Salesforce Gets on the GPT-3 Train with EinsteinGPT

Whether or not adding Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, as an AI feature in your application will actually help users, software companies are doing it anyway for two main reasons: No. 1, it actually is highly likely to be an advantage for users, no matter what the results of queries may be; and No. 2, it’s just cool.

Following other hyperscale software makers such as Microsoft (a $10 billion investor/partner with GPT-3 parent company OpenAI), Shopify, Instacart, Snapchat and others, Salesforce today revealed at its Trailblazer Summit in San Francisco that it has incorporated the white-hot generative AI feature into its home-brewed Einstein application to serve five of its platform services under the name EinsteinGPT. Einstein was launched in 2016 specifically for CRM support.

Generative AI is a category of AI algorithms that generate new outputs based on the data on which they have been trained. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI creates new content in the form of images, text, and audio.

Einstein GPT infuses Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI from a vast ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud to unify all of a company’s customer data. Using Einstein GPT, users can then connect their data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models in order to query the application for desired business information results.

While EinsteinGPT is being tested internally by Salesforce and externally by a few select customers and partners, the company said it doesn’t have a general release time frame for the feature just yet.

The Apps

The new apps, as described by Salesforce, are:

• EinsteinGPT for Developers: Designed to improve developer productivity by anticipating and adding code snippets.
• EinsteinGPT for Service: Able to generate knowledge articles from past case notes and public information. It auto-generates personalized agent chat replies to customers through personalized and expedited service interactions.
• EinsteinGPT for Sales: Auto-generates sales tasks such as composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.
• EinsteinGPT for Marketing: Generates personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
• EinsteinGPT for Slack: Provides customer insights in Slack, such as smart summaries of sales opportunities and background research on accounts.

“The door is open for the next level of innovation in the enterprise,” Sanjna Parulekar, Salesforce Senior Director of Product Marketing, told a group of reporters on March 6. “Across domains, Einstein made it possible for salespeople to understand which leads are most likely to convert and how to better forecast reporting. Marketers have been able to use Einstein to figure out how to target ads to the right people at the right time. Commerce teams have used Einstein to figure out which products are selling the best and to manage pricing and inventory more efficiently.”

Taking it a step further, using GPT-3 inside Einstein ostensibly will add much simpler natural-language interaction for non-technical line-of-business users, making workflows easier to create and execute.

Key attributes of Einstein GPT, as explained by Parulekar:

• It will create personalized content across all Salesforce clouds with generative AI, making employees more productive.
• It is open and extensible, supporting public and private AI models purpose-built for CRM and trained on trusted, real-time data housed by Salesforce and in public internet archives.
• It will integrate with OpenAI to provide Salesforce customers with out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities.
• A new ChatGPT app for Slack integrates OpenAI’s advanced AI to deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools and writing assistance.

Specific examples of EinsteinGPT capabilities are that it can write auto-generated code, create personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, and write targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates.

Salesforce Ventures also announced the launch of a $250 million Generative AI Fund to support the startup development of generative AI applications.