Salesforce uses AI for personalised experiences with Google Cloud

Collaboration brings meshes CRM and other data to improve customer experience

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8 June 2023

Salesforce and Google Cloud have announced an expanded strategic partnership to help businesses utilise data and AI to deliver more personalised customer experiences, better understand customer behaviour, and run more effective campaigns at a lower cost across marketing, sales, service, and commerce.

Two new data and AI innovations will bring real-time data sharing with enhanced predictive and generative AI capabilities, so businesses can use their data and their custom AI models to better predict customer needs and reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of synchronising data across platforms.

While 80% of business leaders say data is critical in decision-making at their organisation, 41% find their data too complex and inaccessible to be useful. These new integrations will help solve the problem of accessing and understanding data and allow companies to use their data to power AI insights across their business that drive better customer experiences.

The new integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery will enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of their customers to provide new, highly personalised experiences.

Salesforce and Google Cloud will provide customers with seamless data access across platforms and across clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location — with zero-copy or zero-ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) that can reduce the cost and complexity of moving or copying it while maintaining governance and trust.

Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI

New integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will enable customers to bring their own models from Vertex and use them across the Salesforce Platform, addressing the specific needs of their businesses – such as predicting buying behaviour or churn likelihood – across their Salesforce Customer 360 data.

Zero-copy data access for AI model training can maximise a company’s AI investment by providing immediate access to unified customer data, thereby streamlining the model development process, and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of AI predictions and insights.

There are multiple applications for the combined use of Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Google’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to improve the customer experience and personalise interactions.

For example, a fashion retailer can connect data from a customer relationship management (CRM) system, like customer purchase history and service interactions, with non-CRM data like real-time online activity or social media sentiment. They can then deploy custom AI models that predict customers’ likelihood to buy certain types of clothing based on that data and deliver hyper-personalised recommendations to customers via the most appropriate channel, including email, a mobile app, or social media.

To take another example, a healthcare organisation can combine CRM data such as appointment history and patient feedback, with non-CRM data like patient demographics and medical history data. They can then deploy custom AI models that predict which patients are at risk of readmission, which informs personalised care plans for those high-risk patients to improve medical outcomes through proactive medical care.

“AI and data are revolutionising the way businesses operate and innovate, and together Salesforce and Google are empowering organisations to unlock the full potential of their trusted data, put AI insights into action, and personalise customer experiences like never before,” said David Schmaier, chief product officer, Salesforce. “This partnership paves the way for unprecedented innovation and business value for our customers.”

“Google Cloud and Salesforce share a commitment to helping businesses accelerate their data-driven transformations,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “This new partnership brings together one of the world’s largest data clouds from Salesforce with analytics and AI capabilities from Google Cloud and represents a significant leap forward in businesses’ ability to generate more value and insights from their customer data.”

TechCentral Reporters