- The launch of ChatGPT started a wave of tech companies looking to integrate generative AI into their products and apps.
- Salesforce is rolling out a new product that uses OpenAI’s advanced AI models to help salespeople, customer service workers, developers and others remove mundane tasks from their workday.
- According to Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud, one of the tasks in particular removed is writing “dreaded” sales emails.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are improving the way businesses and salespeople communicate with customers, said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce’s Service Cloud business.
“You look at how salespeople work today, and most of them dread writing sales emails; they would much rather be out there with customers,” Shih said Thursday on “ Squawk Box” from CNBC. “So they can offload the more mundane tasks…they want to focus on customer engagement and problem solving.”
Shih drew a clear line between how generative AI can be used by the general person versus business customers and enterprise users: “We’re not talking about writing funny poems, we’re talking about write sales emails and customer service responses that agents can send to respond to customers faster.”
Earlier this week, Salesforce launched what it called the first generative AI CRM technology, Einstein GPT. The updated software uses OpenAI’s generative AI technology and advanced AI models that allow ChatGPT to create personalized emails for sellers, responses for customer service reps, and automatically generate code for developers, among other tasks.
“It’s really about bringing enterprise-grade generative AI to our customers, whether small businesses or the largest enterprises in the world, and doing it in a way that’s rooted in business outcomes.” , Shih said.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Ever since Microsoft-backed OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November, apparently every tech company has sought to deploy its own AI-powered generative tool amid soaring interest.
Microsoft announced earlier this week that it would bring AI to its CRM and ERP applications that compete with Salesforce offerings, following the company’s previously announced plan to integrate OpenAI’s chatbot into its Bing search.
Google’s ChatGPT competitor Bard has come under both internal and investor pressure over criticism that the technology was rushed. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is creating a new product group focused on generative AI to create products for Facebook and Instagram. Snap said in February it would integrate a ChatGPT bot into its app.
Salesforce said in a separate announcement that it’s launching a ChatGPT app for Slack that could help write messages and get conversation summaries. Salesforce Ventures, the company’s VC arm, has also launched its own $250 million generative AI fund.
The ChatGPT craze has also gone far beyond technology, with companies ranging from construction equipment maker Caterpillar to financial services firm Wells Fargo highlighting their efforts in AI technology during recent calls. of results.
“When it comes to AI, we’ve actually been on this journey for over seven years,” Shih said. Salesforce first introduced Einstein in 2017. It currently generates 200 billion AI predictions every day, she added.
At CNBC’s Work Summit last October, Shih said integrating AI tools into workers’ lives was “absolutely critical.”
“Right now, so many employees are feeling burnt out, they’re overworked, their days are full of mundane tasks,” said Shih, who compared how AI could help optimize things for workers in the workplace. how Google Maps helps people optimize their travel routes.
Shih said while these tools can help workers with these tasks, it’s critical for companies to ensure that employees aren’t using consumer-focused chatbots.
“It’s about making sure their proprietary data doesn’t come out in the open,” she said.