Salesforce Announces the New Einstein 1 Platform – Driving Productivity and Trusted Customer Experiences Powered by Data, AI, and CRM

San Francisco — September 12, 2023 — Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) today announced the Einstein 1 Platform, which features major advancements for Salesforce Data Cloud and Einstein AI capabilities, all built on Salesforce’s underlying metadata framework. A trusted AI platform for customer companies, the Einstein 1 Platform gives companies the ability to safely connect any data to build AI-powered apps with low-code and deliver entirely new CRM experiences.

“A company’s AI strategy is only as good as its data strategy,” said Parker Harris, Co-Founder and CTO, Salesforce. “We pioneered the metadata framework nearly 25 years ago to seamlessly bridge data across applications. It’s the connective tissue that fuels innovation. Now, with Data Cloud and Einstein AI native on the Einstein 1 Platform, companies can easily create AI-powered apps and workflows that supercharge productivity, reduce costs, and deliver amazing customer experiences.”

Now, with Data Cloud and Einstein AI native on the Einstein 1 Platform, companies can easily create AI-powered apps and workflows that supercharge productivity, reduce costs, and deliver amazing customer experiences.

Parker Harris, Co-Founder and CTO, Salesforce

Why it matters: Customer data is highly fragmented. On average, organizations use 1,061 different applications, yet only 29% of them are integrated. Enterprise data stacks have grown more complex, and prior computing revolutions – cloud, social, and mobile – have generated massive, siloed islands of customer data.

Salesforce’s original metadata framework helps companies organize and understand data across Salesforce applications – the equivalent of having a common language so different applications built on the core platform can communicate with each other. It now creates a unified view of the data across an enterprise regardless of how that data is structured in disparate systems by mapping it to the Salesforce metadata framework.

This allows organizations to customize every user experience and action their data using a variety of low-code platform services – including Einstein for AI predictions and content generation; Flow for automation; and Lightning for user interfaces. These customizations are instantly available to the rest of the organization’s core applications without having to write costly and brittle integration code.

Additionally, Salesforce delivers automatic upgrades three times per year, and the metadata framework prevents any integrations, customizations, or security models from breaking. Organizations can easily add, extend, and build on top of Salesforce as the platform evolves.

Einstein 1 Data Cloud Supports Big Data Scale and High Speed Automation to Power a New Wave of Data-Driven AI Applications

Data Cloud – Salesforce’s real-time hyperscale data engine – unifies and harmonizes customer data, enterprise content, telemetry data, Slack conversations, and other structured and unstructured data to create a single view of the customer. The platform is already processing 30 trillion transactions per month, and connecting and unifying 100 billion records every day.

With the new Data Cloud now natively integrated with the Einstein 1 Platform, companies can unlock siloed data in entirely new ways; create rich, unified customer profiles; and deliver entirely new CRM experiences. 

• Data at Scale: The Einstein 1 Platform has expanded to support thousands of metadata-enabled objects per customer, each capable of having trillions of rows. In addition, Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, consumer-scale technology stacks that joined Salesforce’s Customer 360 portfolio via acquisitions, have been re-engineered onto the Einstein 1 Platform.

• Automation at Scale: Now massive volumes of data can be brought into the Einstein 1 Platform from other systems and immediately made available as actionable Salesforce objects. Flows can be triggered by any change on any object at scale, whether it’s an event coming from an IOT device, a computed insight, or an AI prediction – up to 20,000 events per second – and can interact with any system in the enterprise, including legacy systems, through MuleSoft.

• Analytics at Scale: Salesforce offers a variety of insights and analytics solutions for different use cases — including Reports and Dashboards, Tableau, CRM Analytics, and Marketing Cloud Reports. With the Einstein 1 Platform’s common metadata schema and access model, all of these solutions can work on the same data at scale — providing rich insights for any use case.

Salesforce also announced that every customer with Enterprise Edition or above can now get started with Data Cloud at no cost. Customers can start ingesting, harmonizing, and exploring their data with Data Cloud and Tableau to extend the power of their data across every line of business and jumpstart their AI journey.

Einstein Delivers a Generative AI-powered Conversational Assistant – Baked Seamlessly Into the Flow of Work To Drive Significant Productivity Gains 

Salesforce’s next generation of Einstein brings a conversational AI assistant to every CRM application and customer experience, including:

• Einstein Copilot: A new and trusted out-of-the-box conversational AI assistant built into the user experience of every Salesforce application. Einstein Copilot will drive productivity by assisting users within their flow of work, enabling them to ask questions in natural language, and receive relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure proprietary company data from Data Cloud. In addition, Einstein Copilot proactively takes actions and offers additional options beyond the user’s query – such as providing a recommended action plan after a sales call, checking a consumer’s order status, or changing the shipping date. 

• Einstein Copilot Studio: An easy new way for companies to build an entirely new generation of AI-powered apps with custom prompts, skills, and AI models to close sales deals faster, streamline customer service, auto-create websites based on personalized browsing history, or turn natural language prompts into code, as well as hundreds of other business tasks. Einstein Copilot Studio also provides configurability to make Einstein Copilot available for use across consumer-facing channels like websites to power real-time chat, or integrate with messaging platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, or SMS.

Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio will operate within the Einstein Trust Layer, a secure AI architecture built natively into the Einstein 1 Platform that allows teams to benefit from generative AI, while preserving their company’s data privacy and security standards.

The Einstein 1 Platform’s metadata framework offers a fast, trusted path to AI by enabling a flexible, dynamic, and context-rich environment for machine learning algorithms to operate within. Since metadata describes the structure, relationships, and behaviors of data in the system, AI models can better understand the context of customer interactions, business processes, and the outcomes of certain interactions. And, those outcomes can then be used to further fine-tune large language models to deliver results that continually improve over time.

Customer Stories

• “FedEx is data-rich as our global transportation network continues to expand. By leveraging Salesforce’s Data Cloud and AI capabilities, every aspect of Salesforce is now deeply integrated to drive growth, deliver more customer engagement, and offer personalized experiences to our customers throughout the entire shipping journey.” – Mark Columbo, SVP of Sales & Solutions, FedEx

• “By continuing to innovate their proprietary AI tools and technology while participating in the broader data ecosystem, Salesforce has created a state-of-the-art platform that performs for their customers through all stages of their data journey. At SiriusXM, we are thrilled to have the strength of Salesforce Einstein AI and Data Cloud helping to power our next generation platform.” – Joe Inzerillo, Chief Product & Technology Officer, SiriusXM

• “The way we understand and serve pet owners is quickly evolving, and so are their expectations of us. By embracing Data Cloud, we’re unifying data from across our brands to transform our customer engagement. Leveraging this trove of real-time data, we’re poised to harness generative AI to help improve our operations, make smarter business decisions, and deliver highly personalized offerings that truly resonate with our customers.” – Chip Aubry, CTO of Independence Pet Group

• “Understanding our customers and providing the best customer experiences is our top priority. Salesforce’s flexible technologies and unified customer data platform enables us to build the resilience our business needs and deliver the personalization our customers expect.” – Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India

• “PenFed serves more than 2.9 million members all around the world to provide the world-class digital experience that our members now expect. Einstein provides essential and trusted AI capabilities that allow us to implement impactful technologies directly in the flow of work, allowing our employees to resolve service requests within a minute. Looking ahead, Data Cloud will help us create personalized experiences with existing and prospective customers with real-time data. We look forward to expanding our generative AI capabilities.” – Joseph Thomas, EVP & Chief Information Officer, PenFed

Learn More

• Salesforce introduced the next generation of Einstein, its AI technology
• Salesforce announced the general availability of Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) Data Sharing with the Snowflake Data Cloud from Salesforce Data Cloud
• Salesforce and Databricks announced an expanded strategic partnership that delivers zero-ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) data sharing in Salesforce Data Cloud
• Salesforce and AWS announced an expanded partnership for new Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) and Bring Your Own Large Language Model (BYO LLM) integrations between AWS and Salesforce Data Cloud

Pricing and Availability

• Data Cloud is now included for all Enterprise Edition or above customers at no cost. Included capabilities allow organizations to unify 10,000 customer profiles and start exploring with two Tableau Creator licenses
• Einstein Copilot is currently in pilot
• Einstein Copilot Studio will be in pilot in Fall 2023
• Einstein Trust Layer enhancements will be generally available in October 2023 and included in Einstein products