November 2022 may ultimately be bookmarked as the beginning of the next era of IT. That is when OpenAI announced open access to its ChatGPT, a natural language model that promises to revolutionize customer relationship management (CRM), software coding, and productivity across many industries.
“We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way,” OpenAI explained in introducing their groundbreaking generative AI tool. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
The implications for enterprises are significant. “In business, generative AI has the potential to transform the way companies interact with customers and drive business growth,” according to the
Dreamforce: AI event of the year
Earlier this year, both Salesforce and Microsoft announced their -powered CRM solutions. More recently, Salesforce upped the ante, calling its annual Dreamforce conference the AI event of the year, and announcing that it’s ”powering the next generation of all Salesforce CRM applications with Einstein Copilot – a conversational AI assistant, safely grounded in business and customer data.”
Additionally, Salesforce announced that it is:
- Providing connectors to bring in data from any source, across the Salesforce platform
- Leveraging its acquired MuleSoft integration platform to connect legacy systems and data to its AI capabilities
- Putting Trusted AI at the heart of its marketing strategy
Harmonization in the cloud
Imagine if you could unify all your customer data, across any channel and system, into a single source of truth to truly understand all customer behaviors in real time. That’s the promise of Salesforce Data Cloud, which harmonizes and stores customer data at a massive scale, and transforms it into a single, dynamic source of truth.
MuleSoft (an integration and automation platform Salesforce acquired in 2018) is now, ”loaded with new generative AI capabilities to make integration faster than ever before. Connect to any data or system, wherever it resides, with security and governance built in,” according to Salesforce.
“The MuleSoft Accelerator for Data Cloud can help you unlock and connect to critical industry systems quickly and securely. Once unlocked, your teams can finally harmonize with existing data sources through the power of Salesforce Data Cloud. This enables you to get a unified view of every customer so that you can deliver the right experiences at the right time every time.”
Data harmonization provides enterprises with the capability to create a unified data set from multiple sources, simplifying the effort of aligning data from multiple systems and eliminating inconsistencies. In the future, AI solutions will leverage trustworthy data for unified identities necessary to accurately automate processes and provide deeply advanced insights; Data Cloud and MuleSoft are the bridge to that future.
Fast-evolving risks and rewards
Dreamforce was a breathtaking illustration of the speed with which AI has leapt to the forefront of strategic IT decision-making. No enterprise can afford to ignore the potential of AI, nor should they fail to recognize the risks inherent in investing in such a fast-evolving area of technology while government, society, and business is struggling to
Rimini Street clients investing in customer data frameworks like Salesforce Data Cloud are setting themselves up for AI success and should begin to plan their AI roadmap and budgets accordingly. But as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff himself declared, “No one is ready for AI.”
Clear and trustworthy
Enterprises must recognize that the computer industry as a whole is still struggling with the propensity of AI models to “hallucinate,” or essentially make up answers that they present as fact-based. Organizations must also develop clear and transparent policies that will earn the trust of customers and consumers in the use of AI. And they must calculate the risk and reward of investments that could prove game-changing, or ultimately be judged poor bets.
Learn more: With a global team of CRM experts, we’re eager to work with clients to implement well-founded AI-based solutions. And as your trusted Salesforce partner, Rimini Street delivers a flexible suite of services aimed at reducing complexity and controlling costs of Salesforce implementations.