What happens at Salesforce sometimes seems like a glorious accident, as if CEO Marc Benioff hops continuously in new directions that mostly pay off.
Yet, Dreamforce 2023 and now the acquisition of Airkit.ai have highlighted that all of those new directions, pivots, and acquisitions have been intentional – part of a master plan.
The Master Plan
On the Dreamforce stage three years ago, Marc Benioff said: "We can’t just be Salesforce anymore."
Looking back, that foreshadowed his ambition to build an ecosystem – instead of just expanding out all of its CRM apps. Salesforce had to change.
As such, it started to rearchitect its platform and last year launched Data Cloud.
That move pre-empted the Einstein 1 Platform. After all, it could not have existed if Data Cloud did not exist first.
Now, with a central platform that houses all its apps, Salesforce has built an ecosystem that leverages their combined intelligence and connects them with a cross-function data fabric.
Aggregated and normalized data runs throughout this fabric, allowing businesses to use tools like Flow to automate workflows across these apps and customer-facing functions. These will better connect service, sales, and marketing.
All this is three years in the making. It is no happy accident.
Now, with its new Einstein 1 Copilot innovation, Salesforce takes further advantage of this platform architecture to provide a differentiated virtual assistant offering.
So far, rival Copilots have highlighted the functional application of generative AI (GenAI) – and how it can serve a service agent, seller, or marketeer.
Yet, Salesforce takes a more holistic approach. As Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research – recently told CX Today:
What I wanted to stand up and cheer about was Salesforce’s ability to show how Copilot not only helps the individual but how it also helps that individual fit into a broader customer experience strategy.
For instance, consider how Einstein 1 Copilot auto-summarizes customer service interactions and offers various insights, including customer sentiment.
Businesses can then set up the workflows to pass that conversational data over to:
- Service Cloud to support the next agent that speaks to the customer.
- Sales Cloud to aid possible renewal activities with the customer.
- Marketing Cloud to understand what is driving positive and negative customer sentiment.
So, while rival vendors may offer similar solutions for individual functions at a lower price, these cross-function capabilities will differentiate Salesforce – and take years for others to recreate.
After all, API, microservices, and JSON will only take them so far.
As these rivals try to do so, Salesforce can increase its leadership with more targeted acquisitions.
