Artificial intelligence. Natural language processing. Machine learning. Computer vision. You may have heard one or a combination of these terms, as these technologies are starting to play a natural part in our everyday personal lives. Say your best friend texts you about a concert happening later in the evening and your phone offers an auto-reply option like, “I’m in!” That’s an example of natural language processing. And on the way to that concert, Waze gives you the optimal route to avoid traffic and get you there safe-and-sound, that’s machine learning. And finally, you love the wine the venue serves, and you take out your phone to take a picture of the label, which provides you with the exact brand, grapes, and cost. You got it, computer vision!
But what about in our work lives? Whether you’re in healthcare or retail, work at a startup or a large corporation, AI can make employees more focused, efficient, and proactive. For example, you’re now able to see a prioritized list of leads that are most likely to convert will focus your time or predict customer likelihood to churn will give you the knowledge to proactively interact with them. Eighty-four percent of enterprise executives believe AI will help them create a competitive advantage, but only 38% of those same companies have an AI strategy.
Why is that? Well, building, implementing, and adopting AI is difficult. From talking to countless customers and building the products ourselves, our Einstein team at Salesforce has identified three main adoption hurdles for AI in business:
- Identifying a viable use case and having the data to support it
- Addressing change within employee workflows and embracing new technology
- Trusting whether the AI is correct and aligns with company values
We hear a similar pain from our customers – identifying a use case, and then prioritizing it, is often challenging. According to recent research from O’REILLY, 47% of respondents need people to help identify use cases for AI. With those challenges in mind for identifying a use case, we decided to tackle that adoption hurdle first.
Introducing Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases
At Salesforce, it’s our mission to help businesses overcome these adoption hurdles, thereby democratizing access to AI. That’s why we created Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases — an interactive website with 50+ examples that helps anyone interested in bringing AI to his or her business, identify their perfect use case. It is meant to be a starting point on someone’s journey with AI — a place that inspires and educates, but also provides actionable tips on how to implement.
Customers who have implemented AI have seen tremendous ROI. For example, Kendo Brands, an innovative beauty brand incubator, has had a 75% decrease in manual merchandising tasks, and a 10% conversion increase by serving product recommendations in their cart view. “Instead of relying upon past experiences and gut instinct, we’re innovating with predictive data provided by Einstein Commerce Insights,” says Michelle Sabado, Manager, Digital Analytics and Optimization at Kendo Brands.
So, how does it work?
First, let’s discuss what a use case even is. An AI use case is any particular way AI can be used to benefit you. Below are some great examples:
- Predict the likelihood of a lead converting to a sale
- Deflect routine customer service questions with chatbots
- Recommend products to customers similar to ones they’ve already purchased or viewed
With Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases, we want to give you a step-by-step process for picking an AI use case that’s relevant to you and the problems you’re trying to solve. That’s why we frame it all around a few key questions:
- Which group best represents your department?
- Which KPIs matter most to your business?
- Which use cases positively affect those KPIs?
- What other companies have seen success with that use case?
The best way to show what Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases is is by taking you down a typical visitor path, but you can always access it on your own by visiting (and bookmarking!) this site. You can access Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases on desktop, and it’s even mobile-friendly.
Below is the homepage.
For those who need a little brushing up on their AI terminology, or who want to watch a few overview videos on AI use cases for sales, customer service, and more, you can click on the “New to AI” button on the bottom right (highlighted in red in the screenshot above).
Now that you understand the types of AI and how use cases are categorized, it’s time to get started. After clicking “Get Started,” we’re entered into a series of steps that guide you to your perfect use case. To narrow down your applicable use cases, you first need to self-identify by department. Let’s click on “Sales,” for example.
Now you navigate to a page that asks which KPI matters the most to you. In our hypothetical case, maximizing forecast accuracy has been a challenge, and that’s been a strategic focus of your business lately, so you click on “Forecast Accuracy.”
Then, we move on to step three, which shows different use cases that map to optimizing sales forecast accuracy. Since we’re just getting started, let’s go with the typical sales revenue forecast use case, and click on “Predict Revenue Targets.”
Finally, we move to the most educational part of the website: the use case itself.
Here, you can see the department and KPI you chose, as well as the name of the use case and a brief description. Because we want you to be the catalyst in your organization, we’ve included a brief “What You’ll Need” section that is different depending on the type of use case shown:
- Example training data for “prediction” use cases
- Example business processes for “recommendation” use cases
- Example data sources, systems, and activities for “automation” use cases
Underneath “What You’ll Need,” you’ll see a demo video of the Einstein product or feature that powers that use case.
What better way to believe in a use case than to see a customer who has done the same? On the right-hand side of the use case card, we give you an example of just that. If you’re interested in learning about how other customers are using AI, you can navigate to our “Trailblazer Guide to AI,” which breaks down all of the Einstein customers by industry, the challenges they had, and the Einstein products used to solve them with associated quotes and success statistics.
Lastly, what better way to share what you’ve learned than with an easy-to-consume one-page document? With “click-to-share” functionality, you can email a PDF of any use case to show it off to your teammates or manager.
How will Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases benefit you?
The magic of Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases is that it’s an ever-evolving website. As we create more use cases, as we build more products, and as we see more departments benefit — they’ll be added. It will always be a place that inspires our visitors with different ways AI can help their business and should be referred back to often.
With “What You’ll Need” for every use case, you’ll have access to a new dimension on how to operationalize AI by seeing examples of how to get started for the use case to be successful. With “click-to-share” functionality, you’ll have a head start to being your company’s Trailblazer in AI.
We’re confident that with Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases, you’ll be able to overcome adoption challenge #1 and identify your first perfect AI use case. Once you tackle one use case, the others will seem like a breeze! Get started on your AI journey today.
