Person
1 episodes · 18 quoted claims
Salesforce created the Salesforce AI CEO role to unify its AI work and avoid redundant stacks, with one model gateway, one Einstein trust layer and one data cloud.
“you know, that we had one model gateway, that we were building one Einstein trust layer to handle, you know, citations and data masking and grounding”
Hearsay Systems' early language processing in 2009 used regular expressions, for example flagging posts mentioning pounds and ounces as signs of a new baby.
“our version of NLP in 2009 was we were regular expressions. And we were looking for people who, um, posted something something with pounds and ounces.”
Hearsay Systems mined social media posts, text messages and web forms for insights and compliance infractions, and sold to regulated industries.
“the here part of hearsay is mining signals, mining, um, tweets and social media posts, and now text messages and web forms for interesting insights, and also actually for compliance infractions”
Clara Shih returned to Salesforce in late November or early December 2020 to lead the Service Cloud applications business.
“I came back to the company in late November, early December 2020. This was before there was a vaccine.”
According to Clara Shih, Einstein AI adoption at Salesforce grew 700% from December 2020 to December 2021.
“we grew Einstein AI 700% in in adoption in those twelve months, right from from December 2020 to December 2021.”
Before the pandemic, Salesforce offered Einstein bots as a chatbot and AI agent assist, but they were used mainly by sophisticated customers.
“we had Einstein bots as our chat bot solution, we'd had AI agent assist, but I'd say it was like more niche”
Salesforce Service Cloud added an incident data model in which one parent incident groups many related child customer cases so they can be handled together.
“we expanded our data model to capture what we call incidents, which are, you know, it's like a parent incident with many child cases, where we could address them all at once.”
Salesforce's in-house CodeGen model powers its developer GPT product, generating code snippets and test cases for Apex and Flow.
“we've initially launched with our own Salesforce research models. It's called code gen, and it's primarily used for our developer GPT product.”
Salesforce offers partner foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere and Amazon.
“So we're we're partnered with with OpenAI, with Anthropic, Google, Cohere, and Amazon.”
Heathrow Airport set up Salesforce service reply recommendations in ten minutes, according to Clara Shih.
“One of our customers, Heathrow Airport, they got up and running with service reply recommendations in ten minutes.”
Clara Shih says Salesforce can use records of customer outcomes, such as case resolution time and satisfaction scores, as feedback signals for AI.
“we're not just a database of customer data, we're actually database of customer outcomes.”
Clara Shih says Salesforce's customers divide roughly into thirds: large enterprise, mid-market and small and medium businesses.
“We have a third large enterprise, a third mid market, and we have a third SMBs.”
Clara Shih expects consolidation among foundation model startups, arguing Meta's open-sourcing of strong models added pressure on closed-model companies.
“I think it maybe made more sense before before Meta really lit a fire in the industry by open sourcing such a such a good set of models.”
Clara Shih says a typical salesperson spends about 70% of their time on non-selling administrative tasks, and hopes AI can cut this to 35%.
“Typical salesperson spends 70% of their time on admin tasks. So these are non selling activities where they're not with the customer actively engaging.”
Clara Shih said she downloaded the Mixtral 7B open model to her laptop to experiment with it.
“I downloaded Mixtral seven B to my laptop last week. It was like, super fun, right? But I needed time to do that.”
Salesforce Research built AI models for early detection and self-healing of Salesforce's own data centers.
“they've developed a bunch of AI models to to do early detection and kind of self healing of our, our systems, like our, our first party data centers.”
Salesforce released Prompt Builder, Copilot and Copilot Studio, letting customers customize prompt templates and query data across Salesforce, Data Cloud and MuleSoft.
“we just um released our prompt builder and our copilot and copilot studio and so this is what this means is that customers now can take any of this the generative AI use cases”
Salesforce lets customers fine-tune open source models on their Salesforce and Data Cloud data through an offering called Einstein Studio.
“Some customers come to us and they say they want to fine tune an open source model using the the data that they have in Salesforce and in Data Cloud.”