Salesforce Genie In-Depth: How CDP,  Flow, Tableau, Einstein, and MuleSoft Innovations Harness Real-Time Data

During Dreamforce ‘22, Salesforce introduced Genie, a hyperscale real-time data platform that powers the entire Salesforce Customer 360. With Genie, every company can turn data into customer magic, delivering seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real time. 

Why It’s Relevant: Today, 71% of customers expect every interaction with a business to be personalized. However, data remains siloed, fragmented, and duplicative. Companies on average have 976 separate applications to run their business, which fragments customer data and digital experiences. 

Responding to customer needs in real time has never been more critical, but is becoming more challenging as the amount of data created, captured, replicated, and consumed each year is expected to more than double by 2026. Companies must seamlessly connect digital and real-world customer interactions in order to provide the most relevant, personalized, and compelling experiences, in every moment. 

Salesforce Genie unifies all of a company’s customer data across channels and interactions into a single, real-time customer profile, so every experience across the Customer 360 is more automated, intelligent, and real time. 

Salesforce Genie brings innovation to every cloud and industry

Real-time Data

• Secure, real-time, and open data sharing between Salesforce and Snowflake allows Genie to directly access data stored in Snowflake, and vice-versa, enabling a real-time customer 360 view across the two platforms without moving or duplicating data. This will enable marketing and customer insights teams, for example, to more efficiently access data from both platforms to enhance customer segmentation and analytics using Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform. More information here.

• Partition Genie data by business unit with Data Spaces: Data Spaces will allow Admins to organize their real-time Genie data into secure, logical spaces, enabling different teams or brands within an organization to use the same Genie instance, but only access the data they need to do their work. Available to marketers in the coming months in the Customer Data Platform, this facilitates unique segments, customer graphs, and insights for brands, regions, roles, or departments, driving deeper personalization on one data platform. More information here.

• Streamline customer consent with Preference Manager: A new, simplified customer consent and preference management capability through Salesforce’s Privacy Center solution will help businesses build trust and stay ahead of privacy and compliance requirements. This streamlines requirements like Right to Be Forgotten and Data Portability across multiple interactions to form a unified view of customer preferences as part of the unified profile. More information here.

• New Genie Data Prep Recipes and Transforms: To help teams realize value from their data faster, Salesforce is introducing new Data Prep Recipes and Transforms. These provide the full range of tools, from a drag-and-drop builder, to programmatic dbt (data build tool), as well as native machine learning and SQL-based transforms to aggregate, enrich, and process data at scale, and in real time, saving countless hours of manual data preparation. More information here.

• Instant Analytics for Tableau and CRM Analytics: As businesses shift toward using real-time data, they often find that their analytics are anything but real time, with special passwords and multiple logins preventing frictionless insights across their data stores. Tableau is changing that. With one-click access to live analytics across all data in Genie from any data source, customers are able to build a single source of truth — bringing in Genie data alongside third-party data sources without juggling passwords, and accelerating time to insight. More information here.

• Tableau and CRM Analytics Connectors for Genie: New, native connectors to Genie enable companies to quickly and accurately analyze data across every interaction, and understand ROI across campaigns and segments faster than ever before. With connectors for both Tableau and CRM Analytics built into Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform, granular insights across real-time data are available, using any tool, and without the need to create and maintain custom, expensive connectors. More information here.

Real-time Automation

• Customer Data Platform, powered by Salesforce Genie: Now marketers can connect real-time data across Salesforce and external data through Mulesoft, native connectors, and Salesforce AppExchange. This allows marketers to easily create smarter segments, up to 30x faster, to engage customers with the right message, at the right time across channels, using real-time data and insights, while leveraging all of Genie’s new strategic partnerships. More information here.

• First-party advertising with partners such as Amazon Ads or Meta enable new privacy-safe integrations for advertising activation and aggregated insights — powered by unified first-party data from Salesforce CDP — for more personalized and efficient marketing at scale. 

• Genie Real-Time Journey Orchestration: Using Marketing Cloud Engagement together with Customer Data Platform, marketers will be able to leverage Genie real-time data to respond immediately to user activities to increase conversion and cost-efficiency — like sending a follow-up email when a new loyalty tier is reached, or triggering a personalized mobile and advertising journey as a new hotel guest checks in. Leveraging Genie, marketers will be able to deliver more personalized messages in real time using attributes such as location, loyalty status, interests, or recent activities. More information here.

• Genie and WhatsApp-first business messaging: With this new integration, businesses will be able to leverage their real-time data in Genie with WhatsApp-first business messaging to transform how they connect with consumers through conversational engagement across marketing, commerce, and service interactions for every customer globally. Additionally, from within the Customer Data Platform, businesses can target audiences with real-time data to inform Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience. More information here.

• Call RPA Bots from Flow: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is solving the last mile of automation, connecting workflows across documents, images, and even legacy, green screen applications. The Flow RPA solution, powered by MuleSoft, offers the ability to invoke an RPA bot automatically from Flow Builder and Flow Orchestration, enabling bots to automate manual work as part of multi-user, multi-person, and multi-system automations. More information here.

• MuleSoft Anypoint Connectors and Accelerators for Genie: As teams build out a real-time data strategy around Genie, MuleSoft is making connection of any system to Genie, starting with a new, purpose-built Anypoint Connector for Genie available today. And to enable business users, including marketers, to act on Genie data quickly, MuleSoft is also introducing a Genie connector for Flow Integration next year, along with a Anypoint Accelerator for Genie that packages up all of the tools a team would need to build a full API and data ecosystem strategy around Genie. This, for example, helps retailers deliver informed marketing and in-store experiences by connecting real-time data from campaigns, loyalty rewards, and point-of-sale transactions. More information here.

Real-time Intelligence

• ‘Bring your own AI’ with Amazon SageMaker enables organizations and their data scientists to use SageMaker, Amazon’s cloud machine learning platform, directly with Einstein, Salesforce’s AI technology, to build new AI models tailored to the unique needs of their business, and use them in real time across the Customer 360. More information here.

• No-Code AI Predictions with Custom Propensity Score Builder: Einstein AI is introducing new capabilities designed to empower marketers to create their own purchase propensity scores on top of Genie data. Starting next year, marketers with limited access to data science resources will be able to create their own propensity models, improving the accuracy and ROI of their campaigns by using these predictions to create new segments that have the highest likelihood of purchasing a product. More information here.

• Genie and Personalization Real-Time Integration: Fueling unified customer profiles with accurate, timely data is critical to delivering memorable, relevant experiences. With enhanced, real-time integration between Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform and Personalization, marketing teams will be able to use Genie data and their real-time customer graph to deliver more highly tailored offers, recommendations, and content in the moment, and alter those offers as real-time data updates each customer’s unified profile. By combining streaming data from the CDP and Personalization in real time, marketing teams will be able to optimize AI-driven decisioning for each individual customer to increase customer engagement and conversions. More information here.

• Decision Optimization: Real-time data means better, more predictive intelligence, but teams also need to ensure that predictions and recommendations are tailored to unique challenges they may be facing, such as budget constraints or supply chain interruptions. Using the power of Einstein Discovery on top of Genie, Decision Optimization models scenarios based on these real-world constraints. This enables teams to use AI and ML to build realistic predictions for key business metrics and do more with the resources they currently have. More information here.

• Data Stories for CRM Analytics: Having access to real-time data is an incredible advantage for many employees, but what if wrangling data is not their strong suit? Data Stories for CRM Analytics automatically unlocks powerful insights for an entire organization by dynamically serving up natural language generated narratives in easy-to-understand written form that explain how KPIs are changing and what is driving those changes. More information here.

Powered by Hyperforce

• Hyperforce EU Operating Zone: Genie is natively built on Hyperforce, and with that comes not only immense scalability and performance, but also the flexibility to deploy a real-time data platform regardless of location. And with Salesforce’s new EU Operating Zone, Hyperforce solves for the compliance needs of EU customers. With EU-based data storage and processing, including 24/7 customer and engineering support conducted by local, EU-based personnel, EU customers and customers expanding their business into the EU can focus on business growth — not compliance requirements. More information here.

• External Encryption Key Management: New External Encryption Key Management collaboration with trusted partners will make it easy for customers to plug and play their preferred encryption option into deployed SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services, including Salesforce — empowering customers with more control over data privacy and security.

Pricing and Availability

• Customer Data Platform, powered by Salesforce Genie is generally available today. 
• Genie for Industries is generally available today.
• Tableau + CDP Connector is generally available today.
• MuleSoft Anypoint Connector for Genie is generally available today.
• Genie and WhatsApp-first business messaging for marketing will be generally available Dec. 2022 with commerce and service to follow in the coming months.
• Genie and Amazon SageMaker integration will be available in Pilot January 2023.
• First-party advertising with Meta Ads will be generally available Spring 2023.
• Genie Data Prep Recipes and Transforms will be generally available Spring 2023.
• Genie Data Spaces will be generally available Spring 2023.
• Open Data Access with Snowflake will be generally available Spring 2023.
• Flow Integration Connector for Genie will be generally available in H1 2023.
• First-party advertising with Amazon Ads will be generally available Summer 2023.
• Genie Real-Time Journey Orchestration will be generally available in Summer 2023.
• Genie and Personalization Real-Time Integration will be generally available in H2 2023.

More Information

• See Genie in action at Dreamforce 2022.
• Learn more about Salesforce Genie here.

Editor’s Note: Salesforce Genie is now Salesforce Genie Customer Data Cloud. For the latest on Genie Customer Data Cloud, go here.