Salesforce announces general availability of Einstein Copilot

Salesforce has announced the general availability of Einstein Copilot, the conversational AI assistant for CRM, along with new capabilities designed to enhance seller productivity and scale adoption of generative AI.

For 25 years, Salesforce has been helping sales teams find, win, and keep customers across every facet of the sales cycle – from prospecting and activity tracking to forecasting and revenue operations – all of which can be tailored to a customer’s business through customizable metadata. Salesforce is using this wealth of experience to collapse the most common and valuable seller processes into conversational AI interactions grounded on an organization’s business-specific data and metadata, and delivered at scale through new analytics and testing tools.

A key component of this metadata, and unique to Einstein Copilot, are Copilot Actions — pre-programmed capabilities that enable Einstein Copilot to not only answer questions using business data, but also string together workflows to get things done on behalf of users. In fact, in the recent “Your Data, Your AI” survey, more than half of workers said AI grounded on private company data builds their trust in the tool.

Today, Salesforce is increasing its library of actions with new capabilities where sellers can benefit from conversational AI directly in Sales Cloud. Instead of navigating to a bespoke AI tool disconnected from their CRM, sales reps can simply open up Einstein Copilot and ask for a personalized close plan, insights on why an opportunity may not close in the month, or check if pricing was discussed on a recent call – which means more time focused on the customer and less time sifting through data and screens. Einstein Copilot includes a reasoning engine that can interpret user requests and dynamically automate tasks from a library of actions, ensuring every new action expands the breadth of use cases it can support — and it does so without the need to train or fine-tune a large language model (LLM).

Einstein Copilot now includes new sales actions for boosting seller productivity across an array of cross functional use cases -

● Close Plans: To accelerate time to close, sales reps and managers can have Einstein Copilot create a grounded, personalized close plan for an opportunity with step-by-step tactics based on historical opportunity and account data as well as recommended dates of action.

● Forecast Guidance: Sales managers can understand and de-risk forecasts through Einstein Copilot. They can ask questions such as “what deals are at risk?” and receive a summarized list of deals that could explain why a member of their team might not hit their quota.

● Call Explorer: Using retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which enables companies to use their structured and unstructured proprietary data to make AI more trusted and relevant, sales reps can query prior call transcripts captured in Einstein Conversation Insights, asking questions such as “what was the customer sentiment on this call?” and receiving a semantically relevant answer scoped to that call to avoid hallucinations.

● Follow-Up Emails: To facilitate deal progression, sales reps can have Einstein Copilot craft customized follow-up emails based on prior calls, helping move deals along.

● Einstein Copilot in Sales Cloud Everywhere: Customers can take Einstein Copilot everywhere they work. They can research prospects, get up-to-speed on deals, and draft outreach from any webpage with Sales Cloud Everywhere.

In addition to these new capabilities for sellers, Einstein Copilot is introducing platform enhancements that make every conversational AI experience better:

● Copilot Analytics: Admins can visualize usage of Einstein Copilot through a pre-configured analytics dashboard, enabling them to understand and accelerate Einstein Copilot adoption by dissecting key metrics such as actions used, average interactions per user, and success rates to help businesses drive and measure ROI from AI.

● Recommended Actions: Teams are now empowered to quickly complete any task with recommended actions in the flow of work. Instead of typing in a request, Einstein Copilot surfaces single-click standard actions specific to the page a user is on, such as “summarize opportunity” on the opportunity page or “draft an email” on the contact page.

● Einstein Copilot on the Salesforce Mobile App: For AI-powered productivity in the flow of work, including on-the go, Einstein Copilot is now live on the Salesforce mobile app, with voice-to-text functionality for mobile users that enables them to simply talk with their data and workflows.

Salesforce is investing in a deep library of persona- and industry-specific actions that expand the range of tasks Einstein Copilot can perform. In addition to today’s news around sales actions and banking actions, as well as previously released health actions and service actions, such as AI generated replies grounded in a customer’s knowledge base, Salesforce is developing new marketing actions that accelerate campaign creation, commerce actions that assist shoppers, as well as the ability to turn MuleSoft APIs into custom actions that enable Einstein Copilot to cascade work across multiple systems.