Salesforce World Tour London – What You Missed

Salesforce World Tour was back in London last week and we were there to take in the latest news, views, and updates. Here are our top spots from the event.

It’s All About AI

Generative AI was placed center stage throughout the event this year. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce UKI CEO, gave the keynote address, setting out Salesforce’s AI credentials. We learned that the company has produced some 227 AI research papers and has over 300 patents. It acquired new AI innovation, with organizations like Relate IQ and Prediction IO, supporting the building of Einstein to create new technologies such as feature engineering, auto feature selection, and auto model selection.

Generative AI is changing everything, just look at the pace of development. It took mobile phones 16 years to reach 100m users, 2.5 years for Instagram to reach the same number but just 2 months for ChatGPT. Every business needs an AI strategy now to deliver new levels of productivity, customer experiences, and product strategy.

Closing the AI Trust Gap

Trust was featured throughout the keynote and was also a major topic when listening to other sessions and visiting vendor’s booths. Given the challenges posed by Generative AI such as security, privacy, hallucinations, bias, and toxicity etc, this is not surprising. LLMs consume large amounts of data. However, what if data is unvetted, biased, or outdated? It leads to poor quality outputs. 

Salesforce presented research by Gartner which shows that AI is the number one priority for CEOs right now, thanks to the array of possibilities it provides for efficiency and innovation. However, 59% of customers don’t trust companies with their data. It’s therefore important to look at ways of closing this trust gap that might hold back development.

Trust is a core value of Salesforce. To overcome these challenges, Salesforce unveiled ‘AI Cloud’, which is built on the Einstein GPT Trust layer. The Einstein GPT Trust Layer creates separation between all of your corporate enterprise data stored in your CRM, in databases where access controls can be applied and it allows you to responsibly ground all of your prompts in that data without that data ever leaving Salesforce.

Natterbox Showcased How AI Can Identify Coachable Moments

Keeping with the AI theme present throughout the event, Natterbox Product Manager, James Radford, led a session that showed how Natterbox may develop tools to help enhance customer experience.

James provided some background into the technology before providing a demonstration of how the power of AI can be harnessed to look for opportunities to identify ‘coachable’ moments amongst hundreds, or even thousands of contact center calls. 

Building on Natterbox Insight, the potential solution shows how it can be linked to a large language model, generative AI solution such as ChatGPT. This link-up enables managers to quickly identify areas for improvement across agent engagements to improve coaching feedback and ultimately allow managers to spend more time coaching their team and less time observing and monitoring calls.

Big Investment in the UK

The other big news from the London event was a commitment by Salesforce to the UK with an investment package of $4 billion over the next five years. This follows from an earlier five-year plan that involved $2.3 billion of inward investment. Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners in the UK is expected to create 271,700 new jobs and £52 billion ($66 billion) in new business revenues by 2026, according to research by IDC.

We certainly felt like it was a great event with some insightful speakers and some interesting debates around the future of AI in our industry. One thing’s for sure, things are moving quickly, who knows what will be announced when we see you at our next event.