now a single AI tool that sits across all of its solutions, enables easier access to that data through natural language prompts.
TechMarketView research subscribers can carry on reading the rest of our analysis of Salesforce World Tour and discussions with Salesforce executives in UKHotViewsExtra – click here to continue.
Posted by Simon Baxter at '10:16'
