At the kickoff of Dreamforce, the largest Salesforce conference, the company is doing something crazy. Salesforce is throwing out all of the generative AI assistants it announced in 2023. Those weren’t good enough, it is now coming out with Einstein Copilot, a new integrated AI chatbot that will be found in all Salesforce CRM solutions.
Salesforce, on the one hand, is making a very surprising move, because it is not often that an organisation the size of Salesforce chooses a particular technology, only to dump it and replace it within six months. On the other hand, it is a very logical move, as we suspect Salesforce has become less dependent on the AI models of OpenAI. OpenAI is certainly not bad, but the competition is also picking up and for specific use cases there are now many more and better choices. Salesforce didn’t completely stop with OpenAI, as the CEO of OpenAI makes his appearance on stage this morning.
Einstein Copilot is better integrated
Salesforce seems to have realized there are more LLMs than those of OpenAI. Although they state that the previous AI solutions had been developed as stand-alone components and set up more as tests of how organizations would use generative AI. Now it’s realising a final integrated version in the form of Einstein Copilot. It also allows customers to import and implement their own LLMs into Salesforce CRM. Models from Antrophic, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and several others can be used in Salesforce.
Einstein Trust Layer monitors customer data
Salesforce has also developed the so-called Einstein Trust Layer, which ensures that customer data can be used in responses generated through generative AI, while at the same time ensuring that customer data is not leaked. Customer data is never given to the model for enrichment, keeping customer data safe. Generative AI responses are also put through an additional check to ensure that answers are safe and do not contain any data or text that does not belong in them. Think swear words, offensive responses or sensitive customer data.
Salesforce seems to have made quite a radical decision to deviate from the path taken earlier this year and develop a new generative AI assistant. Even though they present it as a mature evolution. Secretly, the technology is different, and it’s already the third rebranding of Salesforce’s generative AI solutions. It raises some questions, and we will try to answer those in our analysis later this week.
So this doesn’t exist anymore: Salesforce introduces Einstein GPT for sales, service, marketing and developers