• Salesforce unpacked how it is using AI, Data, and CRM to empower its customers during an event in Johannesburg this week.
• The company has been using AI for seven years already under the Einstein offering.
• Now all of Salesforces’ solutions are GPT ready.

This week Salesforce held an important event in Johannesburg to highlight the CRM specialists’ latest tools for business, as well as to emphasise its commitment to the African region, with South Africa serving as a critical hub.

The World Tour Essentials Johannesburg took place at the Kyalami racetrack, as Salesforce unveiled many of its new AI-powered solutions, utilising one of its global customers, Formula 1, to showcase them.

During his opening keynote for the event, Zuko Mdwaba, area VP for Africa and South Africa country leader, ran through several of the company’s core values, before moving onto the three elements that will drive much of its focus over the coming years – AI, Data, CRM.

When it comes to CRM, Salesforce is already well-known, having recently secured a leading global market share in the space at 22 percent, overtaking over big tech firms like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and others. As such, this pillar is all but taken care of, with the company only looking to strengthen its position.

The same goes for Data, as Salesforce leverages the massive data lakes of its customers in order to deliver data-driven insights, pulling in information from multiple sources in order to offer granular understanding.

It is part of the reason why its sales, marketing and, commerce solutions have proved a boon among customers. In the case of Formula 1 for example, which was used a test case for a handful of demos run during the keynote, Salesforce is able to now use generative AI in order to create landing pages in an instant, as well as assist customer experience representatives better assist people that may have a problem.

Much of this works in real-time too, offering Salesforce customers up-to-the-minute and accurate information.

This is where AI is playing a pivotal role. While much of the world, and technology companies in particular, are wanting to leverage as much from generative AI as possible in order to get a leg up on the competition, Salesforce explains that it has been working with AI for nearly a decade now.

More specifically its Einstein offering has been working in the CRM environment for seven years already. Now Einstein GPT is being leveraged to add a critical layer of security to the company’s new Cloud AI offering that was announced earlier this week.

As Salesforce points out, it is now GPT-ready across all of its solutions.

While its competitors are grappling with generative AI and wondering where best to implement it in order to give customers tangible improvements to their business, it looks like Salesforce is well ahead of the curve.

The only missing element at this stage, is when South African customers can begin making the most of the triumvirate of AI, Data, and CRM. For that, we will need to wait to hear when Salesforce will make AI Cloud and EinsteinGPT available locally, and for how much.