Salesforce made good today on its promise to make the sales staff a whole lot smarter. Via an update to its namesake customer relationship management (CRM) application delivered via the cloud, Salesforce is now making it possible for salespeople to directly engage the Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform Salesforce unveiled last year.
Previously, sales staffs had to engage Einstein via a separate interface. Now, Ketan Karkhanis, general manager for Salesforce Analytics, says Einstein is embedded within the Salesforce CRM application.
“Einstein is now built right into the Salesforce platform,” says Karkhanis.
Karkhanis says salespeople and their managers can now directly engage Einstein to, for example, determine what deals are most likely to close first. In addition, sales managers can employ Einstein to keep track of any number of key performance indicators (KPIs).
Salesforce, says Karkhanis, has decided to make some Einstein capabilities available via an update to Salesforce, while other functions will be made available as a separate add-on service. Regardless of the means through which they are invoked, all Einstein services will manifest themselves within the CRM application.
Naturally, there’s a lot of concern over the impact AI technologies will have on demand for human labor. A new report from International Data Corp. (IDC) commissioned by Salesforce predicts that AI technologies in fact will create more than 800,000 net-new jobs, in addition to adding $1.1 trillion to the global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2021. Salesforce estimates its customers will account for $293 billion of this revenue and more than 155,000 of the net-new jobs.
Of course, it’s too early to definitively say what impact AI technologies will ultimately have on the workforce. In many ways, it really depends on the culture of the organization that employs the technology. But the one thing that is for certain when it comes to AI is that, like it or not, the genie is now out of the bottle.