What is Salesforce AI Cloud: Should you subscribe?

Salesforce is stressing trust and security features as it unveils its new AI Cloud, but it's not very different from existing offerings, and analysts feel there could be few takers for the pricey AI cloud starter pack.

Salesforce’s new AI Cloud has left many baffled over what it’s all about — how it is different from the competition, what’s new in the offering, and whether one should consider subscribing. Analysts predict there could only be a few takers for the pricey new offering.

The Salesforce AI Cloud combines the company’s previously announced Slack GPT, Tableau GPT, Apex GPT, MuleSoft GPT, Flow GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, and Commerce GPT along with the new Einstein Trust layer and a prompt engineering tool for training large language models (LLMs).

The new, bundled offering, which focuses on generative AI applications, according to CEO Marc Benioff, is based on the unification of Salesforce’s existing technology stack already offered via products including Einstein GPT, Data Cloud, Tableau, Flow and MuleSoft.  

Although Salesforce is promoting the AI Cloud as a bundled offering via a Cloud Starter Pack, which costs $360,000 annually including a free AI-readiness exam from Salesforce Professional Services, it does not have a single, unified interface, the company said.

“A lot of the AI cloud will actually manifest as assistants across different cloud offerings that we have, for example, Sales GPT in Sales Cloud, Marketing GPT in Marketing Cloud, and Service GPT in the Service Cloud,” said Jayesh Govindarajan, senior vice president of data science and engineering at Salesforce.

“However, if you are an independent service vendor and you want to create your own prompts, the AI Cloud will offer a separate local console with a low-code experience for training large language models,” Govindarajan said, adding that Salesforce had already signed up with service partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, and PwC.

The AI Cloud’s Starter Pack, according to Forrester principal analyst Liz Herbert, is just one product pricing model that the company is promoting, and “not many Salesforce customers will use that model or will be forced to buy it” as most enterprises already have CRM and other software suites installed.

“If you look at how a typical customer already subscribed to Salesforce, then the bundling is very unlikely to be a common way that someone would buy,” Herbert said, adding that Salesforce was also not very specific on pricing elements for enterprises that want to use just one or more offerings under the AI Cloud. The pricing structure is expected to be aligned, over time, to the usage of the different offerings under the AI Cloud, Herbert said.

Salesforce’s AI Cloud architecture is built in such a way that it supports multiple LLMs and their training, according to the company.

The AI Cloud architecture is supported by the company’s public cloud infrastructure architecture, Hyperforce, which in turn supports the Data Cloud layer, followed by a layer that hosts multiple LLMs (proprietary or third-party), on top of which resides the company’s new Einstein Trust Layer, the company said.

The Salesforce Trusted AI Cloud architecture consists of multiple layers.

Salesforce

The trust layer separates the Einstein GPT-based generative AI engines — such as Slack GPT, Tableau GPT, Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT — a prompt-engineering tool, and prediction engines, Salesforce said.

The LLMs that the AI Cloud currently offers include third-party models from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, and Cohere, among others.

The company has also partnered with OpenAI to use its API for accessing models such as GPT-4, which drive ChatGPT.

Salesforce will also provide its own LLMs, such as CodeGen, COdeT5+, and CodeTF for generative AI implementation in applications, particularly those that aim to increase productivity, bridge the talent gap, and reduce the cost of tech implementation.

A new division, dubbed Salesforce AI Research, has been set up to try to develop new applications for AI by advancing new LLMs or further develop existing ones.

Enterprises, according to Salesforce, can also get their own LLMs trained on their own domain-specific data.

“These models, whether running through Amazon SageMaker or Google’s Vertex AI, will connect directly to AI Cloud through the Einstein GPT Trust Layer. In this scenario, customer data can remain within the customers’ trust boundaries,” the company said.

This isn’t the first time someone has offered these capabilities. Several other prominent technology vendors including AWS and IBM already provide similar offerings in the form of Amazon Bedrock and IBM Watsonx.

Contrary to practices from some large software vendors that claim to mix different LLMs together to offer generative AI applications, Salesforce’s AI Cloud “chooses the right LLM for the right task,” according to the company.

“The determination of the right LLM is based on outcomes that the system has seen previously,” Govindarajan said, adding that the LLM recommendation engine is learning from the data across all Salesforce deployments.

Giving the example of Marketing GPT creating a landing page, Govindarajan said the system tracks how that landing page has performed, as performance data is also stored inside Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

“If the landing page has really worked well, then it will suggest the same LLM it has used to build the landing page to another user who also wants to create a similar landing page,” Govindarajan said.

This same logic is also applied to the multiple flavors of Einstein GPT across different Salesforce Cloud offerings that continuously train the assistants, Salesforce said.

“These generative AI assistants such as Slack GPT or Tableau GPT track if the user ends up following a suggestion. It also tracks the edits or changes to the generated result. This helps it to learn continuously and become more personalized for users,” Govindarajan said.

Salesforce’s Einstein GPT Trust layer is neither new nor differentiated, according to Forrester’s Herbert, who says it follows the same principles that most other vendors are offering in terms of providing security. Like most other vendors, Salesforce uses identity and access management (IAM) rights in the enterprise to safeguard data privacy and security, Salesforce’s Govindarajan said.

Salesforce highlighted security features of its Einstein GPT Trust architecture.

Salesforce

“Once a user runs a query on their system, the technology stack behind these generative AI assistants searches the databases about the attribute that it needs and it has access to, followed by the stack creating a semantic search model based on the knowledge graph of the entire enterprise and the employee requesting the query,” Govindarajan said.

“The retrieved vectorized data is kept within the enterprise’s server, masked, and then fed to the large language model to generate a result or response. So, the stack is essentially copying or imbibing the identity and access management policies that are already existing for that employee,” Govindarajan added.

The Einstein Trust layer’s architecture is also built in such a way that once the query is processed, the information contained in the prompt, or query, is not retained, the company said, adding that the generated result is checked for toxicity and an audit trail log for all prompts is maintained.

The offerings under the AI Cloud, according to the company, will be made available in different phases, with the Einstein GPT and Service GPT being generally available in June.

The company’s Commerce GPT will be made generally available in July. Other offerings inside the bundle are expected to reach general availability next year after being in pilot for the majority of 2023.

It will be interesting to see how customers react to Salesforce’s new offering, which is more of a bundle of existing offerings than a completely new platform. However, analysts believe that Salesforce AI Cloud will help to enforce more trust in the use of generative AI by enterprises.

“Salesforce recognizes that there are barriers to AI adoption — especially trust. So, they are doubling down on this aspect. The other challenge is that we will have a plethora of LLMs soon — open source, public and private, leading to confusion on which one to deploy. So, Salesforce’s AI Cloud is letting the users plug in the LLM of their choice,” said Sanjeev Mohan, principal analyst at SanjMo.

High retention could hide a critical workforce problem, says Salesforce exec. Here’s why low turnover isn’t ‘necessarily ideal’

Good morning!

Here’s a hot take: Low turnover doesn’t signal high employee engagement or satisfaction, says Salesforce’s global customer growth and innovation evangelist Tiffani Bova.

In her new book, excerpted in CHRO Daily last week, Bova argues that tried-and-true engagement metrics like attrition don’t always tell the whole story about the employee experience. “A high retention rate isn’t necessarily ideal,” writes Bova. “Low turnover indicates good EX, but it can also alert you to a lax performance review process.”

The issue, she says, is that at many companies, no one person owns the employee experience, leading employers to falsely believe that engagement is higher than it is in reality. In such cases, quiet quitting is widespread, which can fly under the radar in annual performance reviews.

The solution? Investing in training that teaches managers how to coach rather than simply manage employees’ time, Bova says. This approach leaves room for managers to regularly ask questions that unearth how employees truly feel, like whether workers think they have what's needed to be successful in their roles, whether they’re happy in their positions, or whether they feel like they need to be reskilled or retrained.

“That coaching and mentoring time has a huge impact on people's commitment to a company [and] their trust with their leaders,” says Bova. “The connection from an empathetic human perspective [makes employees] more willing to go that extra mile not only for our customers but for the company.”

A more in-depth turnover analysis is also useful to better understand turnover—or lack thereof.

“You must strike a balance between keeping top talent and developing promising talent while dismissing those who are underperforming. A good rule of thumb is to benchmark your voluntary and involuntary turnover and retention rates against other companies in your industry,” Bova writes in her book.

Employers should also measure satisfaction because if it's declining while retention sees an uptick or holds steady, one can reasonably assume employees are disengaged, she tells Fortune.

Story continues

“It is really like being an anthropologist and detective on this,” says Bova. “Connecting disparate data points and looking more holistically at the totality of an employee's experience goes a long way.”

Amber Burtonamber.burton@fortune.com@amberbburton

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Companies should offer employees re-skilling support, says top Salesforce exec

With rapid advancements in the adoption of technology across industries, there is an ever-increasing need of digital skills for workers. Over 95% of Indian workers already use digital skills in their day-to-day work, but less than half expand their horizons beyond digital administrative skills, showed the Salesforce Digital Skills survey 2023. Sanket Atal, Managing Director, Operations & Site Lead-Technology, Salesforce, spoke to BT about the digital skill gaps in India, the rapid transition towards a technology loaded world and how Salesforce is helping Indian businesses. Edited excerpts: 

BT: What is your outlook on the accelerating digital skills gap in India and across the globe? How can corporate India help? 

SA: The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across industries, creating enormous opportunities for all organisations. This accelerated digital transformation has manifested in a widening gap between the demand for and supply of digital talent, leading to a war for the available pool. As this gap accelerates, re-skilling is becoming a priority for every organisation. With the continued shift toward a digital-first world, it’s essential for companies to offer support for upskilling and re-skilling. We are committed to addressing the training and re-skilling imperative—equipping people, seamlessly, with tools to take on jobs that the digitally transforming economy demands. 

BT: How is Salesforce addressing the skills gap in the country?  

SA: Our online learning platform, Trailhead, enables the creation of partnerships with leading education providers, and by delivering a raft of trailblazing apprenticeships, skilling, grants, and philanthropic programmes internationally. Globally, Trailhead has empowered nearly 3.5 million people to learn in-demand skills for the future of work. We recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. We support the skilling imperative via strategic partnerships and initiatives with over 700 universities in India including Bennett University, Manipal Global, Stratos, NASSCOM, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), NIIT, and more. 

Our virtual internship programme in partnership with the AICTE has supported over 46,000 students who have learned so much about Salesforce, its products and services, and the industry as a whole. Most recently, we collaborated with Bennett University, to equip students with the in-demand skills of a digital-first economy. This collaboration integrates industry-specific knowledge into the curriculum and provides avenues for students and faculty members to learn the digital skills needed for the future. We have partnered with Manipal Global to launch a skills initiative to build a talent pool of Trailhead certified professionals as the demand for Salesforce-equipped developers and users is growing rapidly. We also partnered with NASSCOM’s FutureSkills Prime Program, which leveraged Trailhead as part of Salesforce's OneIndiaTalent Program, aiming to skill 1,00,000 professionals, potential employees, and students in India by 2024. We also work closely with our partners that aim at skilling.  

BT: Which are the other industries you are collaborating with? 

SA: We have been bullish about collaborating with other industry players. We partnered with Eduvanz, a digital finance company that provides education loans, to deploy Salesforce to provide students with easy access to financing options throughout their learning journey. We have partnered have with Stratos, a talent solutions firm, to create a career acceleration platform for IT professionals within the Salesforce ecosystem. This unique collaboration aims to deliver a holistic talent solution catering to the increasing demand for Salesforce-certified developers and architects in India and across the globe. 

We also partnered with GiftAbled, an organisation that empowers people with disabilities, to help in empowering people with disabilities with Salesforce skills through the Salesforce Developer Catalyst Programme which provides trainees with in-demand digital skills through self-paced Trailhead content, soft skills training, and live training with a Salesforce Certified Instructor. With these partnerships, we hope to empower learners and educators, regardless of socioeconomic background or disability, to prepare for jobs of the future by providing innovative content, presentations, and training resources. 

BT: What is the road map for Salesforce’s skilling initiatives in India? 

SA: The most significant possibility we have right now is to train the workforce. Before the pandemic, there was a rising digital skills gap. The importance of digitization in rebuilding the economy and society, however, has widened the chasm. Businesses are constantly pivoting their talent strategies to cater to the evolving talent landscape in a digital-first world. While prior to the pandemic, the war for talent discussion was a priority in management discussions; today, it has become paramount to success. We believe that businesses are a powerful platform for change and equal access to skills training is a big part of our mission. We are committed to addressing the training and re-skilling imperative - equipping people with tools to take on jobs that the digitally transforming economy demands. 

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