Salesforce reveals Einstein GPT for CRM, announces broader OpenAI partnership

Salesforce has announced the launch of Einstein GPT, a generative AI for CRM that will augment and help automate customer functions.

The tool aims to improve productivity across Salesforce customers' systems, using public and private AI models to automate processes across sales, service, marketing, and development from within Salesforce CRM.

Einstein GPT adapts to changing customer information and company processes in real time, and can be used to automatically generate personalised emails, marketing campaigns targeted at specific customers, and developer code. It is also capable of generating images for use on marketing material and other customer-facing content.

The announcement was made on Tuesday and followed by demonstrations at the firm’s TrailblazerDX 2023 conference in San Francisco.

The launch comes as Salesforce debuted its broader partnership with OpenAI which also saw the company launch the ChatGPT app for Salesforce-owned Slack.

This can be used to summarise channels or threads, research topics from within Slack, or draft messages within the app. OpenAI has been using the system in its internal Slack channels for several months, and believes that the time is right for it to enter beta.

In one demo of Einstein GPT, the AI generated a reply to a customer query related to a jacket and automatically displayed it to the customer in a small dedicated section of the Salesforce user interface, beside the main chat window.

The employee could then send the AI-generated message to the customer with one click, or use it as a reference around which to craft their answer.

Einstein GPT was then able to respond to follow-up questions, and draw information from the internet on other products, for example, and predicted weather for the area the customer was visiting to generate a recommendation for an additional product.

At the end of an interaction that used Einstein GPT, users are given the choice for the AI to summarise the entire customer interaction which can later be converted into a knowledge article.

Interactions continue to train the model, to ensure that it becomes more adept at handling the individual needs of customers over time.

On a technical level, Einstein GPT is a combination of Salesforce’s proprietary AI and other large language models. Salesforce intends to open up to a wide ecosystem of AI partners, and today’s announcement revealed OpenAI as the first of these.

GPT 3.5 will be available off the shelf in the Einstein GPT ecosystem, but Salesforce did not outline the precise extent to which OpenAI’s model is used throughout some of the promised processes.

Customers can also choose to connect Einstein GPT to external models of their own, which Salesforce stated improves customer choice.

Einstein GPT is capable of changing its tone on request, and can rephrase prompts to a similar degree as other popular chatbots such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat, or Bard.

Developers can use natural language prompts to generate code with Einstein GPT, and it can also be trained on a company’s internal codebase in order to more accurately assist developers in their work. Jayesh Govindarajan, SVP of engineering, einstein and bots told IT Pro that as Einstein GPT is connected to Salesforce Data Cloud, which enables firms to create isolated environments and mark data as private, source code is protected.

Throughout the demos, Salesforce stressed the importance of keeping a human-in-the-loop with generative AI, to improve trust in its output and help train models to be more helpful.

“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalised ways,” said Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce.

“Einstein GPT, in combination with our data cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”

Through the firm’s global investment arm Salesforce Ventures, the firm has created a $250 million fund earmarked for AI startups. Its stated goal is to improve the generative AI landscape, and funding will initially be given to four companies: Antrhopic, Cohere.ai, Hearth.AI, and You.com.

Salesforce has been focused on the implementation of AI in its CRM since the introduction of Einstein in 2016, and in 2018 predicted that workers would increasingly come to rely on AI tools. Today, Einstein delivers more than 200 billion daily predictions via Customer 360.