Ask HN: What does Salesforce AI do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does Salesforce AI do?

9 pointssuzzer9914 comments

So far these Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson commercials have demonstrated that Salesforce AI can:

1) Prevent being seated outside in a rainstorm w/o interacting with a human host to tell them where you want to sit.

2) Prevent receiving food you don’t want w/o ever ordering from a human waiter.

3) Prevent a clothes stylist from putting terrible clothes on you without ever telling the person what kind of clothes you like.

I get that the rain is supposed to be absurd. But you’d think they’d try to add in one realistic application. Which makes me wonder what it actually does.

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Sorry for the offtopic, but I wonder what Salesforce does in AI at all, because isn’t it a boring CRM company from the previous century? Like they just wanted to do AI two years ago and nike’d it.

Well, it's a boring CRM company in a sense, but also one of those used (along with Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle etc) by almost every large enterprise. So quite a large market to ignore, however boring.

And not just a CRM. That has always been their biggest use case, and those functions come pre-baked when you sign up, but it is a full app dev platform. Big, complex, expensive, and old. But not limited to just being a CRM.

It is really worth understanding what SF is if you work with large companies. Love it or hate it, it is a reality of the market.

https://www.salesforce.com/ap/agentforce/

Hi. Ex developer evangelist at Salesforce. Also known as @codefriar.

Salesforce likes to take a bunch of related technologies and brand them under an aegis term. Currently Salesforce’s Ai offerings under the aegis of “Agentforce” are capable, but no more so than other agent frameworks. IMHO.

Under that aegis is their copilot like code writing helper for their proprietary language Apex, and their proprietary Js frontend technology Lightning web components. Its performance is ok, so long as you don’t expect it to reuse any of your existing code. Its performance can write tests, but don’t expect tests with mock data, for instance.

They also have “agent” like chat interfaces for customer service to end use chats. Again, performance depends on who implements it, but while functional, it’s not better than other tools.

What Salesforce is doing with ai, however is interesting. They’re implementing client facing Ai tools with a “trust layer” that ensures Salesforce’s customer’s data - including data on the customers customers is protected from leaking into a training g pool, and on the return side hedging against hallucinations. There’s more of course - using your own models, a whole host of prompt engineering and then some nice to haves like Ai calculated data fields. (Prompt response stored on records, recalculated when prompt inputs are changed…)

Their big bet, is twofold. 1: that the key differentiation in any agent system is not just the prompts and agent workflows, but the data available to ground the results. (Duh). They’re further betting that their enterprise customers that have terabytes of data on spending habits of b2b and increasingly b2c customers, will yield results that move the “deal” meter. 2: by giving away Ai certifications to anyone with a pulse in their Ai tools, their hoping the groundswell of “certified” people will give cXo’s an inflated sense of Salesforce’s market and mindshare leadership.

But Ai is only part of the picture at Salesforce. You should also be paying attention to their “DataCloud”. Data cloud is all the tech and tooling to enable a customer to become their own data broker. Take that ability to de-anonymize and coalesce disparate data streams into identities - and then feed that into your “Ai” agents and you might really have something. (Albeit probably a creepy something).

This might, for instance give you the ability to note that “bob” made capital expenditures in the fall as cmo of foo Inc, and that according to your linked in scraper he’s now at “bar Inc” so maybe you should reassign your sales exec from foo to bar, before q4…

You know, if you’ve thought to develop that agent.

I now work in the public sector, so I don’t know anyone developing “no seat in the rain” agents, but … I can envision how to do it with … well any of the agent frameworks I’ve used. The only difference is whether or not the customer is willing to pay Salesforce for easy access to their Salesforce data. Course, they got robust APIs so, pulling that data could just be step 1a in your agent workflow…

Happy to answer any questions

Jumping the opportunity:; we make a product that do hyper-personalisation for marketing emails, we do have few customers using SFMC and we tried to think about some use cases with Agentforce but i don't see a lot of useful things. Some customers want to see data about who saw personalisation in tableau/datacloud but again this isn't direct integration with Agentforce but more sending data to any salesforce product. Did you see any pratical use case for Agentforce in SFMC ? Thanks

I think the holy grail of marketing cloud is tied to two key things: 1. Cohort identification (segmentation) 2. Personalization.

I think Agentforce could be a powerful tool for processing the vast audiences, and identifying - with data cloud's help - cohorts for segmentation. I'm envisioning more than cohorts of 'women in their 20's and 30's who ski' but more 'past customers of women's ski boots who also predominantly buy red products' That's a little fuzzier than just data. In fact it's a combination of data(who bought what, when) but also fuzzier info 'who mostly buy's products that are predominantly red, regardless of the shade' and I think if you can surface that data to an agent, it could synthesize an interesting cohort for you to market your brand new red ski jacket to...

On the personalization side, I think Agents have a lot of potential. Imagine an agent workflow that went something like this: 1. for each known Data cloud profile develop a marketing profile 2. identify the profiles that show recent activity and / or a history of activity in the next two weeks. 3. Our marketing partners for the next month are: A, B and C. 4. Sort our selected profiles into one of those marketing partners by expressed interest, past history, or relevant markers from their extended data cloud profile. (ie, Kumar seems to always go skiing in early feb..., sort him into Partner A's marketing group) 5. Write email copy to Kumar with a sense of longing and nostalgia for past winter sports vacations. use marketing images from partner A (Vail) and talk about the upcoming ski weather, what the resort's new offerings are in the restaurant and talk up our new 'Ice planet Hoth' approved ski jackets to keep him, and his family warm...

I envision that email is going to be a hell of a lot more persuasive to casual buyers than 'hey, check out this jacket bro!'.

Would it be crazy for a decision-maker to think the commercial is pitching a turnkey solution to keep Matthew McCaughnehey out of the rain, as opposed to a platform where a Salesforce developer could potentially create such a system? Or do they have a better handle on the big picture than I did before reading your excellent post?

Oh 100%. At the same time, it's a commercial - so even if they're targeting developers, there's only so much you can do in 30seconds. They're using a marketing technique of 'dreaming the possible' to get you hooked on the idea that the notion you have in the back of your mind - that seems as impossible as keeping McCaughnehey out of a dumb outfit - is just as possible as, well, keeping an overpriced celebrity who's never used (probably) Salesforce, out of the rain, without dedicating some human to follow around and pander to his whims.

They're trying to sell the idea, and for good or worse, you remembered ;)

Uncle B, is the single best marketer this side of P.T. Barnum, and his antics need to be seen through that lens. He's not directing HR to stop hiring engineers - that's the dream he's selling. (though, I'm certain it's also a lovely cover for slowing hiring).

One of these days I'm going to write up an Era's tour like review of all the various dreams Benihoff has sold. Starting with 1:1:1 to Business is the best vehicle for society change up through Agentforce. The underlying dream is almost always a variation on the theme: Salesforce will empower you (customer) to have a better relationship with your customers so that you make more $.

Wow, this was terrible grammar, and hard to read. Apologies. I was in the ER at the time. Let me address the questions.

At this stage in the cycle, i decided it would be a waste of time to look and see whether its actually valuable. And just assume it’s all marketing BS

I don't think you're wrong.

I do want to 'tweak' your statement a bit.

It's no more - or less - BS than any other Agenic system on the market.

ff. also curious about this after seeing benioff talking shit on excel having an openai wrapper :)

For real.

I've been writing software most of my life. Teaching others to write software almost as long. And for the love of god, Excel is the perfect place for a damn openAI interface. That shit is arcane. Give me a database over excel, any day. Excel is a Swiss army chainsaw wielded by a meth head 3 days past his last fix just itching for an opportunity to take your wonderful idea and make it die.

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