Salesforce Unveils New Einstein 1 Marketing and Commerce Innovations to Power the Complete Customer Journey with Unified Data and Trusted AI

May 22, 2024 at 08:00 AM EDT

Einstein Copilot for marketers and merchants allow brands to automatically generate campaign briefs, personalized content, and promotions from their trusted data

Data Cloud for Commerce unifies business and customer data to deliver smart insights and help merchandisers launch personalized promotions, offers, and shopping experiences for customers, enhancing loyalty and boosting sales

Einstein Personalization enables marketers to leverage the unified customer data profile in Data Cloud to automatically trigger the next best interaction for customers based on their behavior and history with a brand

Today at Connections, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the #1 AI CRM, expanded its Einstein Copilot capabilities by introducing new features for marketers and merchants. Einstein Copilot, Salesforce’s trusted and reliable conversational AI assistant, now helps businesses of all sizes with daily marketing and merchandising tasks, in addition to its existing functionalities for sales and service. Salesforce also revealed new tools for unifying business and commerce data, along with a new AI-powered personalization decision engine that helps companies personalize customer interactions at every touchpoint using data from any source.

“Marketing and commerce leaders need a trusted advisor to help them tap into the promise of generative AI,” said Ariel Kelman, President and CMO of Salesforce. “With the Einstein 1 Platform we’re giving organizations the power to unify all of their data on one trusted platform. This is the key to getting results from generative AI that are actually useful in driving your business forward.”

Why it matters: Marketers and merchandisers understand that personalization is a customer mandate and taking advantage of AI to create better experiences and business outcomes is a competitive requirement. Yet, they still struggle to connect the right data and touch points to fully utilize AI and bring personalization into every customer engagement.

80% of customers believe customer experiences should be better considering all the data companies collect. However, 75% of IT organizations struggle to integrate data insights into user experiences and only 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources.

What’s new: By unlocking and unifying all of their organization’s trapped data on a single platform, brands can harness trusted AI to personalize every customer engagement across marketing, commerce, sales, and service. New innovations include:

Einstein Copilot for Marketers is a trusted AI assistant that has pre-built actions to simplify the campaign creation process by automatically generating marketing briefs, content, and email campaigns. It also helps marketers accelerate time-to-market with auto-generated responses grounded in customer data and aligned to brand voice.

For example, a clothing retailer could use Einstein Copilot for Marketers to efficiently spin up a campaign to entice previous customers to return with targeted product offers. To do so, they would use an AI prompt to build a campaign brief that provides campaign objectives, KPIs, target audience, and initial content for campaign assets. From there, they would create the segment and select audience attributes, hone their email content, and deploy the campaign all from one conversational console.

Einstein Copilot for Merchants is a trusted AI assistant that makes merchandisers more productive by simplifying commerce tasks. Using natural language prompts, it streamlines storefront setup and generates personalized promotions to delight customers and drive higher conversion rates. It also surfaces insights to improve products discoverability and provides AI-powered SEO recommendations to increase revenue.

For example, an air conditioning manufacturer can use Einstein Copilot for Merchants to quickly create a product detail page for their new HVAC equipment line by using natural language prompts, and include AI-generated product descriptions that are optimized for SEO. The merchant can also optimize sales with auto-generated, multilingual targeted promotions that are based on buyers’ locations and past purchases.

Data Cloud for Commerce enables retailers to harmonize enterprise data – like product details, inventory status, and transactional history – with customer data to create a single view to access and leverage across the entire customer journey. This allows merchants to boost revenue and efficiency with insights from AI-powered analytics and automation to guide key business decisions, like choosing to bundle underperforming products, or sending abandoned cart and back-in-stock notifications.

A beauty retailer, for example, could use Data Cloud for Commerce to create and activate segments of first-time shoppers who made purchases of less than $25 and then send them personalized promotions to encourage a repeat purchase and increase loyalty. The beauty retailer could also identify highest-performing products by region and available inventory to determine the best items to bundle together to grow average order value (AOV).

Einstein Personalization is a new AI-based decision engine that allows brands to leverage real-time customer data from Data Cloud to deliver marketing campaigns that automatically trigger next best offers and personalized content – no matter where a customer engages with a brand or organization.

For example, an unknown visitor might land on a bank’s business loan web page, and by the time the visitor navigates back to the home page they would see personalized content for loans and related offers. As this user engages with suggested content and provides their email or name, their profile would update in real time so the bank's sales reps could send the prospect a relevant white paper to aid their search for a business loan.

Unified AI assistants powered by trusted data and metadata

Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot for Marketers and Copilot for Merchants are unique within the industry because they are unified conversational AI assistants built on the Einstein 1 Platform, grounded in company-specific data stored within Data Cloud, and connected to Salesforce metadata.

A typical LLM can’t find the relevant output just from the data. It has to know what promotion, territory, customer, and other concepts mean and where to locate the relevant data to fulfill the prompt. Einstein Copilot uses this metadata to interpret the user’s prompt with complete context, working with the LLM to choose the relevant fields – in this case, for the product promotion email sent to the customer segment.

The Einstein Trust Layer safeguards the confidentiality of the data within these responses, preventing the LLM from retaining any of the information provided. This allows the LLM to access the necessary business-related data to respond to inquiries while enabling the business to maintain security, privacy, and governance over their data.

Customer perspective

“Salesforce allows us to fuse together our trusted data from across our business to deliver tailored quality experiences to every current and future Aston Martin driver. The Einstein 1 Platform allows us to give our customers the personalized, VIP experience they expect, as we look to grow and enable our AI enterprise.” — Matthew Randall, Head of Software and Integration, Aston Martin

Availability

Einstein Copilot for Marketers will be generally available in summer 2024.
Copilot for Merchants will be available in beta in fall 2024.
Data Cloud for Commerce will be generally available in summer 2024 for B2B commerce customers and fall 2024 for B2C commerce customers.
Einstein Personalization will be available for restricted general availability in summer 2024.

Learn more:

Tune into Connections on Salesforce+
Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Discover more about Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.