Empowering and Elevating Sales: Harnessing AI with Data Cloud for Smarter Business Growth

By Indranil Mukherjee Imagine a world where every sales interaction is highly personalized, data-driven, and predictive of customer needs. Too good to be true? Think again. The fusion of AI with data cloud solutions is not just a futuristic concept; it's a game-changer for businesses today, across startups to large global corporations. Breaking Down the Silos Data and AI, powered by gen AI and autonomous systems, greatly benefit businesses but remain untapped without the right tools and strategies. Managing vast, fragmented customer data is challenging, leading to inefficient sales strategies, missed opportunities, and a lack of customer-centricity. The right Data + AI strategy boosts business performance. An integrated data cloud enhances synergy with AI, providing a 360-degree customer view by unifying data from various sources. This harmonized data allows AI to uncover insights for smarter sales strategies. Adopting a data-driven culture with proper governance ensures data integrity, security, and privacy. A responsible AI framework is crucial, as data and AI are symbiotic. The right strategy, tools, and governance significantly impact business agility and outcomes, with benefits outweighing risks. The Power of AI-Driven Insights AI in conjunction with Data Cloud offers unparalleled capabilities in analyzing customer data to informed sales strategies. Here are specific ways AI is revolutionizing sales: Personalizing Customer Interactions: AI algorithms analyze vast datasets to identify customer preferences and behaviors. This allows sales teams to personalize their approach, tailoring their interactions to meet individual customer needs. For instance, a unified Data Cloud provides real-time information on customer engagement, enabling sales reps to have meaningful and personalized conversations. Even for prospects, secondary data are being leveraged to enhance personalization, thereby impacting positively the speed of lead-to-contract.Identifying Untapped Opportunities: In a B2B scenario, AI can uncover hidden patterns in customer data to identify whitespaces. These are areas with potential customers who have not yet been targeted. This insight is invaluable for sales teams looking to expand their reach and tap into new markets.Enhancing Sales Efficiency: AI-powered recommendations provide service agents with cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. By integrating these systems within the sales workflow, businesses can increase sales productivity, operational efficiency and drive higher revenue. Overcoming Integration Challenges Integrating AI with existing data cloud systems is not without its challenges. Data quality is paramount for the effective functioning of any AI model. Many data cloud systems are based on data lakes, which are designed to store vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data. However, this raw data often needs refinement to be suitable for AI consumption. Data Cloud addresses this by harmonizing data from multiple sources into a canonical Customer 360 data model. This harmonized data serves as the clean fuel powering AI models, ensuring accurate and actionable insights. Additionally, with Bring Your Own Model (BYOM), organizations can leverage existing AI models seamlessly within the Data Cloud environment. Real-World Impact Consider a sales team at a technology firm using a Data Cloud integrated with AI, that provides a 360-degree customer view and real-time engagement data. AI algorithms analyze this data to pinpoint leads most likely to convert, enabling the sales team to concentrate on high-potential prospects. The result? Increased conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction, reduced cycle time and a more efficient sales process. Another example is a retail or BFSI company using AI-based recommender systems within their customer service channels. The company sees a significant increase in cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, driving higher sales and revenue, by providing personalized product recommendations based on customer browsing and purchase history. The right setup can enhance the service and revenue assurance for telecom or utility providers through better predictive maintenance, service availability, optimized networks or transmission/distribution channels, which can be key differentiators in the sales process. The Future of Sales with AI and Data Cloud The synergy between AI and Data Cloud is set to reshape the future of sales. Conventional selling is giving way to data-driven, intelligent selling. Here are some trends shaping this landscape: Real-Time Insights: AI-generated insights and prompts within the workflow will become standard, enabling sales teams to make quick, informed decisions backed by data.Predictive Analytics: Advanced AI models will offer predictive analytics, helping businesses anticipate customer needs and trends, allowing for proactive engagement.Enhanced Customer Experience: With AI and Data Cloud, businesses can create seamless and personalized customer experiences, fostering loyalty, long-term relationships and increased lifetime value. Leveraging AI with Data Cloud not only transforms current business operations but also sets the stage for future innovations, driving unprecedented efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction. (The author is Indranil Mukherjee, SVP and Service Offering Head, Infosys Salesforce Services, and the views expressed in this article are his own)

CXOToday

Tue, 4 Feb, 10:26 AM UTC

Salesforce Announces the First Edition of The Great India AI Summit

Unleashing the Power of AI to Transform Business, Drive Growth, and Shape the Future Salesforce, the #1 AI CRM, is set to host The Great India AI Summit, a landmark virtual event designed to equip businesses with advanced AI strategies, real-world success stories, and hands-on learning experiences. As AI revolutionizes industries at an unprecedented pace, this summit will bring together India's most influential business leaders, AI pioneers, and industry experts to explore how AI is redefining Sales, Marketing, Service, and IT. From enhancing productivity to driving innovation and unlocking business growth, AI is no longer the future -- it is the present, and companies that embrace it today will lead tomorrow. What to Expect at The Great India AI Summit: Leadership and strategy conversation with leaders like Arundhati Bhattacharya, Leander Paes, and Devdutt Pattanaik, as they share their unique perspectives on AI, leadership, and high-performance strategy. Trailblazing keynotes & expert-led sessions: Learn from top leaders at Salesforce, Mahindra Group, Accenture, PwC India, and other industry trailblazers about how AI is reshaping business in India and beyond. Exclusive AI masterclass & certification: Hands-on expertise with a specialized AI implementation masterclass by upGrad, and earn an official AI Certification to accelerate your career. Real-world AI success stories Speaking about the significance of AI in India's growth, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson & CEO, Salesforce - India and South Asia, said, "As AI reshapes industries at an unprecedented pace, its potential to drive innovation, enhance workforce capabilities, and build business resilience is undeniable. However, the challenge for many organizations is not just understanding AI's possibilities, but knowing where to start and how to scale effectively.To truly harness AI's power, businesses need more than just technology -- they need a clear strategy, practical insights, and a roadmap for responsible adoption. The Great India AI Summit is designed to bridge that gap -- by fostering knowledge-sharing, showcasing real-world applications, and equipping leaders with actionable strategies, we can empower organizations to confidently navigate their AI journey and chart a path for long-term success." The Great India AI Summit is your chance to gain actionable insights, industry connections, and exclusive AI training to stay ahead in the AI-powered economy. For more details and registration, visit: The Great India AI Summit. About Salesforce Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business with AI. Agentforce -- the first digital labor solution for enterprises -- seamlessly integrates with Customer 360 applications, Data Cloud, and Einstein AI to create a limitless workforce, bringing humans and agents together to deliver customer success on a single, trusted platform.

CXOToday

Tue, 25 Feb, 10:42 AM UTC

Salesforce Einstein 1

Salesforce Einstein 1 offers a cutting-edge solution that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to revolutionize how businesses understand and engage their customers. By harnessing these advanced technologies, companies can deliver predictive insights and personalized experiences across various platforms, driving better customer relationships and enhanced sales performance. Salesforce Einstein 1 is not just an add-on; it is a sophisticated AI and ML suite integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem. This innovative platform enhances Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by automating processes and delivering insights that enable businesses to craft meaningful customer interactions and streamline their operations. Salesforce Einstein incorporates generative AI capabilities specifically designed for CRM applications. This feature empowers marketers, sales professionals, and customer service teams to quickly generate content, engage with clients, and access real-time insights, enhancing productivity and responsiveness. With Salesforce Einstein, thousands of predictions are generated daily, allowing organizations to act proactively rather than reactively. The platform's AI capabilities are ready out-of-the-box, meaning users can begin leveraging insights without extensive data preparation or complex setup processes. One of the standout features of Salesforce Einstein 1 is its ability to unify customer data. Through integrations with external sources via MuleSoft, Einstein creates a comprehensive view of each customer, enabling businesses to tailor their marketing and service efforts effectively. The platform offers automated machine learning that simplifies the modeling process for enterprises. This ensures that companies can implement insights directly into their existing Salesforce CRM operations, facilitating immediate applications in real-world scenarios. The versatility of Salesforce Einstein 1 extends across various cloud services, optimizing their functionality in areas such as marketing, sales, service, and commerce. In Marketing Cloud, Einstein utilizes customer data to create highly personalized campaigns. Features like audience segmentation and optimized content generation help marketers reach their target demographics more effectively. Sales Cloud leverages Einstein to automate sales processes and deliver valuable insights. It streamlines data collection and improves the accuracy of customer records, enabling sales teams to focus on closing deals rather than administrative tasks. Einstein enhances customer service interactions by providing real-time access to data. This includes multilingual Einstein Bots that offer scalable support, allowing businesses to respond to customer inquiries in multiple languages effortlessly. In Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Einstein improves shopping experiences through intelligent product recommendations and searches. The automation of product descriptions expands marketing reach while ensuring consistency and relevance in customer interactions. To maximize the potential of Salesforce Einstein, integrations with other tools enhance its capabilities. Integrating with Tableau offers significant business intelligence elements, while Flow facilitates conversational workflows. Together, these tools enable organizations to extract deeper insights and take action efficiently based on data-driven decisions. Einstein Copilot provides generative conversational AI capabilities that help execute tasks across the Salesforce platform. This ensures users can interact with the system in a more natural, intuitive manner, driving productivity. With the implementation of AI technologies, data protection is paramount. Salesforce Einstein takes this seriously. The Einstein trust layer is designed to safeguard customer data privacy within Salesforce's secure architecture. This provides reassurance to businesses and customers alike, ensuring that sensitive information is protected. Salesforce is committed to ethical AI practices, which guide its implementation of AI solutions. By adhering to these principles, the company ensures that its technologies promote fairness, transparency, and accountability. Salesforce Einstein 1 brings numerous advantages to businesses, enhancing both operational efficiency and customer engagement.

Dataconomy

Wed, 9 Apr, 5:59 PM UTC

Customer-facing agents bolster Salesforce's AI strategy - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce bets on agentic AI to power customer-facing tools Customer-facing tools are just the beginning of Salesforce's evolving strategy. The company is betting its future on agentic intelligence -- from workforce agents to predictive reasoning engines -- infused across its newly overhauled platform. The renamed Agentforce 360 suite now spans nearly every Salesforce application, forming the backbone of its vision for business automation and intelligence, according to Ariel Kelman (pictured), president and chief marketing officer of Salesforce. "In just a year, the whole industry has grown up with [agentic AI]," he said. "We've been methodically iterating with our customers to work through the difference between something that can demo as an agent, and then how do you roll out agentic AI in the enterprise with all the complexity of actually making it work? It's not that hard to make an agent work 95% of the time, but that's not good enough if you're an actual business who's trusting this agent with your customers." Kelman spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and George Gilbert at Dreamforce, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed how agentic AI is impacting sales and its new role in the business world. (* Disclosure below.) Salesforce sees multiple applications for agentic AI in customer service and marketing, including sales agents that operate on company websites and follow up with leads from customers. The key to a good customer-facing agent, according to Kelman, is to contextualize its responses with the right data. "You're going to get worthless outputs if [agents] are not grounded in very detailed data about the customer," he said. "There's so many ways that you really can risk the whole brand reputation of a company. The surface area for brand compliance, if I speak as a marketer, has magnified, and you have to make sure that these agents are governed in the right way." Those agents in question are managed through the Agentforce platform, which helps users build agents about 15 times faster than if they did it themselves, according to Kelman. He predicts that customers will want a centralized, easy-to-use platform that can ensure agents are governed and production-ready. "As companies increase, they're going to look at standardizing on one or maybe two platforms to be able to create data-driven agents," he said. " I think where the industry's heading is platforms for building agents that abstract away a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting, a lot of the really hard parts." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Dreamforce:

SiliconANGLE

Thu, 16 Oct, 11:32 PM UTC

"You can't just take an LLM and throw it at a problem" - why Salesforce is pushing for a smarter way for everyone to do AI

AI is now a common presence in enterprises across the world, helping transform workflows for employees and customers alike, bringing in new levels of productivity and efficiency. But, in order to unlock these benefits, your business has to still make sure it is utilizing and enforcing AI correctly, not just doing it because everyone else is. At the recent Dreamforce 2025 event, Salesforce was understandably keen to show off its dominance and expertise when it comes to all things AI - and it seems a lot of this confidence comes from within. "We are expanding into the enterprise in a big way," Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, President & CTO of Engineering, Salesforce, told me at Dreamforce. "Previously we were always just relegated to saying you are only doing sales, or service marketing - but now we are going beyond that, we're managing customers, we're managing employees, and we're going to be managing operations...and most excitingly, we're managing agents as well! All managed by our unified platform." The theme of Dreamforce 2025 was arguably that of the "agentic enterprise" idea - with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declaring simply deploying enterprise AI models is no longer enough for businesses if these solutions aren't integrated and grounded in proper governance. Krishnaprasad agrees, noting, "for a SaaS company like Salesforce, we're making AI useful, just like we did making the dotcom useful for the enterprise, and we believe this is the best way to get AI working for the enterprise." A large part of that comes from being customer zero for these new agents and AI tools, as Benioff had highlighted how the company "is on the journey" with its customers to the age of the agentic enterprise. Krishnaprasad highlights the work his team did around the initial launch of Agentforce in 2024, building and launching agents on its help site in just a few weeks - agents which have, in a year, handled more than 1.8 million conversations, freeing up human support workers for potentially more crucial cases. There have been well-publicized concerns around the effectiveness of AI tools in some areas, with Krishnaprasad noting an MIT study showing 95% of AI projects fail. "You can't just take an LLM and throw it at a problem," he notes, "(but) this is a constant fear we all have as humans - when the dotcom came we all feared for our jobs, when Tesla introduced auto driving, we all wondered what would happen - but the reality is - humans are the best at adapting - over millennia, we have adapted to so many different things." "We used to look back after electricity came in and say, imagine the pre-electricity days - it changed our whole race, right? AI is going to do the same, and we shouldn't be fearing it, because it's just going to make us better - because guess what? We have so many drugs left to discover, so many processes we can make better." Krishnaprasad does paint an optimistic view of the future where AI agents and systems work alongside humans to maximize the potential of each other. He highlights findings which claims 40% of a developer's life is maintaining code, meaning these workers are often stuck with maintaining old code rather than creating something new. "This is where, if AI can really help solve a whole bunch of issues there, imagine what new things we can create in just 20 years," he says. "This acceleration is happening because of technology, and with AI, it's just going to go even faster...we will be able to leave out the drudgeries of maintenance, instead focusing on innovation, new ways of interacting, new ways of helping our human race together."

TechRadar

Thu, 30 Oct, 12:34 PM UTC

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